The Story

2024 marked Tim Knappstein’s 63rd consecutive vintage, with a ‘Goldilocks’ year for Pinot Noir in the Adelaide Hills. Low crop levels and a long, gentle ripening period produced the best parcels of Pinot Noir fruit we have seen in twenty years.

We decided to produce something exceptional; combining three barriques of the finest expression of the 2024 vintage to celebrate this outstanding year and Tim’s winemaking career.

Shortly after flowering it was observed that 2024 would be a drastically small vintage. Windy, cool and rainy weather in late November resulted in a very poor grape set. Particularly in the cooler areas of Lenswood and Piccadilly, crops were down 65-70%.

To our surprise and delight, once grape maturity and testing started, we noted excellent colour, intensity and sugar acid balance – all indications of exceptional quality. These results held true across all Pinot vineyards and not just the cooler regions,
a trend that was strongly reinforced when we started testing settled juice samples.

What had at first appeared as a looming disaster, now emerged a great opportunity.

We believe 2024 produced the best parcels of Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir we have seen in the past twenty years.

The Pinot Noir was always going to be a multi vineyard and multi clonal wine.

Ten parcels of exceptional quality Pinot Noir material were produced in 2024, filling eighty seven French oak barriques.

Each barrel is unique and imparts its own particular character to the wine, so essentially there were eighty seven individual wines produced, each with its own distinct flavour profile.

We then embarked on our usual rigorous barrel selection to identify the best Pinot wines of the year for the Sabre blend, and sixty seven of the eighty seven were chosen.

However, three barrels held wines of such balance, intensity, texture, and length that we immediately reserved them for a very special project – The Pinot Noir.

As an old Castrol advertisement once said ‘Oils ain’t oils’ and barrels definitely ain’t just barrels. Each one is different. They come from different forests in different countries... and obviously different trees!

Each cooper (barrel maker) makes barrels in unique ways. Some bend the staves with fire, others with hot water. Some offer barrels with all the staves from a single forest, others specialise in the tightness of the wood grain, different length of seasoning or specific blends of oaks to suit a particular wine style or grape variety.

Then there is toast level. Barrels are not bare oak inside, except the heads. They are all toasted over a fire of oak offcuts - to various levels. All of which alter the flavour the barrel imparts to the wine.

There are light, medium and heavy toasts. Light medium, long, medium plus... and the heads can be toasted as well.

Most coopers (the French ones anyway) can probably provide twenty variations on any particular barrel in their inventories. We buy from two French coopers, both based in Burgundy, and take a variety of barrels from each. Additionally, we keep all our barrels (228 litre barriques) for five years, and endeavor never to repeat a barrel inside our small parcels of Pinot.

Consequently, each barrel is slightly different and gives us the maximum of complexity and blending opportunities.

This MV6 fruit was machine harvested using a destemmer machine, which ensures not only a very clean pick but a very high proportion of whole berries. The picked fruit was tipped directly into our open fermenters with no crushing or pumping.

Including these whole berries in the fermentation accentuated varietal fruit characters as the fermentation takes place inside the berries.

Additionally it was decided to add to this batch whole uncrushed bunches from a hand picked vineyard to further lift the fruit character.

The fruit was inoculated with yeast on 2nd March and remained on skins for 10 days, reaching a peak fermentation temperature of 33º C.

It was pressed on 12th March and run to barrel on 14th March. Malolactic fermentation started naturally on 2nd of April and was completed by 24th April.

It was then time to start evaluating the wine in 13 barrels (228 litre French oak barriques) from the 4.2 tonnes.

Finally – Barrel No. K2328 was chosen as the best of this group and of a quality worthy of being a component of The Pinot Noir.

This last clone (DxVy – our identifier) has not been formally identified, although we suspect it is a German Geisenheim clone.

These clones were tipped into one fermenter and a box of Ds V12 clone from Peter Parson’s vineyard (see wine No. 3) was spread on top. Again looking for some whole bunch ‘lift’.

After yeast inoculation the fermentation reached 31.5º C, but was pressed off after only 6 days as it appeared to be extracting an excessive amount of tannin.

This was likely, as many of the grape bunches contained a few full size berries and a large proportion of miniature berries giving a very high skin-to-juice ratio.

The pressed wine was run to 12 French oak barriques (228 Litres) with malolactic fermentation starting naturally on April 2nd and was finished by May 2nd.

Our tastings proved ASPP was one of the top wines of the 2024 vintage, and as Barrel No. K1512 was the best of the best of these 12 barrels, it was an obvious selection for The Pinot Noir.

This vineyard was all hand picked because of its short rows and steep slopes.

The crop was about 40% of the average yield and was treated as one batch of mixed clones. This was done to achieve the warm fermentation temperatures we like – small batches don’t generate enough heat!

The fruit was destemmed, only to keep as may whole berries as possible, and then the grapes were collected below the crusher in 500kg boxes which were tipped into a single fermenter. 0.92 tonnes of uncrushed whole bunch 115/114 was then spread on top. Our aim was to add more fruit character and ‘lift’ by fermentation inside the berries, known as carbonic maceration.

Fermentation proceeded after inoculation with yeast and the wine was pressed off on the 25th March after ten days on skins. Peak fermentation temperature was 33º C.

The wine was run to eight French oak barrels. Malolactic fermentation started in early April and was completed by May 2nd.

After evaluation, this proved to be one of the year’s best and most interesting wines and therefore has contributed two (of eight) half barrels to The Pinot Noir.

These barrels No. K2215 and K2005 displayed differences in their oak flavours which we found complimentary. Hence, half of each!