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When you’re in the mood for:
Blackberry & plum • dark, floral lift • red with opinions
Petit Verdot — or PV, because that’s what we’ve called it in the winery since day one — is the red with opinions.
Our 2024 PV comes from Colbinabbin Estate in Heathcote, and it’s very much the structured one in the line-up: dark fruit, floral lift, dried herbs, proper tannin, and no great interest in pretending to be soft and cuddly.
In the glass, think blackberry, deep plum and dark fruit cake spice, with violets, dried herbs, tobacco leaf and old cigar box in the background. It’s bold and firmly built, but there’s prettiness there too — that violet lift stops it from being all shoulders and no charm.
Petit Verdot often gets used as the structural bit in blends: colour, tannin, backbone, job done. We wanted to see what it could do with the whole bottle to itself. Turns out, quite a lot — provided you don’t mind a red that expects food and gives your glass a bit of a serious look.
This is not your casual soft red. It works best with food that can meet it halfway: richer protein dishes, slow-cooked tomato and herb flavours, smoky or aged cheeses, charred vegetables, or anything with enough fat, savoury depth or flavour to give the tannins somewhere useful to go.
Shiraz and lamb is the cliché. Around here, PV would like a word.
Petit Verdot is not exactly the shy kid in the corner.
It’s better known as a blending grape — the one winemakers reach for when they want colour, tannin and backbone — but we wanted to see what it could do on its own. So in 2024, we picked a small parcel from Colbinabbin Estate and let it have the bottle to itself.
It made us work for it from the start. The stems were twisted and stubborn, which made machine harvesting more trouble than it was worth, so this lot was hand-picked instead. From there we kept the handling gentle: crush carefully, ferment cleanly, and try not to drag out any more tannin than Petit Verdot was already very happy to bring along.
This wine was quietly maturing in barrel in Heathcote when the Harcourt Coolstore fire tore through our bottled stock in January 2026 — just before we were about to launch properly. We lost everything already bottled, including the heavier, matured reds we’d been building from 2021 onwards. The PV, still in barrel and entirely unaware of the drama, was spared.
When it came time to decide whether to soften it further, we tasted it. Then tasted it again. Then took it to other people and got the same general message back: leave it alone.
So we did.
Not because it’s soft. It isn’t. Not because it’s for every mood. It isn’t that either. But because some wines lose the point if you sand off all their edges just to make them behave like everything else.
This is PV with its personality intact: blackberry, deep plum, violet lift, dried herbs, tobacco leaf, old cigar box and proper tannin underneath. It’s dark, floral, structured and still finding out exactly what it wants to be with time.
For some people, it’ll be ready now — preferably with something rich, savoury and not shy on the plate. For others, it’s one to tuck away and check in on later.
Either way, this is the red in the line-up that doesn’t ask to be liked by everyone.
Fair enough, really.
