Bass Phillip 2024: Premium Pinot Noir Ranks #1 for Gippsland on Huon Hooke's Real Review
The 2024 Bass Phillip Premium Pinot Noir has been ranked the number one Gippsland Pinot of the vintage by Huon Hooke at The Real Review. It is the second time the wine has taken that position under Jean-Marie Fourrier. It is also the first vintage to come out of his new winery at Kardella.
The vintage that produced this result was, in Halliday Wine Companion's phrasing, "an up and down season": a cool, wet, humid summer in South Gippsland, harvest from mid-February, and a cool March that slowed the ripening of reds. Bass Phillip's own vintage report calls it "a year of patience." A cold and windy flowering reduced the total crop to 32.3 tons, and the long ripening that followed pushed harvest out to 27 March. Smaller crops, longer hang time, deeper concentration: the kind of year that rewards careful work in the cellar and punishes anything less.
This is the work Fourrier set out to do when he took over Bass Phillip from Phillip Jones in 2020. Since then he has been explicit that precision and consistency, rather than reinvention, are the priority. The Kardella winery, modern where the original facility was rudimentary, is the infrastructure side of that brief; the Hooke rankings are evidence the brief is working. The Premium has now finished first of fifteen Gippsland Pinots in two of Fourrier's release vintages: the 2021, his first complete cycle in charge, and the 2024.
What makes the result possible has not, fundamentally, changed since Phillip Jones planted the vineyards in 1979. The vines remain those original plantings, and the man farming them is the man who has farmed them since 2002 under Jones: Mick Kelly, who has stayed in place through the change of ownership. Adam "Skip" Francis, Fourrier's brother-in-law, runs day-to-day operations on the ground. Total production across the entire range sits at around 1,500 dozen. Bass Phillip is, in James Halliday's words, the producer of "the greatest Australasian Pinot ever made," and remains seventeenth in the most recent Halliday Top 100 Wineries, nineteenth in 2024. Out of those vineyards and into the new Kardella winery, the 2024 release runs to four wines: Premium and Estate tier in both Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
The Premium Pinot Noir is the headline of the release. The Premium Chardonnay, at 94 points, is the quieter find: a worked, generous wine in the producer's Burgundian register, with Bass Phillip's vintage report flagging the 2024 Chardonnays as showing a welcome lift in volume and focus from 2023. The Estate Pinot Noir, at 92 points, is the wine for the cellar rather than the dinner table: structurally dense, deliberately closed at this stage, and built for the long evolution rather than current drinking.
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Securing an allocation
The 2024 Bass Phillip wines release globally on July 1st. As ever with Bass Phillip, the quantities available never match the demand. If you would like to secure an allocation, please submit the form below.
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The Critics on Bass Phillip Estate
"Truly pushes the boundaries of Australian Pinot Noir greatness." Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW
"Some of the best Pinot Noir I've drunk in my whole life, from anywhere of any age." Robert Geddes MW
"Make no mistake about it… these are brilliant Pinot Noirs, undoubtedly the finest being produced in Australia." Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate
