2021

This 2021 release represents our second year tending to Gino’s Block and our second foray into everything Local Weirdos Wine – further exploring and solidifying our style and ethos. It has recently been likened to a ‘difficult second album’ and that is very true in a lot of ways. 4 months on from our third vintage, 2022, we have a little more perspective on the vintage that was 2021.

We continued our viticulture on Gino’s Block - our beautiful vineyard in the South-East of the Swan Valley which closely abuts the escarpment. The vineyard was planted in 1986 and has perfect gravelly sand for the Grenache, Chenin Blanc and Semillon that grows there. 

Whilst our first vintage was a rather idyllic stroll through the growing season, with a relatively late start on pruning, some very hot and dry weather and almost no disease pressure, our second vintage was not.

We had the arduous task of rehabilitating a massive amount of Chenin Blanc and Semillon that had been left to overgrow on the block for a number of years - a painstaking and relatively thankless task due to the knowledge that we would not see fruit from our efforts until the vintage of 2022 – something that we are now grateful to have benefitted from at the time of this 2021.2 release! 

The Grenache that we harvested in 2020, that went into the 2021 Chateau da Swan and Vino di Gino, received a meticulous prune during our ongoing rehabilitating efforts.


Leading up to harvest we had a relatively wet growing season and a lot of disease pressure from an unpruned vineyard immediately to the East of us. Organic preparations alone did not quite cut the mustard in terms of fungal disease pressure and so we had to high-tail it out to the vineyard in December for some much-needed manual leaf to improve airflow throughout the canopy so we could keep things au naturale.

Eventually with the help of family and friends we managed to pick a reasonable yield of this impressively hardy grenache along with our white grapes.

We were fortunate enough to be allowed the run of Swan Valley Wines thanks to Paul and Bree again in 2021 and we had a good idea of the wines that we wanted to make from our experiences in vintage 2020. Our main goal for the 2021.2 release was to make more exacting red wines with extended time in bottle.

All said and done we feel this winter release represents a realisation of meticulous vineyard management in a difficult growing season, precise winemaking with zero intervention and some balanced yet lively wines from bottle ageing of and delayed release.

We’re excited. Get excited with us.

Stay weird,

The Local Weirdos - Sam, Charles, Matt, Larold and Dave.