The Wine Front – A beautiful single-site chardonnay from the Mornington Peninsula. Brilliant straw in colour but long and racy. This really has its skates on, and it pulls more than enough flavour along with it. Flint, meal, grapefruit and stone fruit with fig and cider-like characters. Plenty going on but contained and whole. Terrific length. Just enough razzle-dazzle. Excellent.

World Wine – Barney Flanders from Garagistes (wine) of Mornington Peninsula decided he wanted to take a look at how carbonic maceration and skin contact might work in his white wine ferments. It begat this range of wines. All wines under the label Côtier are made with white grapes (well, gris is in a grey area, of course), but see extended time on skins and ferment naturally ala carbonic. Fascinating. Good drinking. Pale gold colour but blazes in glass. Scents of preserved lemon, honey and honeysuckle, toffee apples, ginger and lemongrass spice. You’d get ‘riesling’, if you were playing guessing games, but with a twist. Chewy and tacky-textured in the palate, almost powdery in feel, lemon barley water and bitter apples in flavour. It’s actually very refreshing too. Defined by its texture, is the take away, and the least eccentric of the Côtier wines. This drinks super well.

The Wine Front – It’s from a number of sites across the Peninsula and its quality (and value) is very good. It’s a dry, savoury pinot with ample fruit and fine grooves of tannin. Complex, interesting, well scaffolded and satisfying through the finish. There’s a woodsmoke note, lots of black cherry, a tangy cranberried character and a late rise of redcurrant to the aftertaste. Plenty to see and experience. We’re into impeccable territory once again.

The Wine Front – A beautiful single-site chardonnay from the Mornington Peninsula. Brilliant straw in colour but long and racy. This really has its skates on, and it pulls more than enough flavour along with it. Flint, meal, grapefruit and stone fruit with fig and cider-like characters. Plenty going on but contained and whole. Terrific length. Just enough razzle-dazzle. Excellent.

The Wine Front – A month macerating on skins has given this wine a lease on life in the orange wine spectrum. Interesting project from Barney Flanders, who tells me that it was born from his love of phenolics and structure in wine, and a willingness to see the same in his whites. I like it. Dense fog of scent shows ripe melon and apple fruit characters, a whiff of juniper or gin-like botanicals, touch of green herb but just a pinch, an orangey aroma too; all appealing. Succulent, full mouthful of juicy fruit hemmed with a corset of fine, chalky tannins. Character-filled, complex white of high drinkability.