Category Archives: Vineyard

Tempranillo — a growing taste

26 October 2011People, Vineyard, Wine, Wine reviewChris Shanahan

With production of a mere 3,000 tonnes annually, it’s tempting to dismiss tempranillo (a Spanish red variety) as a footnote to Australia’s 1.5 million tonne wine industry. But as the industry repeatedly demonstrates, big new things, and even niche new things, grow from modest beginnings, often driven by producer enthusiasm.

Great modern examples include the chardonnay boom of the eighties and nineties and the sauvignon blanc flood of the new century.

No one expects tempranillo to overtake shiraz or cabernet, our two most voluminous red varieties — nor, perhaps, even to be the next big thing. But despite its small total production, tempranillo has the attention of 286 wine companies, say the organisers of tempra neo, an annual workshop aimed at understanding and promoting the variety.

Local organiser, Mount Majura’s Frank van de Loo, says the organising group held this year’s workshops in Melbourne, Brisbane, Kingscliff and Canberra. In Canberra the events attracted full houses to both the consumer and trade events, says van de Loo.

Van de Loo, maker of Canberra’s leading tempranillo, initiated the workshop in 2010 with other tempranillo makers – La Linea (Adelaide Hills, South Australia), Tar and Roses (Alpine Valleys and Heathcote, Victoria), Running with Bulls (Barossa Valley and Wrattonbully, South Australia), Gemtree Vineyards (McLaren Vale, South Australia) and Mayford (Porepunkah, Victoria).

At the workshops, the group presented a mixed field of 18 Australian tempranillos, broken into three brackets of six wines. In an accompanying booklet, they wrote, “They have been chose from as wide a range of regions, climates and soils as we can find, to illustrate the regional expression of tempranillo around Australia.

Thanks to Frank van de Loo we reproduced the tasting, bar one wine, at Chateau Shanahan and later conferred with him on his impressions from the workshops. I’ve incorporated his comments into the tasting notes below.

The line up confirms to me the suitability of the variety in many parts of Australia, giving it a versatility, perhaps, comparable with shiraz. It also reveals the “mainstream” and distinctive flavour of the variety, suggesting to me that, over time, it may become a significant contributor here.

Tempranillos from the tempra neo workshops 2011

Running With Bulls Barossa 2010 $19.95
Running With Bulls Wrattonbully 2010 $19.95
These offer a terrific tempranillo starting point and demonstrate that sometimes less is more. The winemaker input, especially in relation to oak maturation, appear minimal, allowing the varietal expression of the two regions full reign. Both offer bright, pure fruit flavours, the Barossa with soft, juicy tannins to match. The Wrattonbully wine (from several hundred kilometres further south) introduces an earthy, savoury flavour element and firmer tannins. Surprisingly, says van de Loo, people tended to favour the Wrattonbully style – by a large margin in Canberra where five out of six buyers of a mixed tempranillo six pack opted for Wrattonbully over Barossa.

Topper’s Mountain New England 2009 $25
Frank van de Loo says many tasters at the workshops, drew comparison between this and his own Mount Majura, mainly through a shared hint of eucalypt and comparable tannin structures. It’s a delicious wine – the more it breathes, the greater the volume of vibrant red berry fruit flavours emerging (with the merest touch of eucalypt). The tannin structure is fine and soft.

Gemtree Vineyards Luna Roja McLaren Vale 2010 $25
Van de Loo says the wine received broad support at the workshops, where tasters described it as “interesting” and “reminiscent of French wine”. The winemakers, including its maker, Mike Brown, however, lamented its “brett” character – a spoilage caused by the unloved brettanomyces yeast. There’s lovely fruit under the brett, but once you’ve learned to identify brett you can’t forgive it.

Oliver’s Taranga Small Batch McLaren Vale 2009 $38
This is a big, round, soft red. But for me the vanilla-like influence of oak, while sweet and pleasant in its own way, overrides the varietal flavour. As the two Running with Bulls wines demonstrate, less intervention is better with new varieties.

Pfeiffer Winemakers Selection Rutherglen 2010 $30
Van de Loo heard many positive comments on the initially shy wine. However, after a few hours’ aeration, delicious red fruit flavours emerged, checked to some extent by fine, firm tannins.

Mayford Alpine Valleys Tempranillo 2010 $35
This was another of the top wines in the line up. It showed class from the moment it splashed into the glass, then held its power and depth for a couple of days afterwards on the tasting bench. It offers a wonderful tension between concentrated, sweet, restrained fruit and firm, fine, savoury tannins.

Sam Miranda King Valley 2009 $30
To my taste, this was a sound but unexciting wine, not pushing many tempranillo buttons.

Capital Wines the Ambassador Canberra District 2010 $27
This old and much loved friend, often enjoyed on its own, looked good among its peers. The keynotes are pure, red fruit aroma and flavour, elegant, cool-climate structure and very fine, pleasantly grippy tannins.

Mount Majura Vineyard Canberra District 2010 $40
One of my top wines of the tasting, Mount Majura showed some similarities to Topper’s Mountain in the workshops (see above). However, to me it’s a more concentrated expression of tempranillo. Its quite firm, tight tannins form a matrix with the deep, sweet underlying fruit.

Glandore Estate TPR Hunter Valley 2008 $35
First sniff – generic, earthy Hunter red aroma pinpoints its origins; then the plummy, juicy fruit flavour kicks in, not as fleshy as shiraz, with a spicy note, a little more oak than I like and a soft, fine finish.

Tahbilk Nagambie Lakes 2010 $15.45
The cheapest wine in the work shop was well received, says Frank van de Loo. It offers pleasant primary fruit and a solid tannin backbone for a medium-bodied, comparatively low-alcohol wine (12.5 per cent).

Sanguine Estate Heathcote 2009 $30
Sanguine, another star of the line up, flourished for several days on the tasting bench. It offers big volumes of alluring fruity, savoury, spicy aromas, backed by juicy fruit depth on the palate and solid, chewy but elegant tannins.

Tar and Roses Alpine Valleys and Heathcote 2010 $24
Like a nut, there’s sweetness inside this wine, but you have to work at it to find the kernel. A few hours after splashing and pouring, the fruit peeped through the tight mesh of tannin. Finally, one of the better wines in the tasting, just a little off the pace of the top few (Mayford, Sanguine and Mount Majura).

