About Bass Phillip Wines

The wines of Bass Phillip are endowed with vibrant fruit and considerable delicacy, and evolve and develop dramatically with aeration in a swirling glass or decent decanting. They are never excessive in tannins or alcohol in their youth, and with age, they blossom gracefully to develop an intensity of flavour in the finish framed by strong minerality and natural acidity. Countless tales vouch for how Bass Phillip Pinot Noirs improve in the cellar, sometimes for well over twenty years.

 

Drinking an aged Bass Phillip pinot is a transcendental experience a dedicated wine lover must experience to fathom just how special these wines are. Immense, soil driven complexity, deliciousness and seemingly endless ageability are compelling reasons why many Pinot connoisseurs consider them legends.

 

The three wines at the top of the Bass Phillip hierarchy — the Estate, Premium and Reserve Pinot Noirs — have always come from the same original 1979 main vineyard in Leongatha: a 3.5-hectare block, known as the Estate vineyard. Within this vineyard the same rows of vines and sub-plots are used for each of these wines every year, purely because those vines give the best grapes, year after year.

 

Bass Phillip’s first Pinot Noir was made in 1984, and the first commercial release, comprising the 1985 to 1989 vintages, took place in 1991. The 1989 vintage was the first in which the Reserve, Premium and Estate Pinot Noirs were separately vinified, following five years’ worth of research into the separate vattings, which involved numerous small-batch fermentation trials

2021 Vintage

(Please visit our microsite for references to previous vintage catalogues)