Giaconda

Giaconda is a tiny estate in the hills above Beechworth in north-east Victoria, and one of the most revered names in Australian wine. It makes very little — a few thousand cases — but its Chardonnay is widely regarded as one of the country’s greatest white wines, the standard against which Australian Chardonnay is measured.

An engineer’s obsession

The estate was founded in 1982 by Rick Kinzbrunner, a mechanical engineer who had returned to Australia in 1980 to take up a role as assistant winemaker at Brown Brothers in nearby Milawa. He bought land on the decomposed-granite slopes near Beechworth and began planting that year, devoting the site to Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Shiraz. Kinzbrunner has always been a low-profile, uncompromising figure, and Giaconda’s reputation was built quietly, on the wines alone.

The granite cellar

Central to Giaconda’s philosophy is its underground cellar, cut directly into solid granite. The rock holds a steady year-round temperature of around 17°C with naturally high humidity — conditions that let the wines ferment slowly and age gently, without temperature control or intervention. It is a piece of deliberate, old-world winemaking logic: let the site’s geology do the work the winery would otherwise have to force.

The granite soils matter above ground too. Beechworth is cool and elevated, with a wide diurnal range that preserves acidity and detail, and the free-draining, low-vigour granite gives small crops of concentrated fruit — the raw material of a Chardonnay built for both power and length.

The wines

Giaconda’s Estate Chardonnay is barrel-fermented and matured in the granite cellar in a deliberately Burgundian manner — the oak worked as texture and frame rather than overt flavour — producing a wine of unusual depth and cellaring capacity. The Nantua Les Deux is a more approachable Chardonnay bottling, and the Warner Vineyard Shiraz, grown on higher granite ground, is its benchmark red; a collaboration with the Rhône house Chapoutier, Ergo Sum, extends the Beechworth Shiraz story. Rick’s son Nathan Kinzbrunner now works alongside him, a second generation carrying a very particular, hard-won style.