Kooyong

Kooyong is at Tuerong, on the Mornington Peninsula, the cool strip of land running south of Melbourne between Port Phillip and Western Port. The vineyard was planted in 1996 and covers forty hectares, mostly Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with small areas of Pinot Gris and Shiraz. It faces north, sits between 100 and 120 metres above sea level, and grows on well-drained, low-vigour sedimentary clay loams laid down by a Miocene sea, over a much older weathered sandstone bedrock. Different parts of the vineyard carry different proportions of sand, loam and clay, and that is the basis of everything the estate does.

Kooyong belongs to the Gjergja family, who also own Port Phillip Estate at Red Hill and a third vineyard at Balnarring. Tim Perrin makes the wine and Stuart Marshall looks after the vines. Every wine is grown, made and bottled on the estate. The vineyards are hand pruned and hand picked. Fermentations, alcoholic and malolactic alike, are left to start on their own with the yeasts that arrive on the fruit; barrel ageing is entirely in French oak; the reds are unfined and unfiltered, and the whites unfined and often unfiltered too. The winery is built so that fruit and wine move by gravity. After several years in the programme, the vineyards and winery were certified by Sustainable Winegrowing Australia in early 2026, and the estate was James Halliday's Winery of the Year in 2012.

What separates Kooyong from most Australian estates at this price is that the vineyard is divided into named blocks and each one is understood on its own terms. Faultline is the largest block, planted mainly to Chardonnay on friable dark brown loamy clay, and gives the richer, more generous wine. Farrago is a small Chardonnay block where the best fruit comes from soil mottled with sandstone pebbles, and the estate rates it as its most linear and longest-lived white. Meres, Haven and Ferrous are all Pinot Noir. Meres is the most exposed, low in vigour and yield, and the most perfumed. Haven is sheltered by thick tree belts and gives a richer, firmer wine. Ferrous is full of ironstone pebbles and drains fast, giving the most concentrated and savoury of the three. Those blocks are bottled individually at the top of the range, and the Estate wines are drawn from the same named parcels every year, which is why they taste consistently like themselves.

The range works in tiers. Clonale Chardonnay and Massale Pinot Noir are blends of fruit from Tuerong and Balnarring, and they are the sensible way to meet the estate. Above them sit the single-vineyard Estate wines, which come only from the Tuerong blocks: the Estate Chardonnay from Faultline and Farrago, and the Estate Pinot Noir from Meres, Haven, Ferrous and Nord. At the top are the single-block bottlings, Ferrous, Meres, Haven, Farrago and Faultline.