Mel Chester joined Giant Steps as Head Winemaker in 2021, and by 2024, the winery had been awarded the coveted 'Winery of the Year' title by James Halliday's Wine Companion. Needless to say, Mel has achieved a lot in a short space of time, further reinforcing why she is widely regarded as one of Australia's best young winemakers. During her recent trip to London, we sat down with Mel to learn more about her journey into wine, her take on why the Yarra makes some of the world's greatest Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and how she's taken to her new role at Giant Steps.
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What was it that made you decide to pursue a winemaking career?
My great-grandfather imported oak barrels from America and France, and my uncle was a winemaker by trade, so wine was a big part of my family's culture. I’ve always loved flavour and trying different kinds of food. Even as a child, I would be eating oysters, olives and mushrooms, and my parents would always say, “You’ll definitely be a winemaker when you grow up”, because they knew understanding flavour and texture was a big part of winemaking. I also loved science and being outdoors, so it all made sense. But, when I was a teenager, what my parents thought was a good fit became the last thing I wanted to do!
I ended up enrolling in law school and having a year off before starting. My dad suggested I do a vintage to earn extra cash, and I thought, ‘Good idea, but I’m not going to want to become a winemaker – don’t get your hopes up, mate!’
Of course, after my first harvest, I fell in love with it. It was so much fun. Winemaking is an interesting job. It’s very broad. It’s science and farming, but it’s also about business, staff management, and branding. Even now, though, I still love harvest the most; I would do it for free. It is the best time of year—the collaboration, the smells, the excitement—it’s just a very satisfying time.
Every year is different, and I really enjoy how seasonal my job is. In the spring, I am on the farm all the time. Then, for the three months of vintage, I’m constantly in the winery, before there’s another three months where I am travelling a lot to different markets. It’s so fun and varied.
You are fairly new to Giant Steps, having started in 2021, what attracted you to this project?
Giant Steps' reputation precedes it. Everyone knows that they make great wines and have the best sites in the Yarra Valley. I love making Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and I really love the Yarra, so it was sort of this perfect opportunity. Their history is amazing, so there was a great bounce board there already for me to be able to work on and start the next chapter. What Phil [Sexton] and Steve [Flamsteed] had built is really reflected in the company philosophies and the culture. Being named Winery of the Year by Halliday this year reflects a lot of hard work from people past and present.
What is it about the Yarra Valley that makes it so perfect for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir?
It’s all about the climate. If you zoom out from Melbourne, you can see that we are very far south. We are as far away from the equator as you can get on mainland Australia, which means the Yarra is naturally cooler. Our climate is sort of semi-continental and semi-maritime, as we’re only 100 kilometres from the ocean as the crow flies. Yet we are also up in the hills, not far from where people go skiing and the Great Dividing Range that runs up into southeastern Queensland. We have high rainfall, but because we’re in the mountains, we’re away from the flood plains on the valley floor. There are also prevailing winds and rain that come off the Southwest Coast and hit the Yarra.
Then, you can zoom all the way into each vineyard and see how the different soils and aspects contribute to an amazing variety of fruit. These very old soils contain beautiful volcanic basalt, but the minutiae of them changes from site to site. This variation makes it a great place to grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
Throughout the Yarra, site elevation can change by 350 metres from the highest to the lowest point. The valley floor has flood plains around the Yarra River, which we call the Lower Yarra. Then you get into the gently rolling hills and to the Upper Yarra which is more sparsely planted, with lots of temperate rainforests and high humidity. There is also something to be said about the Yarra’s diversity in terms of the spread of varieties it can produce to the same high quality. I can’t imagine another region in the world where you can grow incredible Chardonnay, Pinot, Shiraz and Cabernet in the same vineyard, and yet here we do it all. It’s crazy.
These are the varieties that the Yarra is best known for, but I am going to borrow from my friend Mac Forbes and say that, actually, what we’re known for is medium-bodied, fragrant wines. Our Pinot and Chardonnay are generous in style, while our Cabernet and Shiraz are refined and elegant rather than big and full-bodied. Regardless of the variety, that is our style.
Left: Sexton Vineyard , Right: Tarraford Vineyard
Single vineyard wines are at the core of the Giant Steps philosophy. Could you talk us through each key site?
