Wine regions build reputations by making outstanding wine. Mediocre wines don’t cut through in a crowded market; and poor wines kill reputations. The Southern Highlands region (around Mittagong, Bowral and Berrima) struggled with its reputation for many years, largely because so many of its early wines showed green, unripe flavours.

Indeed, wine quality in the region varied so much a decade ago, newcomer Julian Tertini, founder of Freedom Furniture and Fantastic Holdings, used “Berrima Valley” on some labels – to protect his own name should the region as a whole fail.

But just 11 years after establishing Tertini, Southern Highlands remains on the labels. And, extraordinarily for a small operation that made its first wine in 2005, Tertini claims 285 trophies and medals so far. The honours include a gold medal for the 2009 pinot noir in the National Wine Show 2011, gold medals for the Reserve Pinot Noir 2009 in the 2012 Boutique Wine Awards (open to Australian and New Zealand wines) and the NSW Wine Awards 2012.

In the latter event, the 2009 Reserve won the best pinot trophy in a taste-off against Tertini 2010 pinot noir.

Like other vignerons in the area, Tertini included cabernet sauvignon and merlot among his first plantings. Thankfully, he also planted pinot noir, riesling, chardonnay and arneis in the Yarraandoo vineyard – on the western side of the old Hume Highway, near the Wombeyan Caves road.

Others had included shiraz in the mix, all on expert viticultural advice that proved to be spectacularly off the mark.  “It was a stupid mistake”, says Tertini’s Robert Kay.  He says cabernet, shiraz and merlot don’t ripen, leaving pinot noir to date as the sole red variety ripening reliably across the district.

The failure of cabernet, merlot and shiraz, in particular, highlights the massive difference between growing conditions in the Southern Highlands and Canberra.

Despite being further north than Canberra (and potentially warmer), with vineyards at comparable altitudes, a strong maritime influence counters the effect of latitude. More cloud, more rain and more humidity mean a cooler and less hospitable environment for grapes.

Robert Kay says the area can be overcast for weeks, “and the cloud cuts down the heat”.  He attributes the region’s growing strength to improved vineyard management – particularly an ability to counter moisture-related vine diseases – and a shift to suitable cool-climate varieties.

But even with the right varieties, vigilant spraying and non-stop vineyard work vineyard, nature takes a toll on local crops. Every year Southern Highlands vignerons face conditions comparable to those faced by Canberra’s in 2011 and 2012. And in those two difficult seasons, the highlands suffered even bigger crop losses than normal.

The financial losses to producers can be huge. They face increased vineyard management costs, but lower crops mean less wine and ultimately reduced sales in the years ahead. Every tonne not harvested equates to around 70 dozen bottles of wine not produced or sold.

Because of severe crop losses in the last three vintages, says Robert Kay, Tertini intends in future to make wine from the Hilltops region as well as the Southern Highlands.

In Tertini’s vineyard pinot noir and riesling perform best, and now comprise a majority of plantings. Smaller areas of chardonnay and arneis (a northern Italian white variety) also look good and there’s hope for experimental plantings of lagrein, a northern Italian red variety. And across the district, says Kay, sauvignon blanc and pinot gris generally work well.

Riesling showed great promise from the first (and gold medal winning) vintage in 2005. The wines begin life austere and acidic, though very delicate, and with bottle age develop a delicious lime-like varietal flavour. Tertini therefore release their rieslings several years after vintage.

On a recent tasting at the winery, a museum release, Tertini Cross Roads Berrima Valley Riesling ($33 – a trophy and two gold medals), looked sensational. At six and a half years, it’s youthful and fresh but with a seductive honeyed note of bottle age boosting the succulent, pure, bracingly dry limey flavour.

The cellar door also offers the 2008 vintage ($38 – almost sold and out and not available for tasting), winner of five trophies and 10 gold medals, and the trophy and gold-medal winning 2009 vintage ($30).

The latter offers a delicate floral and lime aroma and flavour. Though it lacks the sheer juicy intensity of the 2006, it’s youthful and fresh and certain to build with bottle age. However, a soon-to-be released Reserve Riesling 2009 ($35) offers similar flavours and delicacy but with greater concentration.

The Piedmontese white variety, arneis, succeeds in Tertini’s vineyard, too. But it lives up to its “little rascal” nickname with miserly grape yields (about half that of riesling) and very small juice extraction rate per tonne of fruit.

The current release Tertini Reserve Arneis 2010 ($35), partly barrel fermented, provides excellent, full-bodied, crisp and savoury drinking – with exotic sappy, racy, melon-rind flavours.

