2023 Attwoods Glenlyon Pinot Noir, Macedon Ranges

The 2023 Glenlyon Pinot Noir is another subtle and restrained wine from this cool-climate Attwoods vineyard in Macedon Ranges. Taking its time to open up, it greets with dark cherry and plum aromas and slowly emerging notes of dark chocolate, chinotto-like orange and a dusting of dried kitchen herbs. The palate is fine and elegant, displaying a cool, composed structure that is likely to reward additional years in the cellar.

We’d recommend decanting this wine as it seems to really benefit from exposure to air. Enjoy with seared kangaroo loin served with a Mullumbimby plum reduction, or roasted quails and freekeh with dill, pimento and pomegranate.

More about this wine

Attwoods took over the management of Glenlyon Estate on the outskirts of the Macedon Ranges in 2019. It’s a small two-hectare cool climate site at an elevation of 500 metres with 26-year-old Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines standing in soils that are combination of quartz, basalt and clay soils.

Organically farmed, the yields here tend to be low, with generous natural acidity a given in most years. The fruit for this Pinot was handpicked and fermented with indigenous yeasts in wooden open-top fermenters with a 40% inclusion of whole bunches and daily treading by feet. The pressed wine was placed for a total of 18 months in French oak barriques of which a third were new. The racked wine was blended into stainless steel and bottled unfined and unfiltered with a small addition of sulphur.

About this producer

Attwoods is a boutique producer of premium wines established in 2010 by its winemaker Troy Walsh and his wife Jane, the couple partnering with John Livingston in 2018 to bring increased business acumen into their growing operation.

At the heart of the Atwoods wines are three labour intensive close-planted cool-climate vineyards in Victoria’s Ballarat and Macedon Ranges. The focus is on minimal intervention wines from Burgundian varieties, with Troy favouring early picking, whole bunches and indigenous yeasts, the reds fermenting in large open fermenters and the whites in barrels.