The coming acquisition of Foster’s by London-based SAB Miller, two years after Japan’s Kirin acquired Lion Nathan, will put the vast majority of Australia’s brewing capacity in foreign hands.
In the short term this should mean little noticeable change for Australian drinkers. But it does open the way for SAB Miller to expand distribution of its international brands in Australia and to brew larger volumes of them in Australia.
The Foster’s deal will also trigger SAB Miller’s purchase of Coca Cola Amatil’s stake in their jointly owned Pacific Beverages – including the 50-million-litre capacity Bluetongue Brewery at Warnervale, New South Wales. Coca Cola Amatil, in turn, will have the right to buy all or some of Foster’s spirits and RTD brands.
The change will leave Adelaide’s Coopers, with just a few percent market share, as the largest Australian-owned brewer.
Taltarni Shiraz 2008 $30–$39 Heathcote, Victoria We put this in an office tasting alongside several far more expensive reds, and for me it was the wine to come back to for a couple of glasses – each one as interesting as the first sip. Heathcote reds can be a bit heavy, alcoholic and over the top. But Taltarni, to me, captures the area’s best features – especially, the deep, spicy savouriness behind the sweet, ripe fruit flavour. A touch of mourvedre in the blend probably accounts for some of the spicy, savoury character and fine, persistent tannins.
Yalumba Christobel’s Classic Dry White 2011 $9.49–$16 Barossa Zone, South Australia The new Christobel’s is a revamped version of wine introduced by Yalumba’s Robert Hill Smith in the 1980s. Behind the vibrant floral label lies a tingly fresh dry white based on the Barossa’s workhorse, semillon. Semillon gives the wine its lemony aroma and flavour; sauvignon blancs adds pungency, zest and a pleasing tropical-fruit note; and savagnin contributes weight and texture. At a modest 11.5 per cent alcohol it’s a terrific all-purpose refresher and food wine.
Shaw and Smith Sauvignon Blanc 2011 $21–$27 Adelaide Hills, South Australia Ahh, such honesty in winemaker Martin Shaw’s press release, “With the exception of sauvignon blanc our vintage 2011 was a shocker by any standards”, he writes. The cold, wet season completely wiped out his shiraz and 90 per cent of his chardonnay – big losses for a small maker to bear. The cold conditions might have delivered one of those capsicum-like sauvignons, in the Marlborough mould. But the 2011 retains the brand’s tropical-fruit character, albeit more subdued than usual. The racy, fresh, bone-dry palate also introduces a pleasing herbal note.
Ballabourneen Gamay Noir 2011 $25 Pokolbin, Hunter Valley, New South Wales The late, fruity, bubbly, ebullient Len Evans planted gamay – the Beaujolais region’s equally fruity, ebullient red variety – on his family vineyard at Pokolbin. After Len’s death, Ballabourneen’s Daniel Binet leased the vineyard and now makes a wonderfully, juicy, fruity, succulent red from the gamay grapes. It’s a fruit festival in a bottle, but has sufficient tannin and savouriness to be a real red and great company with food. Serve lightly chilled. Drink a toast to Len.
Best’s Riesling 2011 $20–$25 Rhymney Vineyard, Great Western, Victoria Surprising for such a young riesling from a cold vintage, Best’s 2011 riesling delivers buckets of upfront floral and citrus fruit aroma and flavour. Although the wine clearly has minerality and fairly high acidity, it’s offset by deep, juicy, sweet fruit flavour and rich, smooth texture. This delicious interplay between high acidity, sweet fruit flavour and rich texture is perhaps what winemaker Adam Wadewitz had in mind when describing it as “a wine with great tension”.
Grosset Nobel Riesling 2011 $45 375ml Watervale, Clare Valley, South Australia On the Mosel, German winemakers embrace botrytis cinerea, or noble rot, as part of the humid landscape, an integral force behind their noble sweet rieslings. In the dry Clare Valley the fungus seems more of a curse than an asset as it can wipe out some varieties almost instantly. In the cool, wet 2011 season Jeffrey Grosset surrendered a hectare of riesling to the rot to make his first botrytis riesling since 1999. It’s a beautiful, succulent wine of luscious apricot-like flavours, cut by bracing lime-like acidity, with an ethereal, floating, delicate texture.
