2021 Punt Road Gamay

Punt Road

Australia / Yarra Valley / Punt Road

What I was chasing this year with the Gamay, in light of the cooler year and the 2019 being quite funky and bunchy, was clarity/purity with vibrant red fruit and no herbal characters. So we picked a touch earlier, whole bunch elements were less macerated and more carbonic, and we had a higher proportion of destemmed fruit/cold soak (60%).
Bunch and berry ferments were pressed together for maturation in old French puncheons for nine months. A minimal addition of SO2 was made in September. The ine was racked and coarsely filtered, bottled in December with no finings.
Certainly the bright fruit aromatics are there, but I really like the tension between the fruit and the acid and the quite insistent 2021 tannin profile. It’s light on its feet but then hits you with a lingering core of savouriness. Our Airlie Bank Garden Red has a similar profile. - Tim Shand, Punt Road

March, 2022

Mike Bennie

The Wine Front

90 points.

Tart, bright, ultra light expression with zesty, pleasingly bitter red berry fruit character, pepper and alpine herb notes, blood orange acidity. Very light and delicate wine, fine boned, perhaps a bit diffuse but generally a pleasing, lighter red wine.

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About Punt Road

Tim Shand heads a dynamic, progressive young winemaking team at this James Halliday five star-rated winery. Punt Road is a standard-bearer for wines of character, drinkability and a clear, proud Yarra Valley stamp. It has history on its side and cards stacked in its favour for a very bright future. The property was founded on site of the St. Huberts Vineyard planted in the 1860s by Paul and Hubert de Castella - some of the first vines in the Yarra Valley and one of the cornerstones of Australian fine-wine tradition. Punt Road owners the Napoleone family took advantage of a tremendous head start when they planted vineyards here in the 1980s. All these years later, Tim and the team bring restless perfectionism to this intimately understood site and its mature vines. The Punt Road wines have never been better.

About

Tim came to the Yarra Valley with vintages under his belt at Domaine Dujac in Burgundy and Château Margaux in Bordeaux, as well as stints in Chianti, Oregon and Chile. Since then he had a hand in some of the region’s headline-grabbing wines of recent times during his tenure at Giant Steps before taking the helm at Punt Road in 2014. Tim and the team are making most of the freedom to push boundaries while making the most of the excellent fruit the Yarra Valley gives rise to.