In my experience the Mornington Peninsula is one of the most frustrating of Australian wine regions. A small number of growers have done the hard yards with site selection and vineyard management to produce small yields of high quality fruit from balanced vineyards. The trouble is, if every Mornington Peninsula grower were to read those words, each would be of the opinion they applied to him or her. Nat and Rosalie White’s Main Ridge Estate is one of the jewels in the Peninsula’s crown that has demonstrated time and again that if you take the right approach, the results might follow. Their best Half Acre Pinot Noir of recent years has been the 1997 vintage, a wine I have been fortunate to taste fairly regularly since its release. I opened another bottle this weekend passed, fearing ever so slightly since it had tasted rather raw and vegetal on the two previous occasions I had opened it in the middle of 2002. As I’d hoped, the wine was in top form. Its youthful red colour belied its age, while its rose garden aromas and sumptuous palate of vibrant dark cherry and raspberry fruit worked tightly with restrained oak and fine tannins. There’s still plenty of development ahead for this pinot, which is certainly one of the best wines ever made on the Peninsula. As for the two previous bottles that had me so worried? Hard to say. There was certainly no obvious contribution from the cork, and the vineyard does have a history of vegetal character in some releases, which might have been expressing themselves. It could also simply have been a phase the wine was going through. None of which makes it easier for us critics. Meantime, should you stumble upon well-cellared bottles of this wine, buy them.
