Yearly Archives: 2008

A new force in Canberra winemaking

22 October 2008People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

Capital Wines, the new joint venture between Jennie and Mark Mooney of Grazing restaurant and Andrew and Marion McEwin’s Kyeema Wines, could quickly become a frontrunner among our local wineries.

It has a couple of advantages that new entrants to an industry known for its long lead times seldom enjoy. For one, Capital Wines gains immediate access to the McEwin’s long-established vineyard at Murrumbateman – one of the Canberra District’s most distinguished, albeit under-marketed.

It also has an established winery; established winemaking contracts with other growers; a core of goodwill towards the much-admired (if little known) Kyeema brand; and a dream cellar door site earmarked alongside Grazing in the Royal Hotel, Gundaroo.

Jenny says that high visitor numbers means it makes sense to locate the planned cellar door in Gundaroo and not near the winery or vineyard at Murrumbateman.

The 50:50 joint venture brings the Mooneys back into the industry that brought them to Canberra in the first place, adds Jennie. In the late nineties, after studying viticulture and ‘looking everywhere’ they established Tallagandra Vineyard. But in 2004 they sold it to Lamberts having been ‘distracted by a very busy restaurant’.

With Grazing restaurant now leased to chef Tom Moore, the Mooneys are concentrating on the new business – Mark tending the vines, Jennie heading up marketing. And freed of these chores Andrew McEwin can focus on winemaking.

Capital Wines plans to ‘focus on production of premium Canberra Region wine’. Presumably this means retaining more Kyeema vineyard fruit for its own labels, now being rolled out as the ‘Ministry series’.

The first of these, ‘The Ambassador’ Tempranillo 2007, from the Kyeema vineyard, is due for release at about the time this column is to be published. Others to follow include ‘The Frontbencher’, ‘The Backbencher’ and ‘Mr Speaker’, all bearing generic political caricatures.

These are attractive labels, notwithstanding caveats expressed in last week’s column, and could prove catchy in the nation’s political capital.

Pleasingly for Andrew McEwin, the fruit source gets a nod in the label blurb with ‘made from fruit grown in our renowned Kyeema Vineyard’. On past performance, both of the old Kyeema label and of other wines using fruit from the vineyard, the wines are likely to be very good.

The vineyard dates to the early eighties, barely a decade after Drs Edgar Riek and John Kirk planted Canberra’s first vines. Over a couple of seasons, Ron McKenzie established a number of grape varieties on his property, Mamre, at Murrumbateman.

From 1987 Andrew McEwin bought McKenzie’s fruit for his Kyeema label before buying the vineyard in1999, subsequently renaming it. The shiraz, planted in 1982 and known as the ‘Penfolds’ clone was always the star. It earned gold medals for the Kyeema label and was highly prized by Hardy’s during their time in Canberra. More recently it was the source of fruit for Alex McKay’s brilliant Collector Reserve Shiraz 2006.

In recent years McEwin revamped the vineyard, extending shiraz plantings from cuttings off the original vines, replacing cabernet with shiraz, adding tempranillo and retrellising it entirely. What was ‘grow and sprawl’, said Andrew in an interview last year, is now the more controlled, and quality orientated, vertical shoot positioning system’.

Now, at last, the vineyard may have a marketing focus to match the quality of its fruit and wines.

The power of suggestion

22 October 2008BeerChris Shanahan

Having convinced drinkers that wine is best appreciated from fishbowl-sized glasses, another arm of Riedel – Spiegelau– has the beer-drinker’s psyche in its sights.

The press release arrived just before father’s day, accompanied by three very fine, elegant blown glasses – ‘the pilsner’, ‘the lager’ and ‘the wheat beer’. They’re beautiful glasses and certainly add to the sense of occasion when enjoying fine beers.

The wheat beer design, in particular, appeals because its bulbous top accommodates the abundant foam found in the best wheat beers, especially the bottle-conditioned versions, or hefeweizens.

Of course, the power of suggestion deeply affects how we taste and enjoy food, wine and beer – physically as well as psychologically. And the glass spruikers, being acutely aware of this, can lead rooms full of people to a blind faith in one-litre glasses – or a belief that every beverage demands its own perfect vessel.

Branded, distinctively shaped beer glasses have been part of Europe’s bar scene for decades. They’re catching on here with the growth of the premium beer market and certainly add to our pleasure. But part of the Spiegelau message is hard to swallow. Glasses that guide each beer style precisely to the right part of our palates – yeah, right!

