TREASURE ISLAND

Our wonderful dessert wines are unique in the world, yet almost unheard of overseas and pretty much unknown at home. That’s astonishing given that we’ve been making these extraordinary wines for over 160 years. The good news is that we can enjoy these rare treats at bargain prices.

Ned Kelly country makes most of our great fortified wines, with the Barossa lending a hand via the treasure trove that is Seppeltsfield. If you haven’t sat by a warm fireplace on a cold winter’s night with a glass of Tokay or Muscat and a bowl of nuts, dried fruits, dark chocolate or blue cheese, you haven’t lived. If you have and didn’t like the experience, you must’ve bought the wrong Tokay and some really old nuts.

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Terra Rossa

Like many great success stories, the Wynns Coonawarra story had humble beginnings. David Wynn bought the run-down winery and vineyards for £22,000 from Chateau Comaum in 1951, and his father Sam thought he’d paid far too much for it. The run-down winery had no electricity and no living quarters. The only township in the area was Penola, the place where Mary McKillop was later said to have performed miracles.

Coonawarra is a long way from Adelaide or Melbourne. The attraction of the far-flung vignoble is the terra rossa soil sitting on a limestone base, a classy combination that makes winemakers’ pulses beat faster. In 1950 only the Redmans were making wine here and selling it to Woodleys in Adelaide, who bottled the fine claret style reds for their discerning clients.

coonawarra, terra rossa soil profile

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When our government sells us out

The egg wars have been raging across this land for decades, like the 30-year war that devastated Europe in the middle ages. These last few years we had a voluntary standard, recommended by the CSIRO: a maximum of 1500 chooks per hectare. The big producers never conformed to this standard, and consumer organisations continued to pressure the government for new legislation.

Late in 2016, the federal government acted at last. What did Minister for Consumer Affairs Michael McCormack do? He didn’t introduce a new standard that defined what constitutes ‘free range’; instead he introduced a ‘National Information Standard.’ What wonderful weasel words. Yes, but are they free range weasels or caged weasels?

The new ‘standard’ increased the upper limit to 10,000 birds per hectare. Hard to believe, I know. Harder to believe is that there’s no mandate in the standard for hens to actually spend time outdoors. It merely recommends that ‘hens have meaningful and regular access to an outdoor range.’ More weasel words. The result? Mass producers are free to stick the free range label on eggs laid by hens squashed into those massive cages, just as they did before.

Egg on their Faces
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This NSW distributor holds a trade tasting twice a year, and they’re always worth attending. They hire a room at the Oaks Hotel in Neutral Bay, and run a second day in town at the Arthouse Hotel.

This time I focused on some of the labels I haven’t checked for a while. Printhie is one of these. The next generation has taken over, the vines are twenty years old, so there’s a new wind blowing on Mount Canobolas.

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I pride myself on getting it right, so I review fewer wines but give them more time – several days usually. I don’t always get it right, of course, no wine reviewer does. There are the vagaries of bottle variation, and how the wine showed on the day as Peter Bourne said to me once when I queried how the Grosset Rieslings didn’t make the 90 point cut in a GTW tasting.

So it goes. A subscriber complained that the 1960 Taltarni Old Vine Block 27 Pyrenees Cabernet Sauvignon 2010 I raved about and gave 96 points to was oxidised / cooked and showed dried porty / stewed aromas. He bought a 6-pack on my recommendation, and is thinking of returning the remaining bottles.

In my defence I said it was a more traditional style, with a stronger tannin grip than usual, and said I thought I mentioned that in my review. It looks like I didn’t. Mea culpa. I should’ve said: you must’ve got a bad bottle and left it at that. The bottle I had was terrific. I’d welcome more feedback.

Kemenys Hidden Label Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc 2017. I can’t find it now but I think I listed this as a great buy in a recent BBW. Then I got a sample and gave it a bad review (84). I’ve been highly critical of wine show judging, and I should stop paying any attention to trophies and other bling. Mea culpa. Still, it’s hard to ignore a list like this:  

• Trophy, Best Value White, Sydney Royal Wine Show 2017
• Trophy, Best Sauvignon Blanc, Sydney Royal Wine Show 2017
• Trophy, Best Sauvignon Blanc, Royal Hobart Wine Show 2017
• Top Gold, Royal Perth Wine Show 2017
• Gold, Sydney Royal Wine Show 2017
• Gold, Cowra Wine Show 2017
• Gold, Royal Hobart Wine Show 2017

The wine won trophies and golds in 4 different shows across the country, not one or two. That kind of consistency is rare; in addition I know the maker – Miles from Nowhere – so I took a punt at that ridiculous price. Then I checked a sample over the usual 2-3 days, and soon found the wine falling apart. Therefore my bad score.

