Joshua Cooper New Releases 2025

Josh Cooper is making some of the most compelling and adventurous wines around. HUON HOOKE, www.therealreview.com.au

I love this new set of wines from Josh Cooper. They reveal a deeply thoughtful understanding of the visceral pleasure that wine gives you, but they also open a window on Cooper’s own wine journey. Bit of a wanky start I grant you, but let me try and fill in the gaps.

Cooper is a wine lover. His early life at Macedon Ranges estate, Cobaw Ridge, sowed the seeds and gave him the basics. No biggie there, lots of people get to have that experience and go on to make wine by the numbers.
No so Cooper, that early experience lit a fire in him and from there he seems to have set off on a boys-own wine odyssey. He’s one of those guys you meet in the wine trade who just wants to see what’s under the next cork. It's not about amassing “trophies” or drinking for drinking’s sake, but more about genuine curiosity and love of what a bunch of grapes can become in the fermented form.

More than that though, over the years since his first releases you can see how the growing back catalogue of wine experience – both in the cellar and drinking widely - has informed his own wines, imbuing them with suggestions of styles from elsewhere spliced skillfully into the fruit of his central Victorian backyard.

Sauvignon Blanc from Victoria’s Pyrenees ripples with Loire valley textures, Dash Farms chardonnay shows linear and intense flavours of this cool, granite-based site, buffered by clever phenolics and oak treatment; Burgundy lurking. It’s the same with the pinot, where he’s found the formula to imbuing the natural high-tone cranberry and red berry nature of the fruit with texture and “seasoning” without obscuring anything of the strong site identity.

It's clever winemaking but more than that the wines belie a basic understanding of what great wine is all about, this nexus between the hand of man and the vineyard identity but also the interplay of old and new world styling.

Anyway, this is a fabulous set of new releases. They’re exciting to drink and now, with the La Nina vintages of the last few years behind him (particularly acute in the cool Macedon Ranges) the 2024s are as good a set of wines as I’ve ever tasted here. Mature winemaking meets beautiful fruit. Do not miss them!