La Linea Adelaide Hills 2010 $27
La Linea split the room, says van de Loo, as people drifted towards or away from its pretty, fruity aroma and flavour. It certainly stands out from all the other wines because of that. Partners David LeMire and Peter Leske attribute the extraordinary (and lovely) fragrance to their coolest vineyard, Llangibby.

Stella Bella Margaret River 2009 $30
We tried to like this but found the fruit not quite up to the 14 per cent alcohol. The lack of fruit flavour, too, allowed the spicy oak flavour to come through. It’s a clean, well-made wine and pleasant enough but to our taste needs more fruit intensity.

Bunkers The Box Margaret River 2009 $20
Another pleasant, fault free wine but lacking fruit intensity and varietal definition.

Mosel with Heiko Fass and Ernie Loosen

12 October 2011People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

Ernie Loosen tasting#678B3C edit — 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.

MOSEL IMPORTERS

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)

Notes from the Mosel, riesling’s motherland

5 October 2011People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

Bernkastel-Kues Mosel Jill Shanahan photo — 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.

Lark Hill grabs a slice of Canberra’s shiraz heartland

17 August 2011People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

Early in August, Lark Hill Winery bought an established 3.6-hectare vineyard at Murrumbateman. The purchase coincided with the release of Lark Hill Shiraz Viognier 2010 and Viognier 2011 (top drops today), both sourced from the vineyard.

Chris Carpenter commented, “We purchased the vineyard in order to secure our long-term supplies of these varieties, and have renamed it ‘Dark Horse Vineyard’. We will be converting this vineyard to biodynamic and organic farming this year”.

Carpenter says the vineyard comprises about 1.2 hectares each of shiraz and sangiovese, about 0.8 hectares of viognier, 0.4 hectares of marsanne and a small patch of roussanne (part of the Rhone Valley white family, along with marsanne and viognier).

The purchase increases the Carpenter’s vineyard holdings to about 10 hectares – the balancing being on their original vineyard, planted in 1978, on the Lake George escarpment, overlooking Bungendore. At 860 metres it’s Canberra’s highest, coolest vineyard.

Over the years David and Sue Carpenter pared back varieties that didn’t work on this cool site. As a result they now focus on the proven winners – riesling, chardonnay and pinot noir and, from 2006, Austria’s specialty white variety, gruner veltliner. By this time their son, Chris, had joined the business and shiraz had entrenched itself as Canberra’s standout variety.

The site being too cold for shiraz, the Carpenters sourced material from lower, warmer Murrumbateman for several years before taking the plunge and buying their own vineyard this month.

The vineyard was one of two blocks in the Ravensworth operation, associated with Bryan and Jocelyn Martin and other business associates over the years.

Martin says the Ravensworth name belonged originally to Brendan Ryan and an American partner.

Later, Michael Kirk, brother of Clonakilla’s Tim Kirk, bought Brendan Ryan’s section of the vineyard and converted Ravensworth from a partnership to a company, with Kirk and the Martins as shareholders. Kirk leased his section of the vineyard to the Martins.

In this month’s transactions, the Carpenters bought Kirk’s section of the vineyard and the Martins bought Kirk out of Ravensworth, to be become sole owners of the name as well as the other section of vineyard.

Martin says he planted the vineyards and knows every vine by name. But he’s relieved to be managing only one vineyard from now on. While the Carpenters vineyard includes the marsanne vines behind Ravensworth’s highly regarded dry white, Chris Carpenter says they will sell the fruit to Martin.

The Carpenters intend to convert the Murrumbatemen vineyard to certified biodynamic – an expensive process, expected to take about five years.

Chris Carpenter says they made no shiraz from the vineyard this year but expect to produce a shiraz viognier under the Dark Horse label in 2012. Lark Hill produced sangiovese from the site in 2007 and 2009 ¬ – the latter, still being offered at cellar door.

The Lark Hill Shiraz Viognier 2010 reviewed below came from the vineyard but had been bottled and labelled before the purchase, so doesn’t have the Dark Horse name on the label.

Lark Hill Canberra District Shiraz Viognier 2010 $40
Grown at Murrumbateman and made at Lark Hill, this wine combines shiraz and the white variety viognier (six per cent of the blend) fermented together. It’s a highly fragrant combination, inspired by the wines of Cote-Rotie in France’s northern Rhone Valley. In the 2010 vintage the floral, spicy and peppery aromas and flavours come with a marked savoury streak and quite firm tannins. That’s firm in a slinky, elegant, medium-bodied context. It builds in interest over time – always a good sign.

QR codes – smarties are onto them

Lark Hill introduced QR codes to their back labels with the release of their 2011 vintage whites – riesling, gruner veltliner and viognier.

QR stands for “quick response” code and refers to a little, square white-on-black pattern, readable by special scanners or smart phones. They’ve been a big deal in Japan for yonks and now seem certain to spread in Australia with the rapid uptake of smart phones – including Apple’s iPhone and other brands, such as Samsung Galaxy, using Google’s Android operating system.

Free scanning apps for the phones read QR codes, which can be encoded with a variety of data, including a link to a website. This is what the Carpenters use in their codes.

Chris Carpenter writes, “I believe we are the first Canberra wine to use QRs. Our aim is to provide what amounts to after-sales support for people – so if a bottle is picked up in a bottle shop, restaurant or similar, anyone with a smart phone can find out more about the wine including its RRP, reviews and our tasting notes.

We will be keeping these links as permanent pages on our website and continuing to add reviews and tasting notes as the wines age – so the QR codes should be useful even if somebody picks up a bottle in their cellar in 10 years (or 20!)”.

Using Bakodo (a free app) we zapped the Lark Hill codes on the Chateau Shanahan iPhone – and bingo, strait through to the detail on the website.

If you have a smart phone try scanning the QR code on Lark Hill Gruner Veltliner back label, pictured.

Lark Hill Gruner Canberra District Veltliner 2011 — Lark Hill -- first Canberra winery to adopt a QR code

Wynns Coonawarra — vignettes of the great terra rossa

27 July 2011People, Vineyard, Wine, Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Wynns Coonawarra Estate winemaker Sarah Pidgeon flashed through Canberra recently, judging at the Winewise Small Vignerons Awards, but taking time out to show-off her new releases – some of the best drinking and most cellarable reds in the country.