Ernie Loosen, Dr Loosen Wines, Bernkastel, 7 September 2011. Photo Jill Shanahan
We always want what we don’t have and value the scarcest things most of all. Australian winemakers value acidity – tasting berries anxiously as an ascendant sun pushes sugar levels ever higher as acid levels decline.
In the Mosel, it’s the opposite. There the winemakers value sugar, something Australia produces in abundance. At 50 degrees north only vines on the steepest south, southeast and southwest slopes, like giant solar panels, collect sufficient heat to ripen grapes fully. Acid levels remain high til the end and Germany’s quality system even grades wine according to the sugar content of the grapes.
English writer, Hugh Johnson, likened the impossibly steep slopes to toast held to the fire – though at this latitude the sun’s oblique autumn angle ensures a very slow roast, ensuring the intense but delicate flavours of the area’s unique riesling.
On the right slopes, proven over two millennia, the grapes do, indeed, achieve full sugar and flavour ripeness and retain high acidity. And because of the high humidity, botrytis cinerea flourishes, dehydrating the berries and further concentrating sugar and acidity.
However, not all of the riesling succumbs to botrytis, widening the options available to winemakers – from fresh, fruity dry wines unaffected by botrytis, through delicate, semi-sweet styles, to profound, sticky wonders made only of rotten, shrivelled berries (beerenauslese and trockenbeerenauslese).
After enjoying his wines at a stall in Bernkastel, we visit Heiko Fass, a small maker based at Neumagen-Dhron. A graduate of Geisenheim wine university, Fass took over the old family business from his father and brothers.
He operates the compact cellar single handed, receiving small batches of hand-harvested grapes – picked by the same Polish family that’ve worked for his family for 50 years.
Everything in the steep vineyards is done by hand, he says, meaning Mosel can only ever be about quality, not quantity.
In the cellar we see similarities with mainstream Australian riesling making, but also some notable differences. Like leading Australian makers, Fass transports small batches of grapes quickly to the cellar, separates the juice into free-run and pressings components, settles the juice and ferments it at controlled temperatures in stainless steel tanks, keeping the various components separate until final blending.
A crucial difference, however, is maturing batches of the higher quality rieslings in “fuder”, old oak barrels of about 1,000-litre capacity, used widely in Mosel. Fass also uses a couple of larger 1,800-litre and 2,000-litre oak vessels. He says his father made some of the fuder, including a couple bearing 1965 and 1969 date stamps.
These old vessels allow micro-oxidation, mellowing the wine, muting some of the aromatics and adding texture, without injecting woody flavours.
Upstairs in the living room, overlooking the Mosel, we taste a range of Fass dry, semi-sweet and sweet rieslings from the Hofberger and Roterd vineyards, near Dhron (hence “Dhroner Hofberger” or Dhroner Roterd” on the labels).
What makes riesling sweet or dry? In short, the winemaker – if she wants dry, she ferments all the sugar; if she wants semi-sweet or sweet, she refrigerates the wine, the yeasts quit fermenting and she then filters the yeasts out, just to be sure. So, the sweeter the wine, the lower the alcohol; the drier the wine, the higher the alcohol – all relative, of course, to the amount of sugar in the juice originally.
In the case of the Fass rieslings, the driest wine at an undetectable 3.5 grams of sugar per litre, contained 12.5 per cent alcohol; the half-dry version had 16.8 grams and 11.5 per cent of sugar and alcohol respectively; and the kabinett, spaetlese and auslese at 7–8 per cent alcohol, contained between 48 and 220 grams per litre of sugar.
But because of the high acidity, the 48 grams-of-sugar kabinett remained delicate, clean and refreshing – definitely a three-glass wine; and the truly sticky sweet auslese, though luscious, remained light, buoyant and completely not cloying.
After the tasting we stop in Piesport to see the remains of an old Roman winery – a reminder of the area’s extraordinary winemaking history
If you’re visiting the Mosel, Heiko will gladly show you the cellar and wines by appointment. The visitor centre in Bernkastel has contact details for all Mosel producers.