The same subscriber said my score for the Dan M’s Langhorne Creek Cabernet  Shiraz cleanskin had come down several points. What happened here is that another subscriber had written in and said my score was too generous, so I bought another bottle at Dan M’s, agreed with him and marked the wine down.

Many of you have written and said that my calls are almost always right, and I think that’s as good as it can get in this business. I do get it wrong sometimes, and other times it’s simply a matter of different tastes. That’s why I make no bones about my lack of enthusiasm for blockbuster reds, skinny chardies and tropical savvies.

Keep the brickbats coming now, you hear?

Kim

When I came across their fancy Rosé in a survey of Rosés from down under, I had no idea who these two were. So I did some digging and found that Bambi Northwood-Blyth is a model and Dan Single is the designing force behind Ksubi jeans, which tend to sell for close to $200 a pair.

When he was staying in Paris early this year, Dan fell from a third floor balcony of the Hotel d’Amour and broke every bone in his legs between the feet and the spine. Families and friends rushed across to the Paris hospital where Dan was recovering and his bones healing slowly. Details and pictures here.

The next news I found was that Bambi had deleted her Instagram platform, ‘following Dan Single controversy.’ The fashion designer had set up a Go fund me crowdfunding campaign to raise $250,000 to pay for his medical bills and upkeep while he was incapacitated.

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Full Circle

Mount Pleasant was James Halliday’s winery of the year in the 2017 Wine Companion. How it got there is a fascinating story that started with a fellow called Maurice O’Shea who had an Irish father and a French mother. In 1932, McWilliam’s bought a half share of O’Shea’s Mount Pleasant vineyard in the lower Hunter, and the remaining share a decade later.

Maurice O’Shea at work – photo credit: Max Dupain

‘We’ve got this cascade of wonderful wines that we haven’t seen since O’Shea,’ James wrote. ‘If you turn the clock back 60 years, you might recognise some of these wines. He’s [Jim Chatto] really brought back the legacy of O’Shea big time.’

It was in the forties and early fifties that Maurice O’Shea made legendary wines for McWilliam’s. He died in 1956, long before most Australians discovered Hunter wine or table wine in general. The McWilliam family made fortified wines in Griffith, and what prompted them to buy into Hunter table wines at that time is one of life’s great mysteries. A friend in the trade tells me that Don McWilliam leant a helping hand to Murray Tyrrell in the fifties, which played a critical role in getting Tyrrells off the ground.

The Mount Pleasant Legacy

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Trophies you can’t Fathom and Wines you can’t Buy

The first thing you notice when you check the winners in this year’s comp is that they’re mostly from Saltram (Treasury Wine Estates) and a couple from Jacobs Creek (Pernod Ricard). Wine companies don’t come much bigger than these two.

The second thing you notice is that you can’t buy the trophy winning wines, with one exception. Why do they do this? What is the point of running a comp like this to find our best Cabernet Shiraz blends and coming up with wines that aren’t released? It’s only going to frustrate consumers and reviewers like me.

Wines Made to a Formula

I suspect the Saltram winemakers took a leaf out of Wolfie’s book, worked out the style the judges liked and shaped their wines accordingly. I liked the 2012 Shiraz, which you could buy for just $17 at the time. More recent vintages have been less elegant, some reaching 15% alcohol. They introduced the Shiraz Cabernet in 2013 from memory, and the price is a tick over $20. Then came a certified Pepperjack Shiraz Cabernet at a price a tick below $30.

I’m not sure what the wine is certified for, but these are rich and robust reds with plush fruit and creamy oak, obviously designed to please crowds of big red lovers. Wine show judges fall for these styles as well, that hasn’t changed since the days when Wolf Blass won 3 Jimmy Watson trophies in a row.

Jacob’s Creek took out the trophy for Best Wine over $60 and that for Best Cabernet-Dominant Blend, both for its Expedition Barossa Valley Cabernet Shiraz 2015. The wine is not released yet.

Trophies by the Truckload

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