Small Change White
16 April 2014
SMALL CHANGE? INDEED! BUT BIG VALUE
Small Change White
$20; 11.9% alcohol;
screw cap; 93 points
Fillets, Flipper, Filth, Furber, Snow, Filster, Whitey ... I've
had some nicknames in my time, some of them completely appropriate, but I've
never been called Small Change. Pardon my presumption, but I rather like it.
Rhys Howlett made the wine and named it. It's 2013 Verdelho from Langhorne
Creek, made, dare I say, much after the retro-rad style of Luis "Louie the
Duck" Pato, leader of the Portuguese white wine revolution. It reminds me
of some of his exemplary Vinhas Velhas, like the 2010, which just manages to have
the same modest number of alcohols as this. What a lovely number! Verdelho can
be made to taste a bit like Riesling, and sometimes it tastes a bit like Chenin
blanc, both of which are surprising for a variety the Portuguese cultivated on
their tropical island colony of Madiera in order to make mighty concentrated
fortifieds that would last for a century or more. It was common for sailors
headed to the antipodes to call by there for a schlück, hoist the odd barrel or
two aboard, and a bale or six of cuttings for their New World. So we grow
Verdelho. And, oh yes, did I forget to tell you that most Australian Verdelho
is very very boring. This wine is NOT boring. This one's made to taste and feel
more like an actual wine than, say, your most flinty austere Riesling or indeed
most Oz Verdelho. It has just the right drip of gingery Iberian sweat on its otherwise tropical
flesh, and the right ping of lemony acid that draws your lips to a pucker as
its tail disappears down your throat. Made to slurp with crayfish, scallops, sardines,
Coorong mullet et cetera, it is a lovely thing at a shiny little spend. If it had a
duck on it, like Luis's posh Portuguese blends, you'd be paying twice this.
Small Change Red
$22; 14% alcohol;
screw cap; 92 points
Same bloke; same gastronomic ethic and wit; same region;
made from 2013 Langhorne Creek Grenache and Shiraz. It's beautifully heady and
scented, somewhere well beyond morello cherries, past beetroot, even past
Guinness, away out in those swoony nether regions of black fruits and spooky
licorice roots which have not yet evolved. It's viscous and silky and barely
tannic, as if August Clape were suddenly to make a Beaujolais, or Pope Frank were
to burst out in tongues and begin chasing shielas round the nave. It makes me
crave those big gamy Calabrian snags they build out of scrapings and other odd
shreds of critters that fall off or get sliced or ground or chewed off or blown
away, even get run over, and miraculously escape the smokehouse, ending up in ordinary feral sausages for the grill. Which makes me
realise the wine has no discernable oak, which pushes it even further out and
away from the mainstream plonkers. I get the feeling Rhys has been plotting
these wines through all those years of exile he spent working for the
Bordelaise winemaker, Jacques Lurton, at his Kangaroo Island vineyard. Neither
of these two Small Changes happened without a lot of thought and an uncommon
wallop of gastronomic intelligence. Try here to buy' em.
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