In 1979, Phillip Jones abandoned his telecommunications career to plant the first vines in Gippsland—a large, but until then, mostly unexplored wine region east of Melbourne. His aspiration: to make a great Australian Bordeaux. Cabernet, however, struggled to ripen in the cool, maritime climate. Instead, it was his three rows of Pinot Noir that would ultimately make him a wine industry star with his first release under the Bass Phillip label in 1991.
Jones’s ultra-premium Pinots put Gippsland on the map. The price for his first top-tier Reserve bottling was higher than any Pinot
