Rees Miller Estate

Reese Miller Estate is  small vineyard of 18ac at Yea, just north of the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia. It is in a new wine region called Upper Goulburn. They specialize in high quality red wines, and have an annual production of 3,000 cases per year. They firmly believe that wine is made in the vineyard and concentrate our efforts there, limiting crops to about 2.0t/ac. The site is excellent for flavour, and vineyard management is designed to maximise this. They are also converting to organic/biodynamic management, to make sure their vineyard and in fact the whole property is kept in the best possible condition.They produce pinot noir, shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and merlot. They use traditional winemaking techniques - open fermenters, hand plunging and pumping over, and basket pressing. They often use wild yeast and allow the wines to complete their MLF naturally.

This year their shiraz, called Thousand Hills Shiraz 2003, was placed in the top twenty wines of the Great Australian Shiraz Challenge competition. The judges included some of Australia's great winemakers - James Halliday, Geoff Merrill and John Duval (who made Grange for 20 years). Their wine was also chosen to be one of the nine wines paired with a course on the menu at the award night at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne. They say this has given them confidence in the way they have set out to produce great wine.
 
There were over 320 entries in the Challenge, most from the famous South Australian wine regions of the Barossa, McLaren Vale and the Clare Valley. Most have far more expertise and financial momentum than the Rees Millers, who simply try to apply traditional European techniques to the right terroir.  (The vines that produced the fruit for the 2003 wine were about 4 years old.) At the moment their wines are only sold at the cellar and exported to Germany and Canada. Hopefully soon they will get some US distrobution.

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