When gut instinct has served you well, it makes sense to keep following that instinct with every new challenge. The wisdom in winemaker Lachlan Duncan continuing to trust his instincts can be measured in the Irvine Spring Hill Eden Valley Pinot Gris that stars in this week’s special offer case from The Australian Wine Club . Among four excellent examples of this popular varietal – and with a deal discount of 30 per cent across the dozen – Duncan’s gold medal-winning 2023 vintage represents outstanding value.
Twenty-odd years ago Duncan’s instinct told him to turn his life upside down and follow a winemaking dream. Now head winemaker at Irvine, adding pinot gris to his creative output gives him the chance to “play around a bit” – he calls pinot gris fun to make and the variety’s booming popularity would attest that it’s fun to drink. It feels like Duncan’s hunches have been paying off since the moment in his early 20s when he began to realise that a secure job studying horticulture for the Western Australian government might not be a career path to make his heart sing.
“I guess it was a lovely job, but after a while I realised that if I kept doing what I was doing, that would be the only job I would do, if you know what I mean ...
keep working for the government and then retire, and that’d be my life,” he says. “I guess I was looking for new challenges. I did a little bit of beer brewing, and a few people in the WA government at conferences had in.