Pidgeon works alongside chief winemaker, Sue Hodder. And together, since 2001, they’ve collaborated closely with Coonawarra vineyard manager Allen Jenkins, polishing the wines of Coonawarra’s best-known and biggest brand to a dazzling sheen.

They started with a makeover of the vineyards, then in time for the 2008 vintage, commissioned a new small-batch winery. The latter finally allowed separate harvesting and processing of small batches of grapes from the potentially thousands of sections of what is now Treasury Wine Estates’ 900-odd hectares in Coonawarra.

Those vast holding service Penfolds, Lindemans and Rosemount, as well as Wynns – so the benefits of segmenting the crop potentially flows through to those brands, too.

But for Treasury Wine Estates (formerly Foster’s), Wynns remains the main game in Coonawarra, with its big volume white label shiraz and black label cabernet, icon wines, Michael shiraz and John Riddoch cabernet, and a growing range of specialty, sometimes one-off reds, showcasing various sections of the vineyard.

Harold Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2001 was the first of these one-off specialties. It’s followed this year by a 2009 cabernet sauvignon from the Davis vineyard and new releases of shiraz and a cabernet shiraz blend from vineyards sprinkled along V and A Lane – Coonawarra’s traditional north-south dividing line.

Wynns’ eight new-release reds come from the 2008, 2009 and 2010 vintages – all good years in Coonawarra. It is, quite simply, a stunning line up, ranging from the charming, easy-drinking white label shiraz 2010 (with proven long-term cellaring ability) to the profound Michael Shiraz 2008 and John Riddoch 2008.

I review each of the wines below, based on a tasting with Sarah Pidgeon. The price range for any individual wine can be very wide. The lower prices are a combination of estimates, based on discounting of the previous vintages, or actual advertised prices of the new releases. The higher prices are Treasury Wine Estates’ recommended retail prices.

Given intense retail interest, especially in the white label shiraz and black label cabernet, we’re almost certain to see intermittent discount wars – so it pays to shop around. For example, the 2009 vintage of the shiraz recently specialled at $8.75 a bottle – an absurdly low price for a wine with proven capacity to cellar for decades.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate Shiraz 2010 $8.75–$23
Sarah Pidgeon says, “I was pleased to be there for 2010, it was such a wonderful vintage”. She describes it as an “even” year, without the temperature spikes of 2008 and 2009, with warm temperatures at flowering and veraison (when the berries change colour and begin to soften) and more moderate temperatures during the ripening period.

The wine’s probably a touch better even than the very good 2008 and 2009 vintages. And it continues in the same bright, pure and fruity style – a result of the vineyard overhaul, harvesting times and tweaking in the cellar, especially in regard to oak maturation.

Pidgeon says only about 10 per cent of the barrels are new, with the remainder two to three years old, and roughly one fifth of the wine not oaked at all – to provide “freshness and purity”.

And that’s what the wine has – a heady, floral aroma and freshness and purity of Coonawarra red berry flavours with a delicious, deep, silky texture. It’s medium bodied, seductively fruity and easy to drink now. But it has the substance to age gracefully for many years.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate V and A Lane Shiraz 2009 $40–$50
This is a selection of more powerful shiraz from vineyards along the east-west running V and A Lane. Here we see the benefit of the new small-batch winery, says Pidgeon. It enabled progressive harvesting and fermentation of fruit and consequent maturation in a range of different types of oak barrels. This gave the winemakers greater blending options.

The wine’s dense, crimson-rimmed colour points to its power and ripeness – a deeper, denser more brooding wine than the white label shiraz. It still has vibrancy and freshness, but spicy oak flavours and tannins weave through the fruit. But despite its greater dimension, the wine retains signature Coonawarra elegance.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate Michael Shiraz 2008 $69.35–$90
Pidgeon says the winemaking and grape growing teams think long and hard about what goes into Michael. It has to be “the best, perfect and the pinnacle” she says. It’s based on a couple of key vineyards on the eastern side of the Riddoch Highway, near the winery and “others we keep our eye on”, she says.

It’s an extraordinary wine – somewhat less chunky than the ones made in the nineties, more refined, but still deep and powerful. It’s aromatic and based on deep, sweet, blueberry-like fruit flavours, mingled with beautiful, cedary oak – a wine of rare dimension needing time to evolve. While the tannins are strong, they’re integrated with the fruit flavours, fine-grained and soft.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate V and A Lane Cabernet Shiraz 2009 $38–$50
Like the shiraz from V and A Lane, this wine presents a strong face of Coonawarra – a blend of many parts, including components matured in a range of oak from different areas and coopers. The oak gives a cedary note, but the cabernet drives the wine with its blackcurrant flavour and strong, fine, elegant structure – fleshed out subtly by the shiraz. This is another strong but elegant red.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate “The Siding” Cabernet Sauvignon 2010 $10.95–$23
Introduced to the range from the 2009 vintage, “The Siding” is an aromatic cabernet made specifically for early drinking. It captures a spectrum Coonawarra cabernet flavours from red-berry to cassis and even a slight touch of leafiness. Like the white label shiraz, some components see no oak and provide a purity and freshness that puts fruit to the fore. It’s very Coonawarra, very cabernet and very drinkable – right now.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 $25–$35
Black Label is deeper coloured than “The Sidings”, but still limpid. It presents a deeper side of cabernet, including black-olive and cassis-like flavours, bound up in sweet, spicy oak. It’s a buoyant, balanced cabernet – generous but elegant, with fine, firm tannins. It remains one of Australia’s best value, long-term cellaring wines. It’s probably better now than it’s ever been. Watch for the discounting as occasionally dips below $20.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate “Davis” Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 $40–$50
The Davis vineyard, located just south of the winery, was planted to cabernet sauvignon in 1957. In 2008 wine from the vineyard “stood up as different”, says Pidgeon, so they kept it aside for individual bottling. This is an opulent and powerful cabernet, combining black olive and cassis varietal flavours with a particularly juicy, ripe, supple mid palate and powerful but soft tannins – opulence and elegance combined. An outstanding and potentially long-lived wine.

