2025 Kooyong Massale Pinot Noir, Mornington Peninsula

Easy to enjoy this as it offers plenty of enticing aromas and flavours all bound up with racy acidity and silty, fine tannins. Bergamot, fresh herbs and a whiff of lavender plus wood smoke, autumn leaves and loads of cherries (pips and all). The palate is neatly composed – not too much of anything – and it ends up a delicious drink-now option. Drink to 2031.

93 points Jane Faulkner for Halliday Wine Companion, June 2026

In drinkability terms this definitely kicks some goals. It’s varietal, it’s juicy, it has a bit of depth and it has a bit of undergrowth-y complexity too. All wins. It tastes of cherries red and black, pomegranate, peppercorns, violets, and sweet earth, with a drift of aromatic herbs in play too. Tannin finesses the finish just enough, and the aftertaste brings an extra linger of undergrowth. It feels authentic and indeed pure. I liked it from the first sip; it’s good to drink, is the take-home.

92 points Campbell Mattinson for The Wine Front, April 2026

Bright, lively and youthful in the glass. Plenty of complexity here, dark cherry, spice, sap and dried flowers. Firm, red fruited, mouth-filing and with smart shape, grip and length. There's a lot to like here in this youthful pinot noir. 

91 points Aaron Brasher for The Real Review, May 2026

From a 40-ha estate vineyard planted in 1996 in Tuerong. North-facing, 100–120 m, on well-drained, sedimentary clay loams. Sustainable viticulture. Bright cherry fruit that slides glides across the spectrum from sour to sweet, yellow to dark red. Acidity is sharp, precise and plenteous, but ripe and saturated, a bit like sucking on a blood orange. Rose buds, hibiscus, rose hips. Slim and slinky. The tannins are less actors, more sound designers, creating atmosphere and pace in the invisible surround. A wine that has so much clarity that I feel like I’m tasting it after a thunderstorm, when everything is on brightness steroids.

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.

This wine is a blend of fruit grown in the estate’s Tuerong and Balnarring vineyards. From the warm and generous 2025 vintage, the grapes were handpicked, destemmed and fermented with indigenous yeasts in a mixture of stainless steel and concrete with a 15% inclusion of whole bunches. The ferments were pumped over daily to start with, followed by cap plunging towards the end. The pressed wine was matured for ten months in a combination of French oak barriques and puncheons of which 8% were new, as well as in large format foudre. The wine was bottled unfined after a single, light filtration.