GOLD MEDALs

2016 Sydney Royal Wine Show

2015 Royal Adelaide Wine Show

McLaren Vale winemakers unveil their ode to Joy Division



I once knew a bloke who built a career in the shadow of a weary cliche. He designed book covers, his professional worth reliant on people ignoring what they’ve been told a million times.

Despite the ubiquity of the advice, every trip to the bookshop is an invitation to judge the books by their covers, and trawling the shelves of a bottle shop requires a similar leap of faith.

There are wine labels I really like, not just for pure aesthetics, but for how the visual language cleverly reflects the nature of the wine inside. Conversely, some labels make me want to hurl myself eyeball first on to a rusty spiked fence.

My favourite labels adorn a pair of wines born in a bio-dynamic McLaren Vale vineyard, elevated by a pair of Yarra Valley visionaries and echoing the unmistakeable sound of a band I’ve loved since I was a teenager.

The label is Known Pleasures, a homage to legendary Manchester band Joy Division and their epochal 1979 album Unknown Pleasures. It’s pasted on white and a red, made by Phil Sexton and Steve Flamstead at Giant Steps in the Yarra Valley with fruit sourced from the Gateway vineyard in McLaren Vale.

They’re obsessed with music, but have divergent tastes. The gloomy glory of Joy Division is the one bit of common ground, a passion shared rather than enjoyed in isolation. For both, it infects heart and soul.

The label is a homage to designer Peter Saville’s haunting cover for Unknown Pleasures, an iconic image representing the intensity of radio pulses emitted by a pulsar registered as C19.

The vineyard, as the name clearly suggests, sits at the entrance to McLaren Vale, a verdant buffer keeping urban sprawl at bay, a sea breeze-cooled hilltop of red soil over limestone where light performs a shadowplay through foliage as a new dawn fades. (The previous paragraphs contain a few gratuitous Joy Division references. There’s a bottle of wine in it for the reader who can pick the others scattered throughout this column.)

That the team from Giant Steps are prepared to leap the logistical hurdles faced by a Yarra Valley winery wanting to make wine from McLaren Vale fruit speaks volumes for the vineyard’s quality and the way wine made from this place reflects a moment in time. A special moment in time.

The wines sit in a unique Interzone, their McLaren Vale DNA spliced and recoded by a winemaking team widely celebrated for their Yarra Valley chardonnay and pinot noir.

Sometimes changing your ways and taking different roads can really pay off.

It’s the only wine I’d buy for the label alone. Thankfully Sexton and Flamstead ensure such an impulsive decision pays off.



Known Pleasures Field White

Sourced from Block 4 in the Gateway vineyard, a patch the planting records say should be entirely viognier but where closer inspection reveals a handful of rogue vines that appear to be other white Rhone varieties. A bit of viticultural disorder has created a wine that’s a strong candidate for the best expression of this style in the country.

Where blends of these Rhone Valley varieties can tend to the oily and flabby, this is a wine that delivers richness with incredible restraint. Power without the padding.

It smells of apricots flirting with full ripeness without being ready to commit, some roast pineapple and that salted watermelon rind that trendy chefs tried to foist on us a year or so back. There’s jasmine and soursobs in there too.

Record producer Martin Hannett became a legend for his work with Joy Division and the way he stripped back their sound to its angular essence.

If Hannett made wines from white Rhone varieties, they would taste, smell and feel like this.



Known Pleasures Shiraz



To best understand this wine and how it is at once of McLaren Vale and at the same time something apart, you need to listen to the work of Joy Division bassist Peter Hook. On most tracks the bassline is a source of driving power, a sturdy foundation upon which can be built something of great magnitude.

But on a track like She’s Lost Control the muscle is replaced with tense sinew; the sound bounces rather than pounds.

It’s still instantly recognisable as Hook, yet somehow very different.

So, too, this wine. There’s liqueur cherries, forest berries and ripe plums, cocoa powder and powdery tannins. But it’s the bouncy energy in the wine that sets it apart, the long rippling lines that give it a different shape and feel from its peers.

It’s drinking beautifully now but has intriguing development ahead of it yet. It won’t push into the eternal, but if your timing’s not flawed, and it’s turned away on its side, it will last eight years, if not decades.

- Nick Ryan, The Australian, Feb 26 2019

94 POINTS

Known Pleasures Shiraz is of course made by Giant Steps using grapes from the Gateway Vineyard in McLaren Vale. The mid-palate is pumped with ripe fruit but it finishes savoury, nutty and spicy. It’s an excellent shiraz. There’s a positive bitterness to the finish, floral notes, vanilla cream and woodsmoke contributions, though the ripe/juicy/silken fruit is the mainstay. It’s mid-weight and most impressive.

-Campbell Mattinson

98 POINTS

Wow. This is an extraordinary wine, handled with kid gloves from day 1. Biodynamically grown, hand picked, refrigerated van to Giant Steps' Healesville winery, destemmed or whole bunched, large format French oak, no fining or filtration. It's faintly turbid, the bouquet pretty red/purple fruits. Then comes the extraordinary power, pulse and drive of the palate, building intensity second-by-second, but equally building dazzling freshness. It tastes like 12.5% alc, not 14.5%. The tannins are imbedded within the fruit flavours, you sense them, but can't isolate them. The finish is endless, ditto aftertaste.

-James Halliday

93 POINTS

Dark red with medium colour density. Pure cherry and plum aromatics. The palate is snappy and bright with defined, intense cherry and raspberry flavours. The tannins are soft and the acidity bright. A flavoursome, modern style with excellent depth of flavour.

-Toni Paterson



95 POINTS

Something new from the guys at Giant Steps. The fruit is sourced from a biodynamically managed vineyard in McLaren Vale. The fermentation is interesting in that, as it approached 11 per cent alcohol, it was seeded with some Rhone yeasts to finish its journey. Wonderful gravelly fruit texture, with a dense concentration. Gets a little new French oak but the older oak has given it the fruit finesse.

-Ray Jordan

94 POINTS

From the Giant Steps crew, from a biodynamic vineyard. This is an exciting release. It feels pure but powerful in style, offering spice, brooding earthiness, a sniff of smoky oak, coursing with dark fruit flavour. Fine wine.

- Mike Bennie