Wynns Coonawarra Estate John Riddoch Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 $69.35–$90
Sarah Pidgeon says the flagship cabernet comes from a diversity of vineyards sprinkled around Coonawarra, principally in the north, but can include southern vineyards in warmer years. Since John Riddoch’s reintroduction under Hodder and Pidgeon, the style has retained its power and intensity but become softer. The current release is densely coloured with a brilliant crimson rim – a deep and brooding wine in which the cabernet fruit and oak really sing in harmony. This is a great cabernet.

Pinnaroo partners and the Yellowtail connection

13 July 2011People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

What an awesome sight the Casella family’s Griffith winery is from the air – a glittering expanse of massive stainless steel tanks housing tens of millions of litres of wine destined for the highly successful Yellow Tail label.

It might smack of homogeneity. But in fact the wine inside those tanks represents a vast network of independent grape growers spread across south-eastern Australia – including the slopes of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales.

This is the story of one of those vineyards – just one piece in the giant Casella jigsaw puzzle.

First a little background. Casella makes the fabulously successful Yellowtail brand. In May this year British consultancy, Intangible Business, named it as the most powerful Australian wine brand in the world and number 37 in the top 100 wine and spirit brands globally. And in the Shanken News report of 5 July 2011, Yellowtail topped the list of Australian imports into the USA in 2010 at 8.5 million dozen bottles – four times the volume of second placed Lindemans.

My back-of-the-envelope reckoning puts total production at perhaps 12 million dozen bottles a year – given that Yellowtail sells domestically and Casella exports to around 50 countries.

Ever wondered how many grapes that takes and what area of vines it might require? On the same envelope, with Boorowa viticulturist, Mark Sims, we computed 12 million cases translates to around 160 thousand tonnes of grapes from vines covering between 10 and 11 thousand hectares. Little wonder, then, that the capital investment and risk is so widely dispersed.

Sims says he’s worked as a middle man for Casella for many years, managing vineyards and sourcing up to 20 thousand tonnes of grapes a year along the western slopes of the Great Divide, between Mudgee and Cowra.

About ten years back Sims and a couple of farming mates from Warren and Nyngan thought they’d grow grapes together. After a long search, a very attractive property became available on the Belubula River, Canowindra.

The property, Belubula Farm, had originally produced hay, lucerne and chaff, says Sims. A new owner used it for cattle and changed the name to Pinnaroo.

The little idea became a bigger one requiring more capital, so the original mates “pulled in extra partners, pooled our capital and formed Pinnaroo Partners”, say Sims.

From 2002, they established a 110-hectare vineyard, contracted to Casella and planted 90 per cent to chardonnay and five per cent each to viognier and pinot gris.

Sims says the vineyard runs east to west, peaking at about 400 metres above sea level. The east-west orientation provides under-canopy shade for the berries, says Sims, a veteran of grape growing in this warm area.

Sims manages the vines and the families from Warren (Glen and Narelle Whittaker) and Nyngan (Paul and Jenny Buckley) look after the farm. And the other partners are all regular visitors: Mark Sim’s wife, Luisa, Mark and Cathy Beach of Warren, David Buckley of Newcastle, Peter and Margaret Carnell of Dubbo, Glen and Michelle Hamblin of Nevertire, Chris and Mary Logan of Sydney and Peter and Suzie Sims of Canberra.

But like most contract grape grows, the Pinnaroo partners began to produce a little wine for themselves – selecting small parcels of the best fruit and sending it to winemaker Richard Parker at Long Rail Gully, Murrumbateman.

Of course, friends then wanted some, so they created the Pinnaroo brand and sell it through www.pinnaroowines.com.au

Quantities remain small, but these are seriously good wines from an estate that normally slakes the thirst of those mighty Yellowtail tanks in Griffith.

Pinnaroo Estate Partners Reserve Cowra Viognier 2010 $25
Viognier provides a unique drinking experience. Yalumba pioneered the variety some thirty years ago. But plantings increased during the late nineties, partly to make varietal viognier, partly as a minor component in blends with shiraz.

The early stand-alone versions tend to be picked very ripe, resulting in high-alcohol whites with sometimes over-the-top apricot-like varietal flavour and, a solid bite of tannin and a thick, sometimes oily texture.

These are all natural qualities of the grape. But it’s possible to maintain the varietal characteristics in a much more refined package – demonstrated in this delicious version, made by Richard Parker at Long Rail Gully, Murrumbateman.

The Pinnaroo partners hand harvested the grapes at a comparatively low 12.9 per cent alcohol potential – not the 14.5 or 15 per cent often seen from comparable climates.

In Parker’s hands this translated to a full-flavoured, aromatic dry white, displaying clear-cut apricot and ginger varietal character. He matured the wine on yeast lees for 12 month, building a lovely, soft creaminess that sits well with the natural viscosity of the style. It’s a comparatively delicate expression of viognier, with none of the hardness and a very lively, fresh acidity.

Pinnaroo Estate Partners Reserve Cowra Chardonnay 2009 $25
This is an exciting wine – and far removed from the Cowra chardonnay stereotype. At two years age we might expect a dark-golden, fat-but-fading peachy dry white. Instead we have a lemon-coloured, vibrant barrel-fermented chardonnay displaying great flavour intensity (melon rind and white peach), subtly enhanced by barrel fermentation and maturation on yeast lees. A wonderfully rich but fine texture matches the intense fruit flavour. And the alcohol’s a modest 12.9 per cent.

It’s hard to imagine how a Cowra chardonnay could be any better than this – a great example of very high quality fruit being artfully handled by a skilled winemaker.

Pinnaroo viticulturist, Mark Sims, says it’s made from the best chardonnay block on the 110-hectare vineyard – planted to the Entav 76 clone. Richard Parker made the wine at Long Rail Gully, Murrumbateman.

Pinnaroo Estate Partners Reserve Hilltops Shiraz 2008 $25
Like Canberra, the Hilltops region, around Young, New South Wales, makes delicious shiraz, albeit in a generally fleshier style than Canberra’s – but still medium bodied and far removed from, say, the bolder Barossa versions.

