2022 Joshua Cooper Ray-Monde Vineyard Pinot Noir

Described by wine commentator Mike Bennie as "one of Australia’s brightest young winemakers”, Joshua Cooper is steadily forging a reputation for thoughtful, elegant, and confident wines from grapes grown in Macedon and surrounds. The Lakey family established the Ray-Monde Vineyard in 1988 in South Gisborne, at an elevation of 400 meters above sea level, on the southern edge of the Macedon Ranges GI. This vineyard is unique to the area with it's gravelly ironstone and basaltic clay with very little topsoil and lots of "Bluestone" rocks just below the surface. This unique soil, along with the age of the vines, results in grapes that are highly concentrated, with thick skins and ripe stems. After three weeks of fermentation, the wine was pressed to a single (Laurent “Magic Cask” thick stave, blonde toast), a single one-year-old Stockinger 300L and three old (6-10yo) oak Burgundian barrels for 12 months of maturation. The wine is then racked to stainless steel tanks for four more months of settling, before bottling without any additives except a small amount of sulphur.

The 2024 Halliday Wine Companion Best New Winery of the Year

Other Reviews....
Josh Cooper says ’22 is the best wine he’s made off this site to date. It’s more savoury and, in a way, structured compared with the Doug’s Vineyard pinot. This comes out with dark cherries, rhubarb, kirsch and licorice root, plus warm earth and bitumen aromas. Complex, rich but not heavy, fuller bodied, with ample tannins all plush and textural, quite distinctive in how they feel across the palate; then fine acidity corrals everything into one seamless offering. Drink 2024 - 2034.
96 Points
Jane Faulkner - Halliday's Australian Wine Companion

The 2022 Ray-Monde Vineyard Pinot Noir is dark in the glass and laden on the nose with graphite and ash, licorice, char and black cherries. The wine is earthy and steely, with black pudding, blood plum, tart cherry and spice and a crackle of dry autumn leaf. It leans more on the structure and spice characters than it does on fruit volume here. It's a compact wine.
I love the tannins; they start sparse but build through the mid-palate and rise up through the fruit through the finish. The tannins are chewy, as opposed to drying. Lovely. 12.5% alcohol, sealed under Diam. Drink 2023 - 2035.
93+ Points
Erin Larkin - Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

Ray-Monde always has me in mind of Rayman the video game character. Instead we have a regenerative-farmed, mixed agriculture property with some pretty damn fine vines on the place – Gisbourne here we are.
As is the motif of the 2022 pinot noirs from Josh Cooper, there is savouriness writ large. Dark cherry, cola, sooty spices, paperbark, black tea and chamomile floral lift with some violet notes in the mix. It saunters along the palate, hugging the corners, drying things out in a broad swish of web-like lacy tannin. It finishes with a solid, black tea chew and feels brooding and intense, but with a very palatable, gentle juiciness that lets you in right now. It feels like one for further on, perhaps. Drink 2025 - 2035.
94+ Points
Mike Bennie - The Wine Front