You’re spot on, everything that we do is about trying to make the best expression from those beautiful sites. We have two vineyards in the Lower Yarra and three in the Upper Yarra.
Our home base is Sexton Vineyard in the Lower Yarra, which is 200 metres above sea level and looks out across the whole valley. Our founder, Phil Sexton, discovered the site in the mid-90s, and it became part of our origin story. Phil was a brewer by trade and also made wine in the Margaret River. He sold both those businesses and ended up in America, working for Sierra Nevada in the 90s, building breweries for them across the country. But he always wanted to come back to Australia and make Pinot and Chardonnay in the Yarra. The site that became Sexton cropped up for sale in 1995 and Phil was told that he’d be pretty brave to take it on – it’s a very steep place! But he loves a challenge. He bought the site, quit his brewery job and founded Giant Steps.
From there, he added the Tarraford Vineyard, a 10-minute drive north of Sexton. This vineyard had originally supplied Chandon, so the fruit was primarily being used for sparkling wine. Phil quickly realised it was a different ball game to Sexton, as the fruit ripened differently, creating very different flavours. Those two vineyards are very much the origin story of how single vineyards became a key part of our philosophy.
Left: Applejack Vineyard, Right: Primavera Vineyard
Ever since then, we’ve been slowly collecting great vineyards across the Yarra. We bought Applejack in 2012 and Bastard Hill in 2022 and rent Primavera on a long-term contract [all in the Upper Yarra]. Applejack and Primavera are actually the same elevation, about 300 metres above sea level, but each represents a different subregion.
Applejack is located in the foothills of the Gladysdale mountains. It's a great site for Pinot Noir because it's so sheltered. It has an east-facing aspect, so it gets a lot of morning sunshine while being protected from the afternoon heat by temperate rainforests. The vineyard was planted in 1997 by my hero Ray Guerin, who had a lot of impact behind the scenes at Giant Steps. He’s also incredibly significant in Australian wine, as he planted some of the country’s greatest cool climate sites while working for Hardy’s. The soil at Applejack is typical of the Yarra, with 450-million-year-old grey soils that have high clay content and diminutive nutrients. When they dry out in the summer, they almost become like cement. It’s the soils that really differentiate Applejack from Primavera.
Primavera, in Hoddles Creek, has a more south-westerly aspect, so it’s more exposed to the elements. Wind and rain can hit that vineyard pretty hard, making farming often quite difficult. The soils are rare, red basalt originating from a massive volcanic explosion that formed Mount Dandenong about 60 million years ago. They are much more fertile and free-draining, so vines have a totally different life in them. There's an ease to the fruit that comes off of red soil. It’s so perfumed and detailed. Whereas I think you get more muscle, more tannin, more drive and more fight to the wines in grey clay soil.
Bastard Hill Vineyard
New to the Giant Steps range is ‘Bastard Hill’. Could you talk us through what makes this vineyard so special?
Bastard Hill has an incredible history; it’s another legendary vineyard planted by Ray Guerin. One of his first vineyard hands here coined the name. He’d ask her to go and work the site, and she’d say, ‘Not that Bastard of a Hill!’.
It was originally planted in 1985 as a super-premium site for Hardy’s sparkling wine because of its cool climate and high elevation. Other wineries also started making wines from the site in the early 90s, creating a huge stir. At a time when people were mostly making big, buttery Chardonnay, Bastard Hill was producing pristine, Chablis-like wines. They were amazing.
By the time we bought the site in 2022, though, it had fallen into a bit of disrepair. We knew this site had an amazing history and pedigree, but we also knew it would take a lot of work and would be hard to farm. Yet the wines we are making from it are already shockingly good, especially considering how neglected it had been. You can tell it will become one of those great sites.
We thought Sexton was hard to farm, but that's got nothing on this vineyard. Bastard Hill is at the top of the Gladysdale mountains, 400 metres above sea level. It's so high that you even get some of the cool breezes from the south. Normally, we’d say that the Yarra is continental, with warmish days and cold nights, thanks to the mountain breeze that comes down into the valley. Being so high up, with those southern breezes, Bastard Hill is almost maritime.