As in the other Pinnaroo wines we enjoy the combination of skilful grape growing by Mark Sims and sensitive winemaking by Richard Parker at Long Rail Gully. The grapes seemed to have been picked at just the right point of ripeness – with the varietal, ripe-cherry flavours at full tilt and packed with the vibrancy of fresh berries. This comes through on the highly aromatic, slightly savoury, spicy aroma and on the juicy, fine-boned palate – a kiss of French oak sweetness adding to the pleasure of the shiraz flavour. Grapes come from Mark and Luisa Sim’s Boorowa vineyard.

Wine review — Curly Flat, Williams Crossing, Grant Burge, Heartland Wines and Angoves

8 June 2011People, VineyardChris Shanahan

Curly Flat Williams Crossing Pinot Noir 2008 $24–$27
Curly Flat vineyard, Macedon Ranges, Victoria
Williams Crossing sometimes outscores its more expensive cellar mate at the annual Macedon wine show. As a judge there on several occasions I’ve consistently marked both at the top of the pack, for the simple reason that they deliver the magic of this beautiful variety. Owners Phillip and Jeni Moraghan make every batch of pinot as a candidate for the flagship blend. And the Williams Crossing components fall out only “as a result of a structured barrel classification tasting – 27 per cent of 2008 pinot noir were declassified”, writes Phillip. The declassified barrels comprise this medium bodied pinot of modest alcohol and what can best be described as true “pinosity”.

Curly Flat Pinot Noir 2008 $48–$54
Curly Flat Vineyard, Macedon Ranges, Victoria
This is a great success in a hot, dry vintage. Phillip Moraghan says the mean January temperature, at 22 degrees, exceeded the long-term average by five degrees. The heat continued in February and March, when the temperature exceeded 35 degrees for eight days. The wine bears the vintage thumbprint but not in the most obvious way – as the alcohol’s just 12.6 per cent. The fruit flavour, however, sits more in the dark-berry and than red-berry spectrum. And the firm tannins holding the fruit in check also reflect the warm growing conditions. So, rather than a big, hot wine, we have a fragrant, complex, savoury, elegant pinot with delicious fruit under the taut structure.

Grant Burge The Holy Trinity
Grenache Shiraz Mourvedre 2008 $28.49–$36
Barossa Valley, South Australia
Grant Burge’s original Holy Trinity, from the 1995 vintage, good as it was, wouldn’t bear comparison to the 2008, despite similar fruit sourcing. It’s a classic Barossa blend, brought to life by the so-called “Rhone rangers” in the 1980s. Restless to improve his, Burge and winemaker Craig Stansborough visited France’s Rhone Valley in 1996. Upon return, they introduced longer maceration on skins, altering the flavour and softening the tannins, and wound back the oak influence – opting for maturation, rather than oak flavour, in older 2,200 litre vessels. In the hot 2008 this means a robust, deeply fruity, supple red with aromatic grenache high notes, shiraz plumpness and savoury, firm mourvedre tannins.

Heartland Wines Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 $17–$20
Langhorne Creek and Limestone Coast, South Australia
Heartland Wines, owned by a consortium of long-term wine industry people, has been a major exporter, with access to the partners’ 210-hectare Langhorne Creek vineyard and 160-hectare Limestone Coast vineyard. Winemaker Ben Glaetzer has wine in his blood, too, with his father, Colin, and father’s twin brother, John (former Wolf Blass maker), both winemakers. Heartland 2009 shows the fruity aromatics of the vintage – quite pure and mulberry-like, in an unmistakably cabernet way, with a sweet kiss of oak. The bright fruit carries to the generous, lively palate, cut by fine tannins. It’s mainly about juicy, drink-now appeal, but has the depth to hold for four or five years.

Heartland Wines Dolcetto Lagrein 2009 $18.95–$22
Langhorne Creek and Limestone Coast, South Australia
Good fruit and very clever winemaking here from Ben Glaetzer, produces unique flavours and enjoyable drinking. It’s a 50:50 blend of the northern Italian varieties dolcetto and lagrein – the former noted for its aromatics and brilliant colour, the latter for its sometimes-intimidating tannins. Glaetzer tames the lagrein tannins, to some degree, by ageing the wine in oak barrels. The dolcetto he keeps in stainless steel to retain its wonderful perfume. The blend is highly perfumed and fruity on the nose; spritely, tart and fresh on the jube-like fruity palate; and finishes with a farewell bite of tannin.

Angoves Vineyard Select Chardonnay 2009 $15–$20
Limestone Coast, South Australia
The older vintage suggests lagging sales, attributable, perhaps, to the sauvignon blanc phenomenon. The press release says (hopefully) “it’s a great example of modern Australian chardonnay from the best region for this variety in South Australia”. In truth, however, it’s in older style that many people love, from a decent, but not cutting edge, chardonnay region. Sourced from vineyards at Padthaway and Cape Jaffa, it offers rich-to-fat melon and peach flavours with an obvious layer of oak. It’s not in the bright, fine and lively modern style at all, but will appeal to the many people who enjoy full-on, plump chardonnays.

Show judges too cool-climate orientated says Grant Burge

1 June 2011People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

Visiting Canberra two weeks back, Barossa vigneron Grant Burge rated 2010 his “best white vintage in 10 years”. Then came the highs and lows of a wet 2011 season, “throwing up all the diseases in one year”, devastating crops in many vineyards, and driving up spraying and vineyard costs across the board.

In his own vineyards – about 400 hectares, mainly in the southern Barossa – Burge sprayed against disease 12 to 16 times, instead of the usual four. And when late-season rain spurred outbreaks of botrytis cinerea, vineyard workers cut out infected berries by hand.

Faced by unrelenting disease pressures, says Burge, “some growers stopped spraying, because they felt uncertain about the final result”. Better to cut their losses early, they reasoned, than to spend more on spraying when there might be no grapes to sell in any event. Some lost their entire crops.

As a winemaker needing every berry, Burge persisted and in the end reaped a good harvest from his own vineyards. In the final ripening period, he says, mild to cool weather settled on the Barossa, bringing healthy fruit to flavour ripeness at unusually low sugar levels. Reds at Burge’s elevated Corryton Park Vineyard, for example, came in at around 12.5 to 13.4 Baume (a measure of sugar), instead of the usual 14 plus.