A short walk out of Bernkastel, we join half a dozen young members of the Oxford University Wine Club for a “tasting and light supper afterwards” at Dr Loosen – one of the Mosel’s most visible, best and outspoken producers. Our host is owner, Ernst (Ernie) Loosen.
Loosen starts with a map of the middle Mosel’s vineyards, compiled in 1868 by the Prussian tax authorities. He says it still holds and became his basis for defining vineyard quality ever since he took over the family business from his father in 1988.
Loosen produces about 40 Mosel wines and takes us through a representative dozen. As we progress he explains, with exasperation, Germany’s confusing wine labelling laws, commenting, “We Germans really hate our customers. We want to make it as difficult as possible”.
Rather than a confusing matrix of regulations for Germany’s different regions, Loosen favours a system that ranks vineyards by their quality, then allows winemakers to choose how they make the wine and whether it’s sweet or dry or in between.
Loosen owns parts of some of the Mosel’s greatest vineyards, including Sonnenuhr, opposite the village of Wehlen; Wurzgarten, just downstream of Urzig; Pralat and Treppchen, opposite the village of Erden; and Lay, adjacent to Bernkastel.
We start with the two dry rieslings, relative newcomers to the portfolio and labelled simply Blue Slate and Red Slate, reflecting the different soils of the vineyards they come from.
But the delicate, sweeter, low alcohol wines from the great vineyards take centre stage. In the warm, sunny sitting room, we linger longer than we ought on the magnificent Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spaetlese 2010. Then with increasing pleasure we move through the sweeties, culminating in the profound Erdener Pralat Riesling Auslese Goldkapsel 2010 and Bernkastler Lay Riesling Eiswein 2008.
The tasting over, Loosen kicks off the “light supper” with a fresh, taut, bone-dry and delicate sparkling wine, based on a 1990 riesling auslese from the nearby Himmelreich vineyard at Graach.
The tasting finished at around six and we leave the light supper, Loosen and the Oxford mob at around two in the morning. By now we’ve sleuthed our collective our way through 18 mature mystery wines from Switzerland, the USA, South Africa, France, Germany and Australia ¬– the latter represented by the still excellent Coldstream Hills Reserve Yarra Valley Pinot Noir 1992.
The German wines came at the very end, with Loosen’s comment, “Now we will drink ourselves sober on Mosel”. The first, a still lively but mature Erdener Treppchen Riesling Spaetlese 1969, made by his grandfather, could’ve been 20-30 year old we thought, not 42. And the second, introduced as “a refresher”, had been put aside and never sold because of its searing acidity at the time. This was, indeed, a vibrant refresher. We guessed its age as three or four years. In fact, it was an Erdener Treppchen Riesling Spaetlese 1983.
While this demonstrates the staying power of Mosel in a good cellar, the main game for visitors to the region and shoppers in Australia will remain recent vintages. Current selections in Australia go back to 2004, and there are still some of the excellent 2007s around if you look hard.
MOSELIMPORTERS
This is not a comprehensive list but should, however, lead you to some terrific Mosel rieslings.
Dr Loosen – www.drloosen.de
Imported by Cellarhand, Melbourne (www.cellarhand.com.au). Woolworths, through Dan Murphy, has an exclusive on Dr Loosen Blue Slate Riesling Trocken (dry). We tried and liked the 2010 vintage at Loosen’s cellars, Bernkastel.
Weingut Staffelter Hof
Imported by Canberra’s Lester and Adrienne Jesberg on indent. Winemaker Jan Klein (“one of a young brigade achieving great things”, writes Jesberg) sources fruit from the Letterlay and Steffensberg vineyard. Join the mailing list to hear of future indents by writing to Adrienne at adrjes@bigpond.net.au
Fritz Haag, A. J. Adam, Reinhold Haart, Knebel, Schloss Lieser, Willi Schaefer and Schmitges
Imported by Eurocentric Wines, Sydney (www.eurocentricwine.com.au). The website links to the producer sites.
J. J. Prum
Imported by Bibendum Wine Company, Melbourne (www.bibendum.com.au).
Reichsgraf von Kesselstatt
Imported by Domaine Wine Shippers, Melbourne (www.domainewineshippers.com.au).
