General News
17 October, 2022
Big wine win for local Peerick vineyard
The Pyrenees continues to make a name for itself through viticulture, with local winery Peerick taking out a prestigious award for the best shiraz in western Victoria. The boutique Warrenmang based winery took out the Noel Hooper Perpetual Shield...
The Pyrenees continues to make a name for itself through viticulture, with local winery Peerick taking out a prestigious award for the best shiraz in western Victoria.
The boutique Warrenmang based winery took out the Noel Hooper Perpetual Shield for Best Shiraz as part of the Western Victorian Wine Challenge earlier this month.
The winery outscored some 40 other entries in the class, including previous winners and well known wineries such as Blue Pyrenees, Mount Langhi Ghiran, Grampians Estate and Taltarni.
The Western Victorian Wine Challenge is an annual awards presentation showcasing the best wines from the Grampians, Pyrenees, Henty and Ballarat regions.
Peerick co-owner Michael O’Hara said it was an honour to take home the award, particularly as a smaller vineyard.
“This recognition means a lot to a small producer like us and is just reward for the hard work and effort we’ve put into our wines,” he said.
“My wife Felicity and I purchased Peerick four years ago after a long search for a suitable vineyard.
“The previous owners, Chris and Meryl Jessup, who established Peerick back in the 1980s, hadn’t made wine here commercially for over 15 years but they left us with an established and exceptionally wellmaintained vineyard which we’ve been quickly able to capitalise on in reestablishing the Peerick brand.”
The results of the Western Victorian Wine Challenge follow other recent successes for Peerick, with gold medal wins for their reserve shiraz in Vienna, a double gold from Winestate Magazine and 94 points from James Halliday, as well as double gold wins for both Peerick’s sauvignon blanc and Two Nurses Viognier at the 2022 Melbourne International Wine Show.
Mr O’Hara said the recent success with awards is a nod to the winery’s ethos of doing things by hand, and also forms part of the plan to rebuild Peerick’s profile.
“Part of my strategy for getting the vineyard going again was building an award profile because Peerick had been out of circulation for around 15 years until we picked it up,” he said.
“I could see the potential in the vineyard and winning some awards is certainly one way of getting your profile up and running again.
“We’re fortunate in some respects that we do everything by hand here which in my opinion makes all the difference when it comes to winemaking.
“It’s a good thing and a bad thing, it costs a lot of money doing everything by hand and we spend a lot on pruning and picking but that’s reflected in the quality of our wine.”
Mr O’Hara said Peerick’s success has been well supported by vineyard manager of more than 25 years Ray Barnes, as well as winemakers Robert Heywood and Ben Howell from Taltarni and Andrew Davey from Melbourne Polytechnic and said Peerick will now look to secure a five star rating from Halliday.
“The one we’re looking at trying to get to now and it’s probably the benchmark of wine in Australia is the Halliday five star rating,” he said.
“We’re sitting at four stars at the moment which is pretty good, I’ve only entered our wine twice to Halliday and to get it back up to four stars after a number of years away is a good achievement.
“We’re on the brink of getting to that five star rating which is my goal at the moment.”
As vice president of the Pyrenees Grape Growers and Winemakers, Mr O’Hara said the Pyrenees region continues to go from strength to strength.
“The Pyrenees is a really underrated wine region and before we came up here we didn’t know all that much about the region,” he said.
“We’re just so fortunate to have lucked upon this area and I can just see this region growing from strength.”