Translation missing: en.New releases from Joshua Cooper + Dr Edge + Dave Fletcher!: New releases from Joshua Cooper + Dr Edge + Dave Fletcher!
Joshua Cooper
It’s pretty rare these days - thanks to social media - that a set of wines actually lives up to the hype. The anticipation of scoring those sought-after rare bottles, or chasing down wines after a series of strong reviews and hoping they live up to expectations, is something a lot of us probably know all too well.
Enter Joshua Cooper’s new releases. A set of wines that year-in-year-out seem to receive more and more praise. And for good reason: they are bloody good.
Born into wine, the heir apparent to Cobaw Ridge and son of Alan and Nelly Cooper, Josh has had access to very good teachers and great fruit to play with. From his first vintage, a single barrel of fruit sourced from his parent’s estate in 2012, to the current evolution where he produces site driven wines that range from the serious to the more ethereal styles, Josh has gone from strength to strength.
Josh’s wines are right at the top of the tree when it comes to producers in the Macedon Ranges. His ability to capture the best a site has to offer each vintage, unaltered and pure, is simply magical. These are the kind of wines we love - modern, fresh and vibrant and breaking away from the conventions of old. As with all good things there isn’t a lot to go around... - Pete L
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Dr Edge
Tasting this Saturday
August 26th
3pm - 6pm
It wasn’t the winemaking bug that originally struck Peter Dredge; it was a discus to the head.
Shattering the young athlete’s dreams of a sporting career, leaving him deaf in one ear and needing rehabilitation to regain his balance, Dredge put his sports science studies on hold to take a gap year of manual labour. It was then, working vintage at Petaluma with Brian Croser and Con Moshos that Dredge’s talents beyond the sports field were unveiled. Work on the vineyard was tough with Dredge coming close to giving up on his new passion more than once, yet he persevered, even taking an opportunity to work with Germany's Dr Loosen on the revered Mosel Riesling. It might have been a jungle of vines sometimes, but it turned out that being pushed by Crose to the edge early in his promising career would eventually draw Dredge closer to the edge of the world: Lutruwita (Tasmania).
Dredge, respectfully drawn out by his winemaking friends to the moniker Dr Edge, moved to Tasmania as the Senior Winemaker for Bay of Fires, which allowed him to gain a great understanding of the island's cool climate viticulture and diverse terroir.
And so the Dr Edge label was born, with a compass of wines to explore the diverse terroir from single vineyard sites in each the north, east and south of the Apple Isle. Dr Edge wines are lees-aged with the help from a little funky yeast, and are un-dredged, ie unfined/unfiltered. The compass series are all vinified in exactly the same minimal intervention way to truly express Lutruwita.
On tasting will be the first wines from his 2023 releases, Chard-ennui which is a blend of Chardonnay with a splash of Riesling and a touch of skin contact. Ambrosia, a skin contact wine made with Pinot Gris and Schonburger plus Tyrannosaurus dREDge which is mostly Pinot Meunier with a tiny bit of Pinot Noir added to the mix. These are the more fun early drinking styles of wine Pete produces and having tasted them last week we think he's put together a set of winners.
Speaking of winners... We still have a tiny amount of his 2022 release available via the link below. - Peta W
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Fletcher Wines
Dave Fletcher is the under-the-radar Aussie winemaker, producing some of our favourite Nebbiolos from Australia and Piedmont. Not a bad achievement! Dave's love for Nebbiolo pushed him to seek a harvest gig at Ceretto, one of the top producers in the Barolo region of Piedmont. Years of hard work in the cellar paid off and now Dave is in charge of all red wine production at this famed estate, as well as creating his very own eponymous label.
His wines range from beautifully gentle, contemplative expressions of Nebbiolo, to more modern, vibrant wines such as his Barbera, made in a similar style to the wines of Beaujolais. He even makes a skin contact blend of Arneis and Moscato - a style rarely seen in the region.
We get modest amounts of his wines each year and have recently received his latest Italian Nebbiolo offering.
These wines are a perfect accompaniment to the shift in weather we are currently enjoying/hating, but they never hang around long, so don't wait!