The low temperatures at ripening produced intense flavours and high natural acidity in the whites, says Burge, and now believes they’ll be even better than the 2010s.

He rates Barossa Valley ahead of the adjoining, cooler Eden Valley in 2011, particularly for cabernet sauvignon. Burge’s Corryton Park vineyard – normally much cooler than the Barossa floor, and more akin to Coonawarra – usually produces his best cabernet.

But in 2011, says Burge, “cabernet sauvignon off the valley floor is the best in 25 years. If fact, I’ve never seen the quality before. I’ve never seen the purple colour on the floor, like at Corryton, but it’s black-purple”.

Overall, says Burge, 2011 wines seem generally leaner, very pure in their fruit expression, less alcoholic and needing time to mature – comments closely paralleling the Canberra 2011 experience.

Burge visited Canberra to promote his flagship Barossa shiraz, Meshach ($155), released, like Grange, at five years. But Burge operates on a large scale for a private Australian producer – and the styles he makes extend far beyond the more expensive reds behind his reputation.

Burge’s 400-plus hectares of vines supply only 60 per cent of company needs. The other 40 per cent comes from about 20 long-term growers, says Burge.

He now makes more white wine than red, largely through the success of his $30-a-bottle sparkling wines, sourced from the cool Adelaide Hills (immediately to the south of Eden Valley on the Mount Lofty Ranges).

But Burge’s most intense passion clearly lies in his beloved Barossa reds. On this trip he’s showing us Meshach 2006 (straight shiraz, mainly from the Filsell vineyard) and Holy Trinity 2008 ($36), a blend of grenache, shiraz and mourvedre.

They’re beautiful examples of their styles – Meshach made since 1988 and Holy Trinity from 1995. While we might call them “traditional” robust, warm-climate styles, they’re both thoroughly modern wines, expressing regional fruit flavours first and foremost, and benefiting from careful fine-tuning over the years.

While the market still loves them, Burge laments a shift away from the style in wine shows. He says the judges are now “all cool-climate orientated. I went to a few shows last year with Craig [winemaker Craig Stansborough] and warm climate wines like McLaren Vale and Barossa couldn’t get a look in. Anything showing American oak got kicked out. But some of the cool shirazes were tried were just green. I understand they need to show a lead for the industry, but they shouldn’t get too far from the public. The judges now have a narrow focus”.

He sees it as a worrying trend that wine judges today tend to award a narrower range of styles now than an older generation did in the past.

Burge offers interesting insights into international markets, too. He exports to 32 countries, sees opportunities for strong brands despite our dollar’s strength. Describing China as “the wild, wild east”, he’s built export volumes of high quality wine there through “individuals all over the place” and expects ultimately to have a central distributor.

He’s neve done much in the United States but plans to attack the market in the near future and sees huge potential there for good wine. Research, however, revealed a widespread perception in America that Australia doesn’t make good quality wine – a stereotype, he believes, created by the success of cheap, fruity wines like Yellowtail.

He’ll therefore emphasise Barossa Valley, not Australia, as Grant Burge wines roll out across America.

Oh, and the wines? See Grant Burge Meshach 2006 and Thorn Vineyard Eden Valley Riesling 2010 in today’s reviews and Holy Trinity 2008 next week.

Majella of Coonawarra — from sheep farming to winemaking

25 May 2011People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

At Chateau Shanahan we’ve experienced cellaring joy and disappointments over the years. But consistent pleasure in older bottles of Majella Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon and The Malleea cabernet shiraz, reminded us of this marvellous winery’s interesting transition from farming to grape growing to winemaking.

When brothers Brian and Anthony Lynn made the first Majella wine in 1991, they’d been growing grapes in Coonawarra for twenty-three years. They’d lived all their lives in the area. They’d grown fat lambs and wool long before vines took root on the family farm in 1968. Yet their first step into winemaking was, perhaps, even more tentative than their first step into grape growing had been two decades earlier.

Then, at least, there was a pre-arranged buyer for the grapes. Eric Brand, a good mate of George Lynn (Brian’s and Anthony’s late father), encouraged the planting of six acres of shiraz and agreed to buy the grapes to help satisfy a winemaking contract with Hardys.

The first Majella wine, a 1991 Coonawarra Shiraz, however, had no guaranteed buyers. If you’d asked Brian or Anthony where the business was headed when the wine was released in 1993, they’d not have foreseen Majella’s complete transition from contract grape grower to leading wine estate in just ten years.

“People ask, were we visionary?” says Brian ‘Prof’ Lynn. “And I say, not really”. But Majella’s huge success wasn’t just blind luck either. It’s a success that grew from strong, deep roots in the Coonawarra landscape and community, fertilised by experience, skill, imagination, good management and – during it’s first decade of winemaking at least – by impeccable timing.

The release of Majella’s 1991 shiraz in 1993 came at the beginning of the unprecedented global red-wine boom. The wine was, and still is, a brilliant drop, beautifully packaged (designed by Barbara Harkness) and realistically priced.

I recall my first taste of it on a wine-buying trip to Coonawarra with David Farmer in September, 1993. At a little cook-your-own steakhouse, Nibs – owned at the time by Bill Brand and ‘Prof’ Lynn – the new Majella label caught our eye amongst all the familiar names on display. Who the hell was this we wondered? Nice label.

Nice wine, too – a classy drop, packed with Coonawarra’s unique ripe-berry flavour. Whether it was our huge grins or the label that prompted Patricia Lynn (Prof’s and Anthony’s mum) to approach us, I’ll never know, because we never met again. She died a few years after our visit.

But this former mayor of Penola (the little town at Coonawarra’s southern tip) turned on the warmth and charm for her Canberra visitors with tales of wartime Canberra. “I was the minutes secretary to the Minister’s secretary’, she told us of her job with the Minister for Supply. She knew ‘Chif’ and Nugget Coombs and that “after the bombing of Leeds, that Lithgow was the only remaining .303 manufacturing plant in the allied group”.

And she told us of Majella. In the post war years she met and married George Lynn, moved to the Coonawarra area where they produced wool on a property just to the south of Penola. One night Patricia told George she wanted to name the property ‘Majellan’ – after St Gerard Majellan, the catholic patron saint of mothers. She’d lost her first child and wanted another.

