Pooley Pinot Noir Butcher's Hill 2023

Pooley Wines began in 1985 as little more than a retirement project for Denis and Margaret Pooley, who planted a handful of rows of Riesling and Pinot Noir on their sixteen-hectare farm at Cooinda Vale, in Tasmania's Coal River Valley. It became something far bigger: in 2003, their son John and his wife Libby acquired Belmont, an 1830s convict-built Georgian homestead near Richmond, and planted a second site — Butcher's Hill — with its first vintage released in 2007. Following Margaret's passing in 2010, granddaughter Anna Pooley returned to the family business in 2013 as the first third-generation Pooley winemaker, and has since driven the estate to real acclaim, culminating in Halliday Wine Companion naming Pooley its 2023 Winery of the Year. Butcher's Hill sits on a steep, north-facing slope overlooking the Richmond cellar door, on a genuinely unusual geology of dolerite, black cracking clay, and limestone over sandstone — the iron oxide in the soil retains heat and moisture in a way that promotes real depth of flavour, and this site consistently produces the more powerful, structured sibling to the softer, more elegant Cooinda Vale Pinot. Fruit is hand-picked, fermented with a portion of whole bunches, and aged in French oak barriques and hogsheads with a meaningful 20–33% new wood, unfined.

The result is Pinot Noir of real presence and complexity: candied cherry, raspberry jube, anise, and wild violet lead the nose, opening onto a palate of bright blueberry and raspberry lifted by white pepper, with fine, lean-but-firm tannins and soft, well-integrated acidity driving a long, savoury finish. It's fine-boned yet weighted by genuine earthiness and a discernible lick of oak — widely regarded as the flagship, most cellar-worthy wine in the entire Pooley range.