2025 Apsley Gorge Pinot Noir, Bicheno

The latest release of the Pinot Noir from Aspley Gorge. We’ll add our tasting notes for this wine soon. In the meantime, here’s what owner and winemaker Brian Franklin himself sees in a glass of his 2025 vintage:

“On pouring the first thing you notice is the colour. A deep ruby red, full of promise. This wine is not fined or filtered, yet it is bright and crystal clear. The nose, mysterious and deep with underlying ripe pinot fruit. No bracken or green character here. The palate has a textured entry, mouth filling and rich. The long, persistent finish has just enough acid to really make this wine sing. Sit back and enjoy the performance. This wine has depth in its colour, on the nose and the palate. A standout Apsley Gorge. A return to the good old days, plus some.“

More about this wine

2025 marks a return to more normal vintages after several very wet and challenging years.

Fruit was picked while cool at 10 degrees, destemmed to whole berries and given cold soak for two and half weeks with indigenous yeast ferment for four to five days before being pressed to barrels of which a third were new, and sourced from various Burgundian coopers. The wine was bottled after a fourteen-month maturation before it was bottled unfined and unfiltered in July 2026.

The fruit gets a very light spray with liquid sulphur after picking, but otherwise no sulphur is used in the winery before a light 15 ppm addition at bottling, resulting in minimal 10 ppm free sulphur in the final wine.

Serve at a cool room temperature (16 degrees or so) and allow some aeration in a decanter before enjoying from a large glass.

About this producer

Established in 1988, the small 6.5-hectare Aspley Gorge vineyard is planted to mostly to Pinot Noir, with just a hectare devoted to Chardonnay. It is located several kilometres inland from the coast near the entrance to the Apsley Gorge National Park north-west of Bicheno. The vineyards unique situation near the entry to the gorge brings breezes in the afternoon which have a distinct cooling effect that sees fruit harvested among the last in Tasmania, often around the first week of May.

Since 1999 winemaking has been undertaken by owner Brian Franklin who also does vintage each year in Gevrey-Chambertin with Philippe Charlopin, himself mentored by Henri Jayer. He is assisted in Tasmania by young French winemakers including Philippe Charlopin’s son Yann.

Always aiming for full phenolic ripeness, the style of wines produced is rich and intense without excessive extraction or heaviness, and modest use of new oak. Highly individual in character, the emphasis is on deep, savoury fruit and structure, and while drinking well young, the wines have shown themselves to have capacity to age over a decade or more.