George’s response was pragmatic. ‘Majellan’ was too long to stamp on a wool bale. End of conversation – although a memorable night in other ways, recalled Patricia. Next morning, George offered a solution. Drop the “n”. And so Majella was born as a wool farm. In 1960 it became a fat lamb farm, too, when George bought his uncle Frank’s block in the heart of Coonawarra. In 1968 Majella became a vineyard. And in 1991, a wine name.

The Lynn family’s move into grape growing, recalls Prof, followed a high school geography project on Coonawarra viticulture. With luminaries such as Bill and Jock Redman, Eric Brand and Phil Laffer advising him, the young Prof’s interest shifted from the theoretical to the practical.

With advice and encouragement from Eric Brand of Laira vineyards, Prof and his dad planted six acres of shiraz in 1968. The propagated the vines from cuttings taken, on Bill Redman’s advice, from Arthur Hoffman’s ‘North Block’ (now Redmans). Prof remembers Bill Redman saying, “I’ll take you to Hoffman’s, because they’re the best shiraz in Coonawarra”.

Similarly, when the Lynns decided to add cabernet sauvignon to the mix old Jock Redman of Wynns advised them to take cuttings from vines he’d marked with white paint. These, he said, produced the best wine.

With a steady contract to supply grapes to Eric Brand, the Lynns were happy with those early grape-growing years. But in 1974 George became ill. By the time he died in 1976, the Brand contract had ended and nobody wanted Coonawarra shiraz – only cabernet, which made up only one third of the Majella plantings.

“If we didn’t have wool, we would’ve gone broke”, says Prof. Business improved in the early eighties when Majella began selling grapes to Wynns – an arrangement that lasted until vintage 2001. And it was grapes that saved the Lynns in the wool crash of the late eighties and early nineties. “We would’ve gone broke without grapes, then”, laughs Prof.

So, by the time Majella made its first wine in 1991, it had served a long, tough apprenticeship learning how to grow high-quality wine grapes good enough to sell even in tough times.

Mature red vines on a good Coonawarra plot, and the ability to produce top grapes, says Prof, is the family’s biggest asset – entrusted, in the early days, to his old mates, the Brands and their talented winemaker, Bruce Gregory.

Then in 1999 Gregory joined the Lynn family full time at Majella’s new winery, next to the cellar door, opened in 1996.

Following its complete transition to winemaking a decade ago, Majella cemented its reputation as one of the region’s great winemakers. The wines all bear the regional style stamp.

Not surprisingly cabernet sauvignon ($33), Coonawarra’s great specialty, now sparks more interest than the shiraz ($30) that blazed the way for the label from the 1991 vintage. And the $75 long-lived flagship, The Malleea, a cabernet shiraz blend, hits profound heights. The same blend, in the $18 The Musician label , provides drink-now pleasure without diminishing the Coonawarra signature.

As the world’s wealthiest people pay ever greater prices for Bordeaux’s cabernet-based reds, we can get on quietly drinking estate-made Majella, and other Coonawarra and Margaret River reds, of comparable quality, at a fraction of the price.

Tasting John’s Blend 1990 to 2006

18 May 2011People, Vineyard, Wine, Wine reviewChris Shanahan

In 1967 Wolf Blass winemaker, John Glaetzer, received a load of “beautiful, concentrated” cabernet sauvignon from Bill Potts’ vineyard, Langhorne Creek. Glaetzer turned those grapes into the first Wolf Blass Grey Label Cabernet Sauvignon.

Seven years later, inspired by those beautiful grapes, Glaetzer (still working for Blass) made John’s Blend No. 1 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, using fruit from Bill Potts’ vineyard.

Glaetzer’s small-production wine developed a loyal following, its reputation spread mainly by word-of-mouth. And in Canberra, the word spread mainly through wine merchant Jim Murphy, a long-term supporter of Wolf Blass and John Glaetzer.

A couple of weeks back, a disparate group of 11 Canberra followers – led by Charlotte Galloway, an ANU lecturer in Art History and Curatorship – raided their cellars to hold a John’s Blend vertical tasting: all the vintages, bar 1992, from 1990 to 2006.

No, not a sniff and spit tasting, but a leisurely stroll through the sequence over lunch on a crisp, sunny autumn day – hosted by Warwick McKibbin and fiancée, Renee Fry, and attended by Galloway, Jac and Kathy Cousin, Jenny and Peter Gibson, James Horne, Heather Smith, Martin Parkinson and yours truly.

A confession here: Chateau Shanahan contributed the 2002 and 2003 vintages, but John Glaetzer had given these to us some years back – we’d seldom tasted John’s Blend, so entered the tasting with few preconceptions.

We tasted the wines in pairs from oldest to youngest, therefore starting with the 1990 and 1991 and finishing at 2006. It’s an effective tasting method as there’s no rush, no palate overload and a natural pairing of wine with food.

We found wonderful consistency of style across the vintages – the thread linking all of the wines being a distinctive mint-eucalypt note associated with cabernet sauvignon from Langhorne Creek.

The wines go through an interesting transition from oakiness to fruitiness as they age. In the fully mature wines, oak seems barely detectable; and in the young vintages it’s an oak-fruit arm wrestle – a style that’s not in vogue today.

In this regard, the wines reminded me of a tasting, with Wolf Blass and John Glaetzer, of all the Wolf Blass Black Label wines a few years back. The veteran tasters, remembering the dark, oaky young Black Labels of the mid seventies, wondered where the oak had gone. All we could taste now were supple, mellow old wines with fruit to the fore.

Similarly, John’s Blend reminds us that it’s all a matter of balance – powerful fruit’s capable of gobbling up lots of oak over time, and the symbiotic combination produces complex long-lived wines.

John Glaetzer says there’s been no significant change to his winemaking technique or oak-maturation regime over the years. He ferments the wine a little cooler than industry standard, to preserve vibrant fruit flavours. He believes warm temperatures “boil off the fruit”.

And in a technique picked up from Wolf Blass (in turn learned by Blass from Grange creator, Max Schubert) Glaetzer finishes the ferments off in oak barrels.

