Rikard, the pursuit of Burgundy in Orange
Rikard Wines is a working vineyard. The cellar door arrived in 2021 and you can sit inside, nice and warm and cosy and taste the wines. But I love the original tasting area, sitting in the cold clear air at the top of the mountain, brutalist industrial concrete, raw oak barrels and stainless steel.
This is the winemaking most vineyards like to hide behind a plush, pretty, sophisticated cellar door. This is the hard graft, industrial winemaking married to passion, skill and years of experience.
This is wine making
The vineyard location is the second highest in Orange with only De Salis Wines being further up the mountain.
The view from the Cellar
Will Rikard-Bell is famous for many reasons, and you can look them up yourself, but the instant he starts to talk about his approach to winemaking my mind immediately went to interviews I have seen with the Queen of Burgundy, Lalou Bize-Leroy.
He will tell you it's the choices you don't make and the changes you don't do that have the greatest effects on your wines. He will wax lyrical about putting the effort into the vineyard so that he doesn't have to make any choices in the wine making process. For example; he picks with 10 kilo packs, not hundred kilo buckets to prevent both bruising and the tiniest amount of early fermentation in his grapes.
His pursuit and his passion is the perfection of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay within the terroir of Orange. He doesn't want to be Burgundy, he wants to be Orange and immediately identifiable as such. He is building wines of length, depth, restrained power and complexity.
His estate price point is better than almost any other Pinot or Chardonnay in the orange region and his Black label moves into the pure and sublime.
He has started to experiment with the wine makers wine, Riesling. With a background in vintages in Germany and winemakers from Alsace working for him, he is producing highly rated Rieslings.
I purchased, a lot, and I will be back for more, for many years to come.
2023 Edit: Rikard produced a Black Label Riesling for the very first time in 2022, a blend of grape and technique that has produced a textured, delicate Riesling with a length of citrus I have tasted in very few other wines. Very Special.