2024 Kooyong Nord Pinot Noir, Mornington Peninsula

Medium ruby red colour. An aromatic nose of dried black cherry, cured speck, and a steely minerality. The palate is textured and layered, medium-weighted, but with really good density and intensity of black fruit through the core. Hints of black spices, cured pork notes, and a lift of dried thyme add great detail and character while it glides incredibly long on the back of silky tannins. Drink to 2035.

96 points Stuart Knox for The Real Review, August 2026

Another top Pinot Noir from the experienced hands of winemaker, Tim Perrin. Exuberant florals and summer berries aplenty here in cherry, raspberry, sweet cranberries with a herbal, leafy edge and nicely matched wood spices. Fragrant aromatics light the palate, but it is the fruit-derived complexity from the get go that so impresses: the depth, the balance, the svelte texture and even-tempered style with tannins fanning out in classic Pinot style. Hints at a bright future ahead. While the Nord Block contains some of Kooyong’s newest plantings of Pinot Noir, it is worth noting that they aren’t exactly youngsters but are now 16 years of age.  They are now hitting their stride and it shows. Drink to 2036.

95 points Jeni Port for Wine Pilot, July 2026

It’s from Kooyong’s close-planted block, planted on the North side of the estate. The vine density here is 5800 vines per hectare. Excellent wine. Complex, powerful and sustained. Spicy up front and in general though strawberry and black cherry characters push confidently throughout. There’s a keen ‘sweet earth’ aspect to this wine. There’s a firm, savoury-studded tannin structure. There’s fruit, there’s length. It’s a banger.

95 points Campbell Mattinson for The Wine Front, June 2026

Lovely aromatics, all savoury, spicy and rather herbal, with cured meats, pomegranate and cherries. This is lighter-framed, with sinewy if lightly raspy tannins, although acidity tends to be in charge. There’s a refreshment factor, so to see this at its best, have hearty, rich fare at the ready. Drink to 2034.

93 points Jane Faulkner for Halliday Wine Companion, August 2026

Something slightly exotic, heady and brooding about this Pinot. A little darker than its stablemates, a little more moody, although in a sultry way, not a recalcitrant way. Quince, damson, smoky, a hint of paprika and hibiscus. More acidity, clench and tension than the Meres 2024, tasted beside it. The tannins are give-slip-to-the-wind slender, but slip in through all the cracks, so you feel their presence without really seeing them. It would be beautiful with rare venison or duck or smoked anything alongside a sharp cranberry sauce.

17/20 points Tamlyn Currin for Jancis Robinson, May 2026

Kooyong is a specialist Pinot Noir and Chardonnay producer based at Tuerong on the Mornington Peninsula, where the Gjergja family has farmed 40 hectares of estate vines since 1996.

The Nord is one of six distinct single blocks vinified separately. This block covers just 0.8ha of Kooyong’s youngest Pinot Noir plantings, now 16 years of age, and on free-draining yellow-grey dermosol soils with a modern clonal mix at a high density of 5,800 vines per hectare.

The hand-harvested fruit was destemmed to a wooden vat with a 15% whole bunch inclusion for fermentation with indigenous yeasts. Gently pumped over and plunged over sixteen days, the wine was pressed, racked and matured for twelve months in a combination of French oak barriques and puncheons of which 18% were new. The wine was racked once more ahead of bottling which took place without fining or filtration.