Glaetzer continues to source fruit from Bill Potts’ Langhorne Creek Vineyard. However, in 1992 and 1993 he and Potts established the 32-hectare Pasquin vineyard nearby. In recent years, says Glaetzer, John’s Blend comes about 50:50 from the two vineyards. He makes only 1,000 cases of John’s Blend each year – but made none in 2011 for lack of suitable fruit.

Langhorne Creek, near Lake Alexandrina (south east of McLaren Vale), is one of Australia’s largest premium wine grape regions. A massive expansion there in the late nineties saw most of its fruit blended anonymously into multi-region blends. Blass reputedly called the region, “Australia’s middle palate”.

The Potts family pioneered the area from 1850 and remain in control today of Bleasdale Winery and vineyards. Bill Potts, one of the family, supplies Glaetzer from his own vineyard.

One of the most enduring reds from the area is Stonyfell Metala Shiraz Cabernet. It was made from 1932 by Jack Kilgour, and marketed originally as Stonyfell Private Bin Claret. Kilgour’s successor, Bryan Dolan, put the vineyard name, Metala, on the label. Dolan won the inaugural Jimmy Watson Trophy in 1962 with the 1961 Metala, the first vintage to bear the new label.

Langhorne Creek triumphed again in 1974, 1975 and 1976 with Wolf Blass’s historic Jimmy Watson trophy hat trick. But Blass’s powerful branding of his Black Label overshadowed the regional credentials.

In John’s Blend, Langhorne Creek cabernet sauvignon reveals its idiosyncratic charm consistently across the decades, with little peaks and troughs driven by vintage variations. With so much focus now on regional specialties, Glaetzer’s 37-year-old brand (like Kilgour’s 1932 Stonyfell Private Bin Claret) reminds us that this is not a new idea at all, but the perennial wine theme.

The current-release 2007 vintage John’s Blend (not in the tasting) is available at Jim Murphy’s for $29.95 and Kemeny’s of Sydney offer the 2006 at $29.99. Few wines at this price offers such a pedigree and proven long-term cellaring potential.

John’s Blend No 17 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1990
A perfect start to the tasting with this mature but still lively, sweet-fruited vintage with distinctive Langhorne Creek minty-eucalypt cabernet sauvignon to the fore. Has years ahead of it.

John’s Blend No 18 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1991
Looked, smelled and tasted older than the vibrant 1990 to its left, but nevertheless an appealing, if fading, old wine.

John’s Blend No 20 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1993
Tasted at the end of the lunch when our host, Warwick McKibbin, generously retrieved a magnum from the cellar. 1993 was a wet, disease-ridden vintage, comparable to 2011. But the wine defied the vintage stereotype, with its complex aroma and lean, taut palate still revealing mint-eucalyptus varietal flavour. Drying out a bit but still thoroughly enjoyable.

John’s Blend No 21 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1994
One of the standout vintages, seventeen years old but still red rather than brown with vibrant mint-eucalypt cabernet aroma and a juicy, elegant palate, finely-sculpted palate. Many years left.

John’s Blend No 22 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1995
One of the most talked about wines, championed by Charlotte Galloway and notable for its strident, chunky style, flanked on either side by the elegant 1994 and 1996 vintages. The mint-eucalypt character seemed particularly strong in this wine, matched by a firmer tannin structure.

John’s Blend No 23 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1996
My favourite drinking wine on the day, a particularly elegant, ethereal expression of its style – all sweet fruit, grace and suppleness. Long and delicious finish, many years of life ahead, but right now showing both youth and maturity.

John’s Blend No 24 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1997
A lesser vintage but in terrific condition, its lively palate notably leaner than the 1996 before it, but still sweet and supple.

John’s Blend No 25 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1998
Generally considered a great vintage but our first bottle seriously cork tainted and the second bottle showing a strange vegetal character and hollow palate. John Glaetzer reckons we struck two dud corks. He regards it as one of the greats. Down with cork.

John’s Blend No 26 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 1999
A beautiful wine with a limpid, youthful colour, seductive ripe blackcurrant aroma pushing through the by now familiar mint-eucalypt. Despite the generous nose, the fruit on the palate comes teasingly wrapped in firm tannins – a delicious and elegant combination, suggesting heaps more drinking pleasure in the years to come.

John’s Blend No 27 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2000
Looks, smells and tastes older than the exceptional 1999. Aged, autumn-leaf aromas join the mint-eucalypt notes and the palate seems old and tiring – a lesser vintage, remarkable that it’s still going after 11 years.

John’s Blend No 28 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2001
A bit of a closed shop this one, some chocolate joining the mint-eucalypt theme on a full but tight, tannic palate – though there’s fruit peeking through and probably a long life ahead of it. Seems to be neither young nor mature, so best left for a few more years.

John’s Blend No 29 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2002
First bottle cork tainted. Second bottle in good condition and just a baby – the first wine to show obvious oak aroma and flavour (the older wines had simply gobbled up all the oak, leaving fruit to star). A lovely aroma combining mint-eucalypt with cedary oak – these characters come through, too, on the tightly-bound palate. One of the greats but best left to mature for a few more years.

John’s Blend No 30 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2003
We’re now squarely among the young, oaky wines. Ripe mint-eucalypt-chocolate-blackcurrant fruit joins the oak but there’s not the length of flavour. It needs more time but probably won’t rate among the best.

John’s Blend No 31 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
Well, yum yum, this one’s saturated with fruit – and oak, too, after three years in new French and American barrels. But as the old wines demonstrate, the oak will fade over time as the wine becomes finer and the fruit steps to the front. A very good vintage.

John’s Blend No 32 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
A big, ripe, crimson-rimmed wine: juicy, vibrant summer-berry flavours mingle with the regional mint-eucalypt. Big and chocolate-rich on the palate in an oak-fruit arm wrestle – but we know the winner in the long run, don’t we.

John’s Blend No 33 Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
A magnificent, deeply coloured, crimson-rimmed wine to finish. Enough oak to build a weekender, but in a complex matrix with deep, ripe varietal fruit (yes, tinted with mint-eucalypt). There’s great depth to the supple fruit and despite the wine’s youth and power, the structure’s poised and elegant. One of the greats.