Cradle of Hills McLaren Vale Route du Bonheur GMS 2011
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Daughter Georgina Smith came up with the brand name, Mum Tracy runs the vineyard and did the artwork (Shiraz lees on paper) and Paul Smith makes the wine in this brave little outfit on the Kurrajong rubble of the piedmont near the Victory Hotel. These Smiths have quietly, quickly moved to the pointy end of McLaren Vale quality winemaking, leaving many of the established names gulping in their wake. This cool baby’s lush with cherry juice, blueberry, and black and redcurrant. True to the pure and clean vineyard regime of horticulturer/environmental scientist Tracy, the wine is disarming in its bright, healthy freshness. It smells like a Burgundian fruiterer’s display. The flavours are intense, the texture silky, the length and form of the wine utterly delicious. About three-quarters of the way through we get a lick of oak which adds spice to the allure. This wood is nowhere near as sappy as those were, but it brings to mind the ultra-slick Black Label Wolf Blass Jimmy Watson Trophy reds of the ’seventies. Which raises an interesting thought: responsible organic vine gardening and tiny back shed winemaking can come up with a wine whose style is very damn close to the best wines of Australia in the pre-refinery days. Come to think of it, Blassie’s winemaker, the mighty John Glaetzer, made those three Jimmy winners in a colorbond shed not much bigger than Smithy’s. Watch this space.
Yangarra Estate McLaren Vale Roussanne 2012
$25; 13.6% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
First disclaimer: I live in a small rented flat near Kangarilla, in the Yangarra vineyard in which I have no financial interest, unfortunately. Second disclaimer: I love this new wine. It grew where the Maslin Sands ironstone meets the Kurrajong Formation rubble: rounded riverine rocks washed down over the faultline from the mountains that towered over the Willunga Escarpment until last time the world melted and the ice and snow washed them away in violent effluvia of a scale we simply cannot comprehend. I’m talking about aroma and flavour here, not fruit. Forget all that standard white wine language about limes and citrus and stone fruits. Third disclaimer: I’m white in more ways than one, and carry the scars of many stonings, and I think that if it’s fruity descriptors that you want this smells like avocado and white sapote (Casimiroa edulis – the Mexican sapote, not the Vietnamese). But it predominately smells like all those rocks bashed to powder and dust in one king-hell mortar and pestle. Most sommeliers and wine writers call this minerality. I call it rocks, because not all minerals are rocks and this smells like those rocks it grew in and seems nothing like well-known minerals such as asbestos, mercury, salt, arsenic, ice or gold. Which brings me to actually drinking the stuff. Pretty much more of the above, really, with perfectly slimy flesh – avocado and white sapote, funnily enough – and that dusty dry extremely fine-grained tannin that tastes like all those rocks smashed into powder. As for an accompanying dish? Richard Olney’s cool Provencale bean and pork belly stew is perfect. I reckon it’d be one of the very few wines which could handle the bitter tannins of the artichoke, but I haven’t tried that yet. Otherwise, it goes deliciously with avocado, olive oil, lemon juice and black pepper, or, even more simply, sliced white sapote. And oh yes. They don’t make much of a big deal about it, but this wine was grown and made while the vineyard was in transition to full biodynamic and organic certification, so the wine has no herbicides (like the dreaded Roundup), and no pesticides or synthetic chemicals, which makes me very happy. Not only do I love putting the wine in my body, but my body loves living in the vineyard.
No comments:
Post a Comment