In the foothills of Mt Baw Baw in central Gippsland is Neil Prentice’s Moondarra vineyard. On it, he grows mostly Pinot Noir and Nebbiolo, and has small plantings of Picolit, Chardonnay, Pinot Bianco, Pinot Grigio and Friulano.
What sets Moondarra wines apart is that Prentice makes them with funkosity. They are, in his words, “post-punk”; informed by the likes of great labels like Gravner and Radikon, but reinterpreted in a way that’s uniquely and distinctly Moondarra.
Prentice farms his grapes mostly biodynamically (although he hates that word). He’s never irrigated nor fertilized his vines, and uses skim milk powder and the like to protect the grapes instead of pesticides. He tracks the overall health of his vines by monitoring one in particular (he named it Kevin), and a gas gun explodes intermittently over the vineyard, scaring away birds with nothing more than sound.