Wine review — De Bortoli Windy Peak & Thomas

19 October 2008WineChris Shanahan

De Bortoli Windy Peak whites $12–15
Pinot Grigio 2008 and Sauvignon Blanc Semillon 2008
Yarra-based winemaker Steve Webber, new chair of the Melbourne wine show, seems to be on a mission with the Windy Peak range. It’s a trickle-down effect from the new depth we’ve seen recently in De Bortoli’s more expensive Yarra Valley range. The pinot grigio’s out of whack with contemporary Australian white styles. There’s a quirky, tart edge to it, in a pleasant Italian sort of way. There’s some of the same quirky, tart character in the sauvignon blanc semillon, too. But the fruit’s more aromatic and combines tropical sauvignon blanc with grassy semillon. Both wines have good mid-palate texture.

De Bortoli Windy Peak reds $12–15
Pinot Noir 2008 and Sangiovese 2006
Steve Webber and his team have really nailed Yarra pinot in recent years, partly through fermenting uncrushed berries – the fermentation taking place inside the berries, capturing fragrant, pure fruit flavours without hard tannins. Despite its youth Windy Peak – sourced from Yarra, Beechworth, Port Phillip, Mornington and Canberra – captures much of the variety’s magic flavour and silky texture. It’s phenomenally good at this price. The King Valley-sourced Sangiovese is even more of a triumph. It captures bright fruit flavour as well as the earthy, deeply savoury flavours of the variety as well as its dust-dry tannins.

Thomas Hunter Valley whites
‘Braemore’ Semillon 2008 $25 and ‘Six Degrees’ Semillon 2008 $20
Winemaker Andrew Thomas rates the 2008 vintage as ‘disastrous for reds’ but the semillons as ‘nothing short of exceptional’. Who can argue about the whites? The ‘Braemore’ (from the Braemore Vineyard, owned by Ken Bray) is as pure a semillon as I can recall. It’s very fine, very delicate and at just 10 per cent alcohol delivers one of the gentlest imaginable drinking experiences. It’s in the taut, dry, understated style that cellars forever. ‘Six Degrees’ weighs in at an even lower alcohol – eight per cent. It’s zesty, fine-boned and varietal, but it offsets the zesty acid with a lovely burst of sweetness.

New Canberra label reminscent of Ralph Steadman

15 October 2008WineChris Shanahan

Readers familiar with the work of Ralph Steadman might easily mistake the label cartoon on ‘The Ambassador’ Tempranillo 2007 (a new Canberra label) for an original from this great artist. I did, and was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t.

One glance at the quirky, stout, dinner-suited, moustachioed, florid-faced, red-wine toting ambassador stirred memories of Steadman’s extraordinary wine pictures – the endless stream in British retailer Oddbin’s catalogues; and the sheer brilliance in one of the best wine books ever, in my view, ‘The grapes of Ralph: Wine according to Ralph Steadman’.

It was published by Random House, London, in 1992 and is still available. Amazon offers used copies from $US12.95 and new ones at $US117.29.

Buy it and hang onto your sides. You could split laughing. Open a second bottle and it gets even better. Throughout the book words and pictures mingle in a flow of fact and fantasy at times difficult to separate.
Steadman approaches wine as a drinker:

“ I tried desperately to savour the first tasted on my tongue, but thirst got the better of me and I gulped a mouthful which burst inside me like a warm sensuous bomb. I followed it with a piece of black bread and thought only of France and the sheer joy of booze at the right moment.”

But he’s not just any boozer as we see from this colourful tasting note on Wynns John Riddoch Cabernet 1982 tasted on its home turf, Coonawarra:

“A massive body – it swells to gargantuan proportions – the primal savage emerges – thunder in the brain. Time opens its doors and you come face to face with immortality.”

In 223 pages, Steadman dazzles us with impressions of Bulgaria, France, Germany, Portugal, Lanzarote, Italy, Australia, California, Peru, and Chile, dropping in four amusing interludes on various aspects of wine en route.

I counted 264 illustrations, ranging from tiny line sketches to double-page full-colour landscapes. These embrace wine, vines, grapes, wine tastings, mythology, wineries and buildings, landscapes, and wonderful character portraits.

Colour sketches breath life into leading Italian wine makers robed in medieval, renaissance, and papal costumes (eg: a Florentine Angelo Gaja, “the Lorenzo de Medici of Italian wines”). And there’s brilliance in sketches of wine paraphernalia, circa 1490, by ‘Leonardo da Steadman’ (I think that’s what it says. It’s written backwards).

Steadman portrays national identities without creating mere stereotypes. And the landscapes radiate almost as much warmth as the people.

His twenty-eight page Australian section sketches an exotic landscape that seems to have fired his imagination.

The opening double-page painting shows a vast blue-grey, red-streaked landscape with Ularu and the Olgas thrusting through. Six pages dominated by Aboriginal themes follow, one with the caption: Homage to Australian Wine inspired by Aboriginal art – the only true culture to emerge from the Australian continent in the last 40,000 years.