Egon Muller
Imported by Negociants Australia (www.necociantsaustralia.com)
James Squire One Fifty Lashes Pale Ale 345ml 6-pack $16 Lion Nathan-owned James Squire released this new barley and wheat malt ale last month. A spicy, hop-led aroma, with a subtle fruit note, precedes a stunningly fresh, medium weight palate with a spicy, hoppy moderately bitter finish. It’s an easy-drinking refresher at a modest 4.2 per cent alcohol.
Handpicked Eduardo Jordan Selection Maipo Valley Carmenere 2008 Until a French vine expert identified it in 1994, Chile’s vignerons remained unaware that many of their vines, misnamed as merlot since the mid 19th century, were in fact carmenere – a variety that disappeared from Bordeaux after the phylloxera infestation. Chile now has a near monopoly on the variety. This medium bodied version combines ripe, red fruit flavours with a tangy touch of capsicum and slightly raw, though not hard, tannins. ‘Handpicked’ offers a range of wines from different winemakers, in this instance Chile’s Eduardo Jordan. The wines are available through selected independent retailers.
Clonakilla Canberra District Viognier 2010 $45 Canberra’s regional wine show becomes a powerful marketing tool for local vignerons when it’s supported by our best makers and best wines. For example, when a wine of this calibre tops its class then wins the trophy for best “other” white variety, there can be no doubting Canberra’s potential to make sublime viognier. The wine’s success puts a halo over the whole district. And what a refined, elegant, classy viognier it is. It has the classic apricot and ginger flavours of the variety, but the silky, fine, rich texture stops short of oiliness. See www.clonakilla.com.au
Yalumba Galway Vintage Barossa Shiraz 2010 $10.42–$16 This is a new incarnation of Yalumba’s ever-popular Galway Shiraz, originally Galway Claret, dating from the 1940s. It’s a long way from the bigger, firmer style admired by Bob Menzies, but retains its delicious Barossa character. It now comes in lightweight glass bottle, and focuses on the ripe, primary, fruity fragrance of Barossa shiraz – generous, round, fleshy, soft and unburdened by too much oak (just three months in older barrels). The recommended price is around $16 but retailer discounting sometimes pushes it under $11 – then it’s a bargain.
Cumulus Wines Climbing Pinot Gris 2011 $18–$22 Orange, New South Wales The difficult, wet and cool 2011 vintage caused much devastation in vineyards across Australia. However, some white varieties, including pinot gris, seem to have benefited from the cool conditions – for example, in the recent local wine show, Mount Majura Vineyard won a gold medal for its 2011. And over in even cooler Orange, Cumulus wines harvested this scrumptious, bronze-tinted drop. Winemaker Debbie Lauritz really captures the character of this often-lacklustre variety – fresh and intense, with pear-like flavour and rich, slightly viscous texture.
Dopf au Moulin Riesling 2010 $13.29–$16 Alsace, France Dopf, based in the beautiful old village of Riquewihr on the Rhine River, makes a notably fuller, more viscous style of riesling than in its counterparts further north on the German stretches of the Rhine or its tributary, the Mosel. This slightly sweet riesling, imported by Woolworths (available at its Dan Murphy’s or BWS outlets), appeals for its gentle sweetness, smooth texture and unique flavour – recognisably riesling but interestingly different than Australian versions. It’s a good aperitif and also works with spicy food.
Voyager Estate Girt By Sea Cabernet Merlot 2009 $19–$24 Margaret River, Western Australia As several of Margaret River’s top cabernet blends now push to $100 or so, Girt by Sea delivers an affordable and delightful, drink-now expression of the region’s great red specialty. Blended principally from cabernet and merlot (with a splash each of shiraz and malbec), it’s a rich but elegant, fine-boned red, based on just-ripe, mulberry-like varietal flavour, with an attractive overly of cedar and tobacco-like character that seems to come partly from the oak and partly from the varietal blend.
Coolangatta Estate Tempranillo 2009 $35 Shoalhaven Coast, New South Wales In the Canberra Regional Show 2011, this wine top scored in its class, winning a gold medal and proceeding to the “other red varieties” trophy taste-off. The Canberra gong added to the gold medal and four trophies won in the 2010 Kiama Regional Wine Show. Like Coolangatta’s wonderful semillons, the tempranillo is estate grown but made in the Hunter Valley by Tyrrell’s – clearly a successful arrangement. This is a fresh, vibrant and medium-bodied tempranillo, seamlessly combining sweet and savoury fruit with soft, persistent tannins.