Like the rieslings, the pinots (2008 $28, 2009 $55 and 2009 Reserve $58) show a family style – delicate and restrained. I’ve tasted several vintages over the years and, indeed, these were the wines that broke my longstanding doubts about the region’s wine. They’re outstanding – and reviewed in next week’s column.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan
First published 7 Novemer 2012 in The Canberra Times

From a little valley near Braidwood comes the outsider that blitzed this year’s Canberra regional wine show. Half Moon Riesling 2010 won the ‘best riesling’ trophy, beating some of our hottest local riesling makers, including Helm, Clonakilla, Four Winds, Ravensworth, Gallagher and Nick O’Leary.

Half Moon then secured the ‘best white’ trophy then won a taste off with the best red – Hungerford Hill Hh Tumbarumba Classic Shiraz 2010 – to seize a third trophy as champion wine of the show. It was the first riesling in the top spot since Helm Premium 2008 shared the honours with Eden Road The Long Road Hilltops Shiraz in 2009.

The tiny vineyard – located near Mongarlowe, about 16 kilometres from Braidwood – belongs to Sydneysiders Tony and Robyn Maxwell. Manager Malcolm Sharp says the wine bug bit Tony Maxwell in the nineties when he established a vineyard at Rylstone, near Mudgee.

With Rod James, he planted vines at Nullo Mountain, a challenging site within the Mudgee region – but, at 1100 metres, totally different viticulturally. While the pair pulled out many of the vines during the industry downturn early last decade, the wine bug remained with Maxwell.

He asked Sharp, a long-term friend, if he’d look after a vineyard if he planted one on his weekend block at Mongarlowe. What Maxwell had in mind, recalls Sharp, was a very small vineyard he could enjoy, with the aim of making good wine.

Sharp says he knew nothing about vineyards, but accepted the task and planted 200 vines each of riesling and chardonnay in 2000. While Maxwell and Sharp were aware that some people regarded the frost-prone site as an unlikely place to grow grapes, the first vines reached the cordon in the first year, suggesting they could be onto something.

But a subsequent planting of merlot failed and a run of heavy frosts in October 2006 destroyed 500 vines, including a block of pinot noir. Tempranillo took off well, but as the stock they planted carried a virus, Sharp dug them out and planted more riesling, by now a consistent performer.

The vineyard now includes shiraz, viognier, pinot gris, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay and riesling.

Early on, Maxwell introduced Sharp to well-known viticulturist David Botting (he’d consulted on the Nullo Mountain vineyard). And Botting, impressed by the vineyard, came on board as consultant.

At the time the grapes were being trucked to David Lowe’s winery at Mudgee, a legacy of the Nullo Mountain venture. But Botting suggested making the wines closer to the vineyard. The whites in particular, he recommended, needed quick processing. He arranged a meeting on site between Maxwell and Sharp and Murrumbateman winemaker, Alex McKay. As a result McKay took over the winemaking from 2008.

McKay describes the Half Moon site as a little bit cooler than Canberra with double the rainfall (on well-drained soil), with more humidity – a plus for retention of grape aroma and flavour.

He says, “management is first class with a level of attention and hand work you’d be more likely to see in Europe than around here”.

Malcolm Sharp confirms he and his wife Jenny do the majority of work by hand, with a little spraying from a quad bike on one flatter section. On the steep sections, for example, Jenny reels the spray hose out to him from a utility parked at the top as he descends and sprays on foot; then reels him in like a lifesaver as he struggles back up the slope.

To date, says McKay, riesling shows the most consistency and potential. It starts with “enormous levels of acid”, he says, so as a young wine it’s difficult to see the fruit quality lurking under the acidity. But it’s there he say, as the trophy winning 2010 demonstrates, having fleshed out notably in the two years since bottling.

That high acidity, reasons Sharp, comes from the very cool site. The vineyard, at around 630 metres, is flanked by higher ground, with the coastal escarpment immediately to the east.  The days tend to be warm to hot, but cold air pools there in the evening, with overnight temperatures of just four and five degrees common during the growing season.

McKay rates the chardonnay as very good, too, and similar in style to wines from Tumbarumba. But production of just one barrel a year provides little scope to explore the style.

He’s optimistic about shiraz even though it’s difficult and harvested from the individually staked bush vines “at the dusk of vintage”. He adds, “We can’t say as emphatically it’s as suited as riesling”.

While the trophy-winning riesling sold out quickly, the 2011 (a very good wine needing time, says McKay) has been released. It and the other Half Moon wines are available at Plonk, Fyshwick Markets, and at Local Liquor and Boutique Wines on Wallace in Braidwood.

This is a producer to watch, though production will remain small. Tony Maxwell has no plans to expand the vineyard says Malcolm Sharp.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2012
First published 24 October 2012 in The Canberra Times

On June 29 in Moscow, Penfolds told the world the best seal for wine is glass. They didn’t say it in so many words. But that’s the message dramatically delivered in twelve $168,000 glass ampoules of Penfolds Kalimna Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon 2004. Yes, just 12 for the whole world.  And the problem for Penfolds will be allocating them, not selling them.

