Black Stump Clare
Valley Viognier 2010
$26; 14.8% alcohol;
screw cap; 89 points
I'd not seen Tim Mortimer since the days when Nicholas
Binns was publican at The Exeter, and the eight-ball table was still there by
the fire. I was drinking a rustic Bulgarian red from the list when the bloke
I'd been chatting to said he'd made it. The wine. Next thing, what? Twenty
years later, same bloke rocks up with a selection of wines so truly eccentric that
they made that Bulgari oddball look mainstream.
Like this beefy Viognier from Clare. It's one of those
wines that floods the table with aroma as you pour it: all those pear and peach
and apricot aromas spill across the room, but with the mellowing, burnishing turn of a big white wine at five
years of age: it has an alluring autumnal reek.
Looking at those alcohols, and that heady perfume, I expected
a much thicker wine than I got: after all that fanfare, the palate's much
tighter and more focused than you'd think. It's still big, but it's a slick,
steely, polished spear of a wine, very much like some of the more mature
Viogniers of Condrieu, but perhaps lacking some of their distinctive phenolic
tannins, which makes it a little more like an ageing white Burgundy, and
perhaps more approachable than a typically feral Condrieu.
It makes me dribble in the general direction of a hearty
chowder (a la Bombora Café, Goolwa) or a seriously complex bouillabaisse
(Marseilles).
Exeter publican Nicholas Binns with Gabriella Bertocci, 1996 ... photo Victoria Straub
Black Stump
Nebbius
$26; 9.8% alcohol;
screw cap; 93 points
A non-vintaged blend of Clare Nebbiolo and Moscato
bianco, this slightly fizzy, sweet rosé is a serious peg closer to proper
hearty country wine than most of the raspberry-simple Grenache pinks Australian
winemakers seem to think we deserve.
It smells a little of raspberry, but I suspect that's a
subliminal insinuation induced by that outrageous rosy hue. After a proper
sniff, I find lemon pith, pomegranate juice and blood orange: grown-up aromas. There's
also that husky, dusty smell of burlap sacks stacked in the barn. Together,
this rustic ensemble makes me hungry.
The wine's so chubby and viscous it's almost fluffy. While
all those flavours indicated by the fragrance simmer along in order, the tiny
pixillations of the fizz tidy the tongue up, leaving it shampooed to best
appreciate the see-saw of acid and sugar the two varieties then provide in
perfect proportion. It leaves a fleeting insinuation of marmalade.
This is the Piedmont/Po Valley pink you have at eleven,
with a thin slice of panforte or an almond biscotti, before the shortablack and
the rollie with the grappa di moscato.
It's also wicked on big clunky ice with a slice of
orange, a mint leaf and a splash of soda.
Black Stump
Nebbius Forte
$26 - 375ml; 16.5%
alcohol; Diam compound cork; 90 points
Clare Riesling fortified with brandy spirit and flavoured
with a squeeze of Riverland mandarin concentrate? Why not? Given the volumes of
wasted fruit this wine business grows, you'd think more winemakers would be
trying their hand at pleasing aperitifo tinctures like this.
The bouquet's close to that rosé, with mandarin replacing
the blood orange, and that raw whiff of spirit widening the nostrils.
It's sweet, citrussy and nutty, like grilled cashews - a
character which probably comes from a year on yeast lees - and it's just fine
to have short, chilled; not so short, warmer, or by the standard glass at room
temperature with a chunk of ice and soda.
Bravo Black Stump! It's very cool to see somebody nudging
the boundaries without making a turgid hippy mess of everything.
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