Sorrenberg

Barry and Jan Morey established Sorrenberg in 1986 in Beechworth — a gold-rush town in Victoria's northeast whose granite and quartz soils and cool continental climate had attracted almost no serious viticulture before them. The grape varieties they chose — Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Gamay, and Cabernet Franc — were not the ones that dominated Australian wine in the 1980s. The farming approach they adopted, without chemicals and with the attentiveness that comes from a genuinely small operation, turned out to produce wines with a precision and longevity that the Australian market took years to recognise and that a small international following had already understood.

The biodynamic practice at Sorrenberg is a long-standing farming philosophy that is in the process of formal certification. The wines Jancis Robinson has awarded 96 points are made from less than five hectares of vines by a couple whose indifference to trends and whose commitment to their specific place is itself a form of evidence about the quality of what they produce.

The Chardonnay is the wine most cited by critics: precise, restrained, mineral in the way that cold-climate Australian Chardonnay achieves when yields are low and the farming preserves what the granite soils want to express. The Gamay is an outlier in Australian wine and is better for it.

Sorrenberg is one of those estates that people in the wine trade know and talk about quietly, without making a noise that would increase the difficulty of getting the wine.