We also glimpse animated wine bottles: one in Ned Kelly helmet a-la Sydney Nolan, dancing on a vast plain; two portrayed as ‘Kangarouge at Play’; and vignettes of imaginary wine figures, including ‘Barossa Pearl’. She ran a soup kitchen while her preacher husband travelled the outback warning against the evils of abstinence.

It’s a profound book, as engaging now as it was on its release in 1992. Mere prose can never capture its wealth of ideas.

Beer review — Mildura Brewery

15 October 2008Beer reviewChris Shanahan

Mildura Brewery Mallee Bull Heavy 330ml $3.95
Strong as a Mallee bull, certainly, but alas, not as fit. Too much sitting around on retail shelves fattens a beer up, taking the fresh, aggressive edge off the hops. That caveat aside, this is a robust, smooth, strong ale with appealing toffee-like malt flavour. Oh, for a fresh bottle.

Mildura Brewery Storm Cloudy Ale 330ml $3.95
Like the Mallee Bull above, Storm suffers a little from age. The malt, fruit and hops flavour are complex and enjoyable. But how much more enjoyable it’d be if the Amarillo hops could be in full, citrusy, pungent flight. Almost but not quite. See www.mildurabrewery.com.au

A chat with brewer Bill Taylor on Lion’s natural beer promise

15 October 2008BeerChris Shanahan

Lion Nathan’s chief brewer, Bill Taylor, says that his company’s ‘natural beer promise’ campaign began as a technical project by his brewing team.

The campaign, launched two weeks ago, promises to remove some additives and to use only five natural ingredients in the company’s key beer brands.

Taylor says that Tooheys New, Tooheys Old, XXXX Gold, XXXX Bitter, Swan Draught and West End Draught meet the new standards.

He says that improved technology, principally an improved ability to suck air from bottles and better use of carbon dioxide, meant the elimination of sulphur dioxide as an additive. It had previously been used at very low levels (around 10 parts per million) to mop up oxygen dissolved in the beer.

Other additives that have been eliminated include colouring agents such as caramel, brewing enzymes and tetra hops.

Taylor added that enzymes would still be used in low-carbohydrate beers – added at the mashing stage to aid extraction of fermentable carbohydrates from grain. And chemically modified hop extracts (tetra hops) that protect beer from ‘light strike’ will still be used in beers packaged in clear glass.

He said that the level of naturalness would ultimately appear on Lion’s beer packages.

Wine review — Grant Burge, Pirramimma & Brands

12 October 2008Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Grant Burge Moscato 2008 $16–18
Grant Burge Barossa Valley Filsell Vineyard Shiraz 2006 $30–35
Formally it’s muscat-blanc-a-petite-grains, but in the Barossa they call it white frontignac, or fronti. In Italy it’s moscato, a name increasingly adopted by Aussie winemakers as they emulate the light, zesty, grapey, sweet, ‘frizzante’ style made in Asti, Piedmont. Grant Burge’s stunning new package captures the light, fresh, grapey mood of the wine – an appealing drop that threatens to bring sweetness back into fashion. It contains just 8.5 per cent alcohol. Burge’s red is the more familiar face of the Barossa – a powerful, deeply layered shiraz sourced from the ninety-year-old vines of the Filsell vineyard, located near Williamstown, in the valley’s south.

Pirramimma McLaren Vale Stock’s Hill Shiraz 2005 and Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 $13–15
Johnston’s Pirramimma, one of the great old names of McLaren Vale, has significant vineyard holdings. This and its long experience enable it to stomp all over the big companies’ turf with these wonderful, satisfying mid-priced Stock’s Hill wines. They’re not Vale heavyweights for the cellar– although Pirramimma makes those as well – but tasty, regional reds tailored for early drinking. The shiraz is fragrant, fruity, soft and medium bodied with an attractive touch of supporting oak; and the cabernet’s firmer and more assertive. Both are from the excellent 2005 vintage and have the extra complexity of a few years’ bottle age.

Brands Coonawarra Blockers Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 $22–25
Brands Stentiford’s Block Coonawarra Shiraz 2003 $70–76
It looks like there’s a lighter hand at work in the McWilliams-owned Brand’s winery. Coonawarra’s fine fruit and elegant structure shines through in these lovely wines, without the distractions of excess tannin or oak. The latter, in particular, blemished some past vintages of the potentially sublime Stentiford’s – made from a small stand of northern Coonawarra vines planted in 1896. The Brand family first released an individual wine from this plot in the 1980s. The practice continues under McWilliams’ ownership and in the 2003 we see the wine’s unique intensity and elegance. The cabernet doesn’t scale the same heights but gives the Coonawarra experience at a fair price.

Whatever happened to cabernet?

8 October 2008WineChris Shanahan

Whatever happened to cabernet, former king of the reds? By volume it’s running a distant second to shiraz. And in the publicity stakes it struggles to a poor third behind tiny-volume pinot noir.