It’s 5° cooler than the valley floor, so you're often picking a lot later, meaning vintages won’t be consistent, and yields will often be low. We might not make this wine every year; that’s the risk we knew we’d take to be able to work with one of the best sites in the country for Chardonnay. It’s a long journey of restoration, and we are just taking it slowly. In year one, we fenced it; this year (the second year), we’ve been doing a lot of soil work, and then next year, we will start replanting. It’s a 20-year project and will probably make its best wines in 50 years. It’s an honour to think that we are doing all this for future generations.
2022 was your first full vintage with Giant Steps; how would you describe it, and how does it compare to 2021 and the upcoming 2023?
All three were cold years, with cold, wet springs and late ripening. 2021 was something of a Goldilocks year. It was Steve Flamsteed’s last year as head winemaker, and he reckons it was the best vintage he’d seen in 20 years of making wine at Giant Steps. Crop levels were perfect, nothing was ripening too quickly and so it was just this really lovely, easy walk into vintage.
2022 had very difficult conditions over flowering, and that was in my first week. I was walking through Tarraford and getting rain flying directly into my face. It was cold, wet, rainy and windy all through flowering, so we had an average number of bunches on the vine but with half the usual crop level. A normal bunch of Chardonnay would be about 120g, and we were getting 60g bunches. We were about 45% down on crop level overall, so it was definitely a tough vintage from a farming perspective. But on the flip side, the quality was amazing. The wines were compact and concentrated, the Chardonnay’s were driven and powerful and the Pinots were fleshy with amazing tannin definition.
Then 2023 was colder again. It was our latest ripening vintage on record at Giant Steps by about two weeks. It was another cold, wet spring – we were a bit over that by this point! - and then a very wet January, too. Not a day over 35C, which is cold for us. We’d usually crack 40C every day in the summer. But that meant we ended up with high-acid Chardonnay that is so crystalline, pure and linear. They’ll live for a million years. The Pinots are delicious; I think it’s a great Pinot year – they’re super sweet-fruited with lots of beautiful, fleshy tannins and a sweet kind of pulpiness to the wines. The 2023s are delicious and probably the best vintage we’ve seen out of all three.
Cold vintages rock. They’re tough and hard to manage, but they have amazing results qualitatively. In 2023, we had better crops than in 2022, as we were only 25% down! We took that as a win.
It seems a bit like since you’ve started, it was a slight baptism of fire, with tough vintages and a lot of change to grapple with.
Oh, 100%, but it’s been amazing. It’s been really fun. You know, add to the tough vintages the fact that we bought a new vineyard and also moved into a new winery eight weeks before the 2022 harvest; it’s been busy but really exciting, too. With the Jackson Family involvement, we’ve been able to do a lot of the things we’ve been wanting to do for 10 years but never had the resources.
The funny thing about winning Winery of the Year is that we did that without really having all these changes fully tuned in yet. But it really cements that we’re making the right choices and changes, not just for the winery but also for the team.
What kind of wines do you enjoy drinking? Do you think they influence your own winemaking style?
I find the exploration and discovery of wine so exciting and so fun. I’ve been drinking a lot of Chenin Blanc recently. Some awesome Australian Chenin’s are kicking around. I love wines from the Loire and from South Africa. I think I particularly enjoy the texture. All the wines that I make have texture to them, so I suppose it makes sense that I seek out similar wines myself.
Every wine discovery you make just opens up another little window in your brain that helps you understand the category that is wine better. I don’t think I have ever changed my winemaking style because of the wines that I try, but I enjoy the calibration and context that you get through trying different things. There’s always Chardonnay in my fridge. Why would I ever drink anything cold that isn’t Chardonnay?
Then with reds, obviously, Grenache in Australia right now is a really big thing. Those wines are so beautiful and delicious. The wines from Willunga 100 are killing it, and those old vines in the McLaren Vale and even the Barossa have been a missing piece of the puzzle that is so exciting to discover. They’re so inspiring. Again, wines with texture! And, of course, I drink a lot of Pinot. I think it’s generally just really important to taste a lot and to constantly calibrate your palate to be able to help you communicate something that is so personal.
For more information about purchasing the wines of Giant Steps, please contact your Account Manager. Not yet a customer? Contact Us to discuss opening an account.