From Burgundy to bargain bin: pinot's price problem

Last week I found a two-litre cask of Marlborough pinot noir at a local pop-up store for $7.99. Not $7.99 a bottle, but $7.99 for the equivalent of nearly three bottles. I bought one. And while it’s not a Halliday 95-point wine, it was perfectly drinkable. The question it had me asking is how does a variety famous for breaking hearts and bank balances end up this cheap?

The answer is simple economics. Marlborough has just come off two of its largest harvests on record – 2022 and 2025 – exactly as demand softened in its two biggest export markets, the US and UK; the latter further complicated by a fresh US tariff on New Zealand wine. An estimated 75,000 to 100,000 tonnes of fruit went unharvested in 2025 alone and growers without contracts simply had nowhere to send it. Bulk pinot noir has been moving at prices that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, cheap enough, evidently, to land in an Australian discount bin as a $7.99 cask.

It’s the wine world’s version of a fire sale. Pinot is New Zealand’s most-planted red, out-planting its nearest rival merlot roughly six to one, and reduced to bargain-bin economics simply because there’s too much of it and not enough demand to match.

Historically, this is an anomaly. For most of pinot’s history, it’s been the reverse: hard to find, and expensive because of it. Compare this to chardonnay, which will ripen respectably in every state in Australia, from the Riverina to Tasmania and anywhere in between, and which competent growers and winemakers can turn into something drinkable without breaking a sweat. That adaptability is exactly why it’s the most-planted white grape on earth, and why drinkable chardonnay can be made inexpensively almost anywhere. Great chardonnay, is of course, a different story.

Pinot noir offers no such mercy. It ripens early and needs cool conditions to hold onto its perfume and acidity, but not so cool it never ripens at all. It’s a narrow window, and not a forgiving one. Plant it on the wrong site and there’s nowhere to hide.

That’s the reason pinot noir, great or otherwise, only comes from a handful of places worldwide: Burgundy, parts of Oregon and California, most of New Zealand including Central Otago and Martinborough, and a select few pockets of Australia, mainly, but not exclusively, in and around Melbourne and Tasmania.

Even once you’ve found the right site, pinot is prone to overcropping. Thin-skinned and tight bunched, it’s vulnerable to rot and disease in a way thicker-skinned reds simply aren’t, demanding far more hands-on vineyard attention through the season. As Franco d’Anna from Hoddles Creek puts it: “With pinot noir, there are no shortcuts, regardless of price point, to making something decent. We start in the vineyard… in fact we spend 90 per cent of our time getting it right in the vineyard. That’s the hard part.”

That combination, a shortlist of suitable places to grow it, and the hands-on attention it demands even once you’ve found one, is enough to keep pinot at the more expensive end of any wine list. But in Burgundy, pinot noir’s ancestral home, that natural scarcity has run headlong into something else: a finite number of premier and grand cru vineyards that are now being acquired by some of the wealthiest people in the world.

Burgundy prices have, over the last 20 years, become increasingly detached from what’s in the glass. The inflection point can be traced back to 2006, when François Pinault (of the luxury Artémis group) paid €13 million for the six-hectare Domaine Engel, following the death of its owner Philippe Engel in May 2005. It was described at the time as the highest price ever paid for vines in Vosne-Romanée – one of several appellations, including Clos Vougeot and Echezeaux, across which Engel’s six hectares were spread – and some 30 per cent higher than the most recent comparable sale.

That was to look a veritable bargain given the reported €1 million for a 0.042-hectare parcel of Montrachet that Pinault purchased in 2012. A parcel barely larger than a tennis court. Not to be outdone, France’s wealthiest man, Bernard Arnault, responded by purchasing the 8.66-hectare Clos des Lambrays in 2014 for a reputed €100 million.

Three years later, Pinault answered back by acquiring the vineyard next door, Clos de Tart, for a reported €250 million. Pinault and Arnault had essentially turned Morey-Saint-Denis into a trophy cabinet for their personal rivalry. These figures weren’t wine economics; they were luxury goods brand valuations. By the time American billionaire Stan Kroenke, who also owns the Arsenal football club in London and the Denver Nuggets basketball club in the US, bought an 80 per cent stake in Bonneau du Martray in 2017 for a reported €100 million, it barely raised eyebrows. A sports franchise owner buying one of Burgundy’s most iconic domaines felt almost routine by then.