Yet, when Australia’s modern table wine boom began forty years ago, cabernet sauvignon was revered as one of the four ‘noble’ grape varieties, along with riesling, chardonnay and pinot noir.

In this era our ubiquitous workhorse, shiraz, rated as an also ran, despite the standing of Penfolds Grange Hermitage – a shiraz – as our greatest red wine.

Those early boutique wineries, inspired by the originals from Bordeaux, tended to focus on cabernet. And the wine buzz through the late seventies and eighties was on the likes of Bill Pannell’s Moss Wood and Kevin Cullen’s Margaret River cabernets, along with the top wines of Bordeaux and, for a time, leading examples from California.

Shiraz was always there in our vineyards, especially in the warmer regions, but it didn’t attract the same respect as cabernet until the late eighties and early nineties. At about this time Grange creator Max Schubert, received UK-based Decanter magazine’s winemaker of the year award; a band of Barossa makers, dubbed the ‘Rhone rangers’, asserted the beauty of their traditional varieties, led by shiraz; and the world had begun to take fresh stock of superb shirazes from Cote-Rotie in France’s northern Rhone Valley.

It was also at this time that Canberra’s Clonakilla made its first straight shiraz, having blended it with cabernet for almost twenty years. Even that was partly an accident – a fortunate one that highlighted the variety’s quality and suitability to Canberra’s climate.

As shiraz gained respect globally, Australia took ownership of the variety, principally because it suited our growing conditions, we had lots of it and we had over a century of experience making it. Cabernet slipped to the backburner. But cabernet didn’t, and won’t, disappear.

The gap between the two varieties really opened up during the planting boom of the nineties. In 1995 we harvested 62,080 tonnes of cabernet sauvignon and 77,080 of shiraz. This year, with the full impact of the plantings, we picked 253,852 tonnes of cabernet and 435,850 tonnes of shiraz.

If cabernet’s not doomed, I do believe that in Australia it’s destined to fall further behind shiraz and may even lose some ground to pinot noir (our pinot harvest grew from 13,600 tonnes in 1995 to 47,104 tonnes in 2008).

This is because the average quality of our shirazes seems to be greater than the average quality of our cabernets. Where shiraz seems to be adapted to a wide range of conditions, cabernet is fussier. Too often cabernet is a little green, a little astringent and lacking in mid-palate flesh. Shiraz, on the other hand, tends to be soft, juicy and easy to love.

With a tendency for people now to enjoy a glass or two of wine on its own, the growing preference for shiraz is understandable – and good for Australia’s vignerons given our propensity to grow it.

Over time this will probably see cabernet retreat to the areas (like Margaret River and Coonawarra) that do it best. As well, we’ll probably see more of it blended with shiraz – a proven combination in which shiraz fills the flavour hole and cabernet shores up the structure.

People don’t know what beer’s made of

8 October 2008BeerChris Shanahan

Alas, this column’s deadline can’t accommodate the full breaking story. But by the time you read this, Australia’s second largest brewer, Lion Nathan, will have launched a ‘natural beer promise’ campaign.

The brewer’s embargoed press release claims that nine out of ten Aussies don’t know the ingredients used in making beer – a figure based on a September 2008 national survey of 1004 respondents aged 18 years or over.

The campaign, to be led by Lion’s brewing boss, Bill Taylor, promises to dispel the myths about popular, large-volume beers and to promote a new ‘natural beer promise’.

Bill says, ‘we’ve simply taken out some additives, improved the way we do things, and gone back to the basics of brewing with only five natural ingredients’. The ingredients are grain (malted or not), cane sugar, water, yeast and hops.

It’s sort of a sweetened version of Germany’s sixteenth century Rheinheitsgebot, or beer purity law, that allows grain, water and hops (yeast hadn’t been discovered at the time) but not sugar.

Lion claims its popular Tooheys New, Tooheys Old, XXXX Gold, XXXX Bitter, Swan Draught and West End Draught meet the new standards.

Visit this column next week for details of the changes. What are those additives that’ve been taken out?

Beer review — Red Angus

8 October 2008Beer reviewChris Shanahan

Red Angus Pilsner 345ml $4.50
Griffith-based winemaker, De Bortoli, launched Red Angus Pilsener last December. It’s a fresh and lively European-style lager built for pleasurable, easy drinking rather than making a big statement. It leads with aromatic hops that add complexity, and then a lingering, refreshing bitterness to its generous, malty palate.

New Norcia Abbey Ale 330ml $6.95
This was originally brewed by Chuck Hahn and cellared under the Benedictine monastery at New Norcia, Western Australia. It’s in the strong (7 per cent alcohol) mould of Belgian Abbey Ales. It’s fruity and hoppy in smell and taste with a little burst of alcohol and then a distinctly hoppy, bitter finish.