Review: Southwood White Kangaroo Pinot Noir 2021. A real discovery

I love when great wines turn up out of nowhere. It’s what makes wine reviewing fun. This Southwood White Kangaroo Pinot Noir 2021 is the perfect example.

Southwood Wines is a small 0.5ha vineyard on Tasmania’s East Coast planted in just 2020. As vigneron Tracy Taylor explains, ‘whilst we are waiting and nurturing these vines, we’ve had a practice run of picking from Coal River Valley to produce our Southwood White Kangaroo Pinot Noir 2021’.

Previously, Taylor has ‘mostly been supplying to family and friends, and our favourite local restaurants and bottle shops’ but is now keen to go further afield. There is a joke there about hopping to it, I’m sure.

Anyway, this is such a delightful wine. There’s this perfect flow of bright raspberry coulis, cherries, a whiff of leaf a little chocolate and earth, with a wonderfully varietal open nose married to a coiffed palate. It’s just so good, so delicious and right and Pinoty, that I would have sworn this had come from old vines and old hands.

I can’t wait to see what else comes from Southwood.

Best drinking: nowish. 18.5/20, 94/100. 13%, $45. Southwood website. Would I buy it? Sure would.