Ingram Road Chardonnay 2010 $18–$20 Helen’s Hill Vineyard, Coldstream, Yarra Valley, Victoria Ingram Road is the second label of Helen’s Hill Estate. Like the premium wine, it’s estate grown. Winemaker Scott McCarthy says it’s wild yeast fermented in a mix of new (10 per cent) and older French oak barrels, undergoes a partial, spontaneous, malo-lactic fermentation and matures in barrel for about 10 months. Those winemaking inputs simply add spice and texture to a stunningly fresh, vibrant chardonnay based on delicious, citrus and white-peach varietal flavours.
Barwang Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 $13.90–$19.99 Hilltops region, New South Wales Peter Robertson founded Barwang, the first vineyard near Young, in 1969 but sold the vineyards to McWilliams in 1989. McWilliams extended the plantings and over the years took the Barwang and Hilltops name to drinkers across the country. It’s an important brand for the region because of its reach. If the Hilltops winemaking high ground has been taken over by small makers like Clonakilla and Eden Road, Barwang continues to make excellent wines at fair prices. Their 2009 cabernet is impressive for a red under $20 ¬– packing in absolutely lovely, mulberry-like varietal flavour and retaining cabernet’s distinctive, firm structure.
Middle Mosel with Kues to the left, Bernkastel on the right. Photo: Copyright Jill Shanahan, August 2011
We’re a die-hard lot us riesling lovers, clinging to a great variety that appeals to few. We talk it up. We pore over the results of Canberra’s annual International Riesling Challenge. We admire Frankland Estate’s International Riesling Tasting. Then Coles liquor executive, Grant Ramage, reveals the sorry truth, “Riesling’s just not going anywhere. Nielsen data says sales are down nine per cent year-on-year to the end of August”.
In more gloomy riesling reality, the press release accompanying today’s wine of the week crows, “Sales of pinot gris/grigio have now overtaken riesling in this country”. Depressing news about a variety that more often than not produces ordinary wine.
We’re fishing for good riesling news, high on the variety after eight days in the central Mosel, Germany’s riesling heartland – source of the world’s most delicate, most profound rieslings.
We’ve carried these aromas and flavours in our head for over thirty years – memories born in the late seventies from tasting wines from the great 1976 vintage. What unforgettable wines they were, even if we knew little of the regions or names at the times.
The wines did the talking – gently fragrant kabinett and spaetlese rieslings, poised softly, ethereally on the palate, delivering intense flavours and a unique, perfect, thrilling balance between sweetness and dazzling, fresh acidity. Even the profound, sweet ausleses, beerenausleses and trockenbeerenausleses sat delicately on the palate, never cloying, never too sweet, but filling the room with their fragrance.
You can’t forget wines like that, and we didn’t. Though the selection included wines from the Rhine River, a few Mosel wines in particular etched their peculiar names in our minds – Bernkasteler Doctor, Wehlener Sonnenuhr and Graacher Himmelreich.
We were new in the trade at the time, but studied the vineyard maps, gained a basic understanding, and over the decades, enjoyed other vintages without ever losing the thrill of first discovery. These were great and unique wines.
But even then, long before the chardonnay or sauvignon blanc ages, selling German riesling in Australia proved difficult. It took years for Farmer Bros to move the 400 cases of 1976 it’d imported. David and Richard Farmer and staff probably drank more than they sold (I’m still grateful).
And nothing’s changed, says Grant Ramage, quoting the Nielsen year-to-August figures again. Sales of all German wines increased by 2.5 per cent in value but declined in volume, accounting for just one thousandth of wine sales in Australia.
Even in Germany, it’s not easy to find these home grown glories. In east and west Germany, in the weeks before arriving in the Mosel, we search supermarket shelves in vain. We find long lines of bland wines, German and imported, mostly priced between two and four euros.
At a tasting with renowned Mosel producer Dr Loosen, a German-based, English wine distributor confirms what we’ve feared. He tells us, “The Germans have no appreciation of what they’ve got. That’s why Ernie [Loosen] exports 70 per cent of his wine to America”.
