$55; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 92+++ points
"I live to make 'seventies wine," Diana Genders
said a week ago. "I just don't do micro-ox or those things. I'm here to
wait. Like we used to do."
We were in her comfy tasting-by-appointment only winery
on McLaren Flat, drinking her best vintages from the last fifteen. The oldest, the 2000 Cabernet was just
beginning to awaken. Now I'm startled to realise that like that wine, I've had
this new release Shiraz Grenache opened all that time, and it's showing signs
of stirring, too.
A week back, this was so brutally reclusive it scared
me. It reminded me of 'seventies
Penfolds reds, tight and compressed within their surly sappy carapace,
sometimes softened a little like this, with
some Grenache.
Now it's a rich, smoky, surly stew of a thing, a welling
wallow of blackberry, mulberry, dried fig and prune with a prickly
aniseed/fennel edge. It's syrupy of texture, and almost seductive, but then the
reinforcements arrive: the acid and tannin footsoldiers rock in to warn you
that this is not gonna be a walkover.
It does indeed remind me too, eventually, of the rich,
staunch wines Diana's Dad Keith made in that same little building when I was
still in pimples.
I reckon Diana's wines are cleaner and more precise,
which serves only to make them more gradual about getting around to your actual
glowing. As she said, she's not into deliberate oxidation as has been the
fashion for years, softening wines with the vinous equivalent of the fish tank
bubbler.
This very seriously is a trip into the past. I wonder if
I drink a case will I get my yoof back?
Being very aware that not all ethanologists have the
patience to wait a week for a drink to awaken I've stuck to my points from the
moments after opening. I'd add a bit more to the score of this bottle at hand
if I were pointing it after all that air.
Genders Duncan
Single Vineyard McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2009
$55; 14.3% alcohol;
screw cap; 95+++ points
Roast fennell with aniseed and chicory, some peaty soot
with that type of red seaweed - Chondrus
crispus - that the Irish jokingly call moss and use for clearing chest colds,
blackberry leaf ... after a patient week nudging this braw laddie, these are
indicators of the wine being Cabernet.
Below all that decor, the fruits, a compote of all sorts
of red and black things glower upwards, gazing through the murk like the eyes
of ancient pike. I'll thank Ted Hughes for that image. Diana Genders, come to
think of it, is the only vigneron in the Vales as elusive as Pike, the
mythologised hermit of Marius, and perhaps the only soul in the joint who makes
wine as determinedly individualistic and outstanding of quality.
But I'm wandering ratbrained now. It's the wine. This is
a massive, impenetrable, hewn menhir of a drink which I don't reckon many would
have picked as a Cabernet upon opening and even fewer would have recognised as
the sort of classic McLaren Vale tincture we'd drink in the 'seventies.
Although Cabernet was a rarity in these parts back then.
When the teenaged Duncan Genders, brother, planted these vines in 1967, he
found it very difficult to find cuttings. Nearly fifty years ago. That's the sort of
timeframe I reckon all Diana's wines can claim. They will live for such great
stretches of time that in these infant days the best lesson they can teach can
be learned ideally by those who'll spend their $55 and ponder a glass each day
until you hit that mad rushy peak like I'm hitting now.
I'm gonna finish this bastard off.
A warning. It's not fair to go bothering Diana to drop
everything to open the doors and pour unless you are a 100% hard-core heavy
progmetal warrior of exceptional gastronomic patience and a tendency to guilt.
Not to mention an obligation to buy some of these incredible scarcities.
Show due respect to the wallet of the dogged
individualist who runs this remarkable place pretty much single-handed.
No point in making enemies at the Genders temple.
photos by Philip White
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