Philip Rich on Giant Steps' standout 2025 single-vineyard release

Giant Steps has released its 2025 single-vineyard wines today, with winemaker Melanie Chester calling it one of the strongest years yet for the Yarra Valley producer's flagship range.

The 2025 season was markedly different to the cool, wet vintages that have shaped recent releases. A wet winter gave way to a warm, dry summer, pushing harvest forward and demanding fast decisions in the vineyard. The result, according to Mel, is a suite of wines with real confidence on release: chardonnays showing more power and openness than the valley has seen in years, and pinots that are succulent with beautifully resolved tannins.

Mel, who is now three vintages into the role after taking over from longtime winemaker and consultant Steve Flamsteed ('Flammo', who has been nominated for Winemaker of the Year in this year's Halliday awards), says the house philosophy hasn't shifted so much as sharpened. While Giant Steps has never worked to a fixed recipe and winemaking calls are made block by block, vintage by vintage, Mel's growing intimacy with each site is showing through in tighter, more deliberate decision making at picking and in the winery.

Giant Steps winemaker Mel Chester is now three vintages into the role.

Two stories stand out in this release. The first is Bastard Hill, the legendary Ray Guerin–planted site Giant Steps acquired in 2022. Three vintages in, the focus has been on rehabilitating vine health and farming the property's brutal slope on its own terms, alongside a major sustainability project that has moved irrigation off the creeks that run through the site, with new plantings due in 2027.

The second is the arrival of a new wine: Primavera Chardonnay, made in a tiny 60-case volume from the Primavera family's Upper Yarra block, a site Giant Steps has worked since 2012 and now farms under long-term lease. It took until 2025 for the fruit to clear the bar for single-vineyard status, a combination of accumulated work in the vineyard and a season that finally gave the wine the power and definition to match its site.

Underpinning all of it is Circle of Fifths, the tier introduced to catch parcels that didn’t quite make the individual single vineyard cut. As Mel says, it's created a cycle: "Our singles are held to a tighter standard every year because we have somewhere worthy for the fruit to go — and sometimes it's more about the combined whole than any individual part."

Volumes remain vintage-dependent and never chased for their own sake, but in 2025 – which had closer-to-average yields after the lean La Niña years – there's a little more of this standout vintage to go around.

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