2025 Reed Wines ‘Love’ Gamay

The Feelings & The Story:

This last trip to Beaujolais, I decided to make Gamay from my mentor Pierre-Marie Chermette’s family vineyard in the south where the soils have limestone. The idea was to understand my home block in Australia in a deeper way and the effects that calcareous soils have on Gamay outside of its country’s influence.

The undeniable energy in both wines tethered them from afar and the result is breathtaking and grounded in place.

I think a lot of my choices in wine have come from the hands and hearts of people who broke off a piece of themselves and gave it to me. The greatest example is Pierre-Marie Chermette and that’s why it’s so important that I carry that torch and keep the curiosity and love for Gamay going. Sometimes wine is a drink and sometimes wine is a story trapped inside a person, like petrified wood crystallised in time; waiting for someone to trace it back to where it all began. I felt that so intensely when I met Pierre and I made sure I too was apart of his story, because his wisdom was the gift I needed to be who I am in wine today. Gamay is my Love letter to Vissoux.

Tasting Notes Through Feelings:

I haven’t always been such a fan of Gamay outside of its birthplace, so I didn’t expect much from a maritime climate example grown on limestone. Hence naming the wine “Love” because I put ten rows in for the love of the variety. However the last two vintages of this wine have blown me away, it brings me right back to the cellar of Vissoux; a sensory memory imprinted so deep in me. Cassis, jambon cru, praline, the perfume from the tops of small wild strawberries and underripe raspberries sprinkled with pink rock salt. These are the smells and flavours of the way we met in France and who we have become together in Australia. The acid in the wine shimmers and dances like the fossilised seashells embedded in the soils that it drinks from. It’s a wine that screams of place and the heart it was created with; it’s that piece of me that I break off and now give to you.