The price tag, quality of product, originality of the idea and launch at Moscow’s Pushkin Restaurant (with a run of legendary old Penfolds reds lavished on the guests) ignited huge global publicity.

Behind the cleverly executed campaign, lies years of thinking by winemaker Peter Gago about the best way to seal wine intended for decades or even centuries of cellaring.

By the 2004 vintage Penfolds had adopted screw caps for all its reds except Grange. And in a 2007 interview, Gago told me why not, “‘With Grange we’re talking about people cellaring it for thirty to fifty years. We’ve had trials for ten years, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that these wines will still be good in four or five decades. It’s the integrity of the seal, not ageing that’s of concern”.

He explained that while we knew screw cap seals kept white wines perfectly for thirty years, the chemistry of red wine is different and we simply don’t know for certain whether the seal will last.

He recalled working with well-known sparkling-wine maker, Ed Carr, at the company’s sparkling cellars. They observed how crown seals on sparkling red wines often deteriorated where those for sparkling whites didn’t.

Gago believed a glass-to-glass seal presented the best solution as there’d be nothing to corrode – no perishable material like cork, the tin or polymer coated material in screw caps or the silicon o-ring of the glass Vino-Lok.

Indeed, Penfolds had already engaged an engineer to develop a prototype – a glass disc held in place with a spring-loaded clamp.

Two years later Gago told me they’d developed a second prototype, “a pseudo screw cap” holding a glass disc in place, and had tested both on the 2006 vintage Grange.  He said he’d like to take it to the next level, but that would require money – an unlikely outcome at the time as parent company Foster’s struggled with its wine division.

During both the 2007 and 2009 interviews, Gago discussed the concept of a “time capsule” – a wine sealed in a continuum of glass, capable of cellaring for centuries. That’s the dream that became a reality in the recently released ampoule.

Gago calls the ampoule project and the earlier glass-to-glass trials “parallel pursuits” – separate but interrelated. He hopes that success of the radical new ampoule might spark enthusiasm for glass seals within in the company. All it needs now is money, and imagination.

It presents a golden opportunity for Penfolds new managing director, Gary Burnand, to make his mark on the company and, indeed, on the entire wine world. The ampoule gave us the first ever perfectly-sealed wine. By supporting Gago’s glass-to-glass concept he could usher in the most radical technological change since the invention of the glass bottle.

Kalimna vineyard, Block 42

In the nineteenth century, this northern Barossa site provided firewood for D.J. Fowler and company. In the 1880s, precise date unknown, George Fowler planted and named the Kalimna vineyard. Penfolds bought it in 1945 and its fruit subsequently starred in many of the company’s greatest reds – including blended wines like Grange and several notable cabernets sourced only from Block 42. These include Kalimna Cabernet Sauvignon 1948, Grange Cabernet Sauvignon 1953 and the first Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon (1964).

Winemaker Peter Gago rates Grange cabernet 1953 slightly ahead of Grange Hermitage 1953, in his view the best Grange ever made.

Gago says the low-yielding Block 42 produces extraordinary wine in some vintages. In the most recent outstanding vintages, 1996 and 2004, Penfolds released cabernet under the Kalimna Block 42 name. The wines tend to fetch $500–$600. The ampoules contain the 2004 vintage. Penfolds believes the venerable old vines on Block 42 to be the oldest continuously producing cabernet sauvignon in the world.

What you get for $168,000

• 750ml of Penfolds Kalimna Block 42 Cabernet 2004 in a glass ampoule, designed and hand-blown by glass artist Nick Mount.
• A grey and ruby coloured glass plumb-bob, designed and hand-blown by Nick Mount. The plumb-bob suspends the ampoule in its Jarrah cabinet.
• Jarrah cabinet designed and made by furniture craftsman, Hendrik Foster.
• Precious metal details designed and made by Hendrik Forster.
• A Penfolds winemaker will travel anywhere in the world to open the wine using one of two purpose made tungsten tipped devices to cut and snap the glass tip of the ampoule.

Penfolds produced 12 sets of ampoules for the world market. One remains in the company’s museum cellar at Magill, Adelaide. One is to appear at an event in Singapore next year, but exactly how isn’t clear. The remaining ten are up for grabs as I write. Penfolds also produced and is retaining in its Magill cellar an additional stand-alone ampoule of Kalimna Block 42 2004, without the plumb-bob, precious metal trappings or timber case.

Penfolds Managing Director, Gary Burnand, says retailers and private collectors around the world want the ampoules. Allocating them could take all the diplomacy in the world.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2012
First published 18 July 2012 in The Canberra Times