Pinault hasn’t stopped either. In 2022, his holding company Artémis Domaines merged with the Henriot family’s wine empire, adding William Fèvre and Bouchard Père & Fils and around 200 hectares of prime Burgundy vineyard to a portfolio that already ran through Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne, for undisclosed terms that industry watchers estimate ran well into the hundreds of millions of euros.

Against that backdrop, what’s happening in Australia looks like the middle ground between the two, neither struggling with oversupply like Marlborough nor detached from reality like the Côte d’Or. The numbers back this up. The national average price for a tonne of wine grapes currently sits around $600. Tasmanian fruit averages roughly $3700–3900 a tonne, and Mornington Peninsula fruit even more, at over $4100. Compare that to shiraz from Australia’s warm inland regions, where growers have recently been paid as little as $80 to $120 a tonne (well below the cost of production) and has, for the first time in 15 years, dropped out of the number one spot as Australia’s most-crushed variety, with vines being pulled out by the thousands of hectares. Australian pinot, by contrast, isn’t in crisis. It’s in demand.

That said, it would be disingenuous to pretend nothing has softened. Franco, who has been making benchmark-value Yarra Valley pinot since the early 2000s, is candid about it, stating that Yarra prices have come down a little, partly because phylloxera’s spread through the Valley has cooled growers’ appetites to plant, leaving the industry, in his words, “in a holding pattern”. Tasmania has its own version of this story, though for a different reason. Plantings there have outpaced the island’s own winemaking capacity, so surplus fruit is increasingly being shipped to the mainland. It’s a real cost pressure, and part of why Hoddles Creek was able to make a $20 single-vineyard Tasmanian pinot in the first place. But easing off a record high is different from collapsing, and grower prices in both regions still sit multiples above the national average.

That demand is backed by plantings that have concentrated rather than spread thin. Tasmania and the Yarra Valley between them account for the clear majority of Australia’s pinot noir plantings, each holding somewhere around 1000 to 1200 hectares of the variety, roughly double Mornington Peninsula’s plantings and five to seven times Geelong’s. Meanwhile, more Australians are drinking pinot as heavier, warm-climate reds fall out of favour. It’s a rare case of a variety’s fortunes rising in step with its reputation.

Which brings us to the genuinely good news. At $40 and under, there is more excellent Australian pinot noir to be found right now than at almost any point I can recall. Combing recent Wine Companion reviews from October 2025 onward for wines rated 93 points or above, priced at $40 or less, the Yarra Valley leads by a wide margin with 32 qualifying wines, from producers including Giant Steps, de Bortoli, Dominique Portet, Gembrook Hill, Yering Station, Oakridge, Toolangi, Medhurst and Hoddles Creek to name a few. Adelaide Hills follows with 11, led by BK Wines and Murdoch Hill. Mornington Peninsula and Tasmania each contribute eight, the former via Garagiste, Montalto, Stonier, Ten Minutes by Tractor, Kooyong and Yabby Lake, the latter through Two Tonne, Stoney Rise and Dawson James. Geelong adds five more, including Mulline and Provenance.

I would also point out that the price of premier and grand cru Burgundy now makes our most highly decorated wines look inexpensive by comparison. So, what does ‘value’ even mean for pinot at the top end? I would argue that two of Halliday’s recent Pinot Noir of the Year winners look like ‘bargains’ on a world scale. Giant Steps Applejack Vineyard Pinot Noir 2023, crowned Halliday’s Pinot Noir of the Year in 2025, sells for $95. Hardys Eileen Hardy Pinot Noir 2024, this year’s winner, sells for $120. Neither could be considered cheap, but compared to Burgundy, where modest Bourgogne rouge routinely costs more than either of these, and the top grand crus now run into the thousands, it can mean genuine quality at a price that would barely register elsewhere.

One producer deserves mention at the other end of the scale. Hoddles Creek, with both its eponymous label and Wickhams Road, has quietly turned out excellent-value pinot for the better part of a decade. Hoddles Creek spotted the gap for high-quality, affordable pinot as far back as the early ’00s. “We deliberately priced our pinot to be competitive and to turn a few heads to get traction before building out the multiple tiers, and that let good parcels find their right price point rather than being forced into one,” Franco says. Some 20 years later, Hoddles Creek has been joined by a broader field of Victorian, Tasmanian and South Australian producers chasing the same idea: that good pinot noir doesn’t need a trophy price tag to prove its worth. But the story doesn’t end at $40. Australian pinot noir now runs convincingly from a $20 bottle to a $120 Wine of the Year contender, and that top end is only going to keep growing in stature. Whichever end of that range you’re drinking from, there’s never been a better time to be a pinot noir lover in this country.