But if sales of German riesling disperse in little wisps to admirers around the world, here in the central Mosel, up and downstream of Bernkastel, riesling rules, accounting for 60 per cent of the area’s 9,000 hectares of vines.
We didn’t come here for the other 40 per cent. However, because we’re there and we can, we taste a few examples of muller-thurgau (rivaner), elbling, pinot noir (spatburgunder), dornfelder and pinot blanc. But they’re not wines you’d travel 20,000 kilometres to taste.
We didn’t come to try the increasingly popular dry (trocken) rieslings either. But we do and conclude that the classic, delicate, semi-sweet versions – with their unique balance of acidity and sugar – remain the region’s great specialty.
Our visit coincides with the middle Mosel wine festival, so we taste dozens of wines simply by wandering from marquee to marqee strung along a riverfront road at Bernkastel. It’s an annual event, held each September shortly before vintage, and worth attending.
There we savour old friends, like J. J. Prum’s exquisite Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spaetlese 2007 at three euros a glass or 17 euros a bottle – amazingly modest prices for a wine of this stature.
We enjoy unfamiliar wines, too, and stop to chat with young winemaker Heiko Fass. Later we drive up to his underground cellars, built by his father in 1969, at Neumagen-Dhron. There we learn more about Fass rieslings from the Hofberger and Roterd vineyards, Dhron – and his recent access, through his wife’s family, to the great Goldtropfchen vineyard at Piesport, around the next bend of the Mosel, down stream.
Over the next days we drive upstream to the old Roman provincial capital, Trier, and downstream to Koblenz, where the Mosel flows into the Rhine. Our constant travelling companion, Hugh Johnson’s wonderful World Atlas of Wine, with its detailed contour maps, allows us to identify the great vineyards on the Mosel’s impossibly steep south, south east and south west facing slopes.
Our other constant companion is a desire to drink those beautiful rieslings, which we do in buckets. What we’re not expecting, though, is to taste, alongside those rieslings, an eclectic and great range of perfectly cellared whites and reds from Switzerland, Loire Valley, Washington State, Corton-Charlemagne, South Africa, Aix-en-Provence, Yarra Valley, Volnay, Charmes-Chambertin, Pomerol and St Estephe.
But we did. And that’s part of the continuing Mosel story next week.
Ingram Road Yarra Valley Pinot Noir 2010 $18 A growing number of high quality cheaper wines highlights Australia’s maturing pinot growing and making skills. In this instance Helens Hill Estate’s second label, Ingram Road, delivers the aroma, flavour and structure of decent pinot at an affordable price. It has floral and cherry-like varietal aromas that flow through to a vibrant, medium bodied palate, supported by fine, firm tannins and completed by earthy and savoury notes. Scott McCarthy makes the wine from estate-grown fruit 0ff 12 and 13-year-old vines. It’s an early drinking style – enjoy any time over the next two or three years.
Kingston Estate Coonawarra Wrattonbully Cabernet Sauvignon $10.45–$15 Bill Moularadellis’s Kingston Estate, based on South Australia’s Murray River, sources grapes from growers across the state. In this wine Bill delivers good cabernet flavour and structure by combining material from Coonawarra and Wrattonbully, just to the north east of Coonawarra. The wine has a youthful, deep colour and buoyant, sweet, ripe blackcurrant aroma. The palate’s full and rich with juicy, sweet blackcurrant flavour and cabernet-like drying astringency. It offers very good value for money, especially when it’s discounted to between $10 and $11. Drink now to two years out.
Fox Creek JSM McLaren Vale Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon Cabernet Franc $21.85–$24 This is an original and clever blend, based on shiraz but using the two cabernet varieties to add different dimensions. First impression is of a highly aromatic red with buckets of slurpy, sweet, juicy fruit on the mid palate. The aromatic high notes come, presumably, from the cabernet franc component. And the big, soft palate and soft tannins start with shiraz. However, two cabernets affect the palate, too – cabernet sauvignon tightening up the structure with its solid tannin and adding mint and chocolate notes. The cabernet franc adds a lively, racy element. It’ll probably never be better than it is now in its exuberant youth.
