The philosophy behind the wine making is to grow or source fruit of the highest quality and to allow the resulting wine to reflect its particular vineyard origin ( what the French call terroir ), and to encourage the development of secondary aromas and flavours, structure and mouthfeel to achieve wine with subtle complexity, structure and a lingering pleasing aftertaste.

When Moorooduc Estate was founded in 1982 very little was known about growing grapes and making wine on the Mornington Peninsula. Since then we have accumulated sufficient experience about the viticulture and winemaking on our piece of land to be able to draw some conclusions about its potential for making great wine. In most years, wines we have made from the later ripening varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz have been very good. This is explained by our warmer subregion and a well situated and exposed vineyard. It is increasingly evident, however, that our site is most suited to the early ripening varieties of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. In our opinion the Mornington Peninsula has the potential to be one of the world’s great regions for the production of wines made from these varieties which are our main focus but we will continue to make small quantities of high quality Cabernet and Shiraz for the mailing list, cellar door and the discerning trade.

Over the years our winemaking has been defined and refined through experimentation, research and reflection. In 1996 we started experimenting with indigenous or ‘Wild’ yeasts naturally present in the vineyard, relying on these to effect the primary fermentation. We have consistently preferred the wild yeast wines to those inoculated with commercially available cultured yeast, the former being less fruity but richer and more complex, and we adopted the name for our reserve wine. So successful were the results that today all of our Moorooduc Estate wines are now fermented with indigenous yeasts and, starting with the 2001 vintage, all our Moorooduc Estate wines are labelled as such and the reserve wine is called “The Moorooduc”.

It has also become clear that, whereas the Mornington Peninsula as a whole shares certain viticultural characteristics such as a temperate, maritime climate, there are distinct differences between areas within the region. In particular, our warmer, drier Northern part has quite a different climate to the cooler Southern areas around Main Ridge and Red Hill. It is likely that these differences will be recognised by the definition of two or more subregions.

After centuries of experience, many old world wine regions have observed definable subregions and within them, individual vineyards that consistently produce characters identifiably different and better than their neighbours. Examples of this are seen in Italy’s Piedmont, Germany’s Mosel and in many French regions with the best known being Burgundy’s Cote D’Or. Here the classifications encompass regional wines made from grapes grown in any part of the region, village wines from individual communes and individual vineyard wines within communes, usually indicated by Premier or Grand Cru status.

We produce wines from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir at three levels in a similar hierarchy of regional, subregional and individual vineyard wines.