I’m a little bemused… this is the 10th set of these notes I have written. It’s hard to write something that has any relevance, reference or, better, reverence to the amazing thing that is winemaking and more specifically making these Nocturne wines. Yet I try, and each year I’m in a different place, as are the wines, but the DNA remains the same.

Now, George Friedman said, “A century is about events, a decade is about people.” I think even a century of wine would be more about people than events, which is a hard argument to make, but the great wines of the world are about people and places—and it’s the people that really make the difference. Was Covid a thing? Sure, but did we make great wines? Sure. WW2 was a thing, but was the 1945 Cos d’Estournel one of the most formative and wonderful wines I have ever tried? Events shape people, and people shape wines. You can only shape wines in an image that your sites allow, but you need to understand the best shape for that site. That’s the art in wine.

Now, 2024 was in parts a challenge, but as the famous adage goes, “Producer, producer, producer”—implying that the producer is more important than the vintage. I wouldn’t claim to be the man to buck a trend or really do anything much other than be unkempt and a little irreverent but the 2024 Nocturne wines are excellent. So excellent, in fact, that I think it’s one of the best SV Cabs ever. Was the vintage this great? No, no, it wasn’t, but maybe the fruit from my vineyards was, and I didn’t fuck it up even a little bit. And here we are. You may have to decide for yourself.

If the first decade was searching for and maybe finding, the next decade sounds pretty exciting: refining, defining and, maybe, searching some more. Regardless, it sounds like a journey I need to make and maybe, just maybe, continue to make more wines that touch more people and do more things than ever before. In my imagination there are no bounds. (Geoffrey Chaucer: “People can die from mere imagination”…)

As you know, Nocturne comprises two wine ranges: the Single-Vineyard or SV range and the Sub-Regional or SR range. Our SV Sheaok Cabernet and SV Forrest and Wilson Chardonnays remain, as ever, awesomely epic expressions of the best sites in Margaret River.

SR7 – Seven vintages into the Sub-Regional range. Lucky Number Seven. Wines so delicious light cannot penetrate their core.

SV10– Limited as ever and 100% allocated. Allocations have gotten very tight. For the last vintage, we had to implement a new system for our mailing list, looking after our longest-standing and best customers for these wines. If you get a letter, you know who you are; if you don’t get the letter, please still make a request on your order form—if there is any allocated stock not picked up, it will be first in, best dressed.