($30; 13% alcohol; screw
cap)
While the wildcats of McLaren Vale plant Fiano everywhere - it grows much
better at Langhorne Creek, methinks, until the Vales finds the right geology - the belligerent and knowing Paul Petagna
flips 'em the bird with this, the region's first home-grown Greco. (Beach Road
has a good one, but that's also from the estuarine realms of Langhorne Creek.)
Paul
learned his winemaking from his late father-in-law, Modestino Piombo, in the
shed where this wine was born. He makes his wine real slow and rustic. Old oak;
lots of long lunches; a well-greased spit; wood oven; pots bubbling with pasta ...
Nigel Rich conducts vintage lunch amongst Paul Petagna's Sellicks Hill fermenters
This
Greco has alluring wafts of fresh-poached peach with grilled lemon and
pineapple, dusted with musky confectioner's sugar and crystallised violets. And
oh yes, a sprinkle of fresh white pepper. When they pack their old Ferraris
away in climate-controlled storage, millionaire petrolheads put talcum on their
windscreen rubbers to preserve them. It smells like that, too.
These aromas are
not vividly broadcast in the flavour division. Rather, we have a neutral moment
that's all about texture: modestly unctuous, then very long and dusty and
tapering until those lovely things you inhaled return in your happy exhalation.
Nigel
Rich (The Elbow Room and Slo Moe's) once boned a pig, stuffed it with about ten boned paddock-raised chooks,
fresh
herbs and a wheelbarrow full of garlic and and cooked it slow on a spit while we attacked barrels in Château Modestino
there on the slope above the Gulf but below The Victory.
This delicious adult
wine would go just swimmingly with that feast, were it all to happen again.Which
it may, or something like it: keep an eye on the Sellicks Hill Wines website.
Torzi
Matthews Vigna Cantina Eden Valley Rosato di Sangiovese 2015 ($25; 13.5%
alcohol; screw cap)
I know, I know. Every time I review wines from the Torzi
Matthews stable or their Long Hop/Old Plains brands with colleague Tim
Freeland, I drool over their wholesome, open-hearted honesty, the rustic sense of country they express, and
their amazing value. So there. I've done it again.
And so has dear Dominic Torzi
with this disarming rosé. It's not sweet: it has not one insinuation of the
simple raspberry-jelly pink drinks upon which too many squander really good
Grenache. Instead, we have an autumnal-coloured wine with a slightly cheesey
whiff amongst its gentle capocollo and mortadella fats. Which makes it the
perfect accompaniment to a proper antipasto spread: it'll handle even the
tricky tannins of the pickled artichoke.
The wine is gentle and fine of
structure, with just the right amount of viscosity to settle you down before
the dusty tannins move in to excite you and tighten your hunger. It'll make a
vitello tonnato sing, duet perfectly with veal Sorrentino, and build to a real
cute choral work with saltimbocca. And it'll do this, in every case, with a
role more supportive than contrasting. It will never intrude, but lubricate and
very gently stimulate. So there: I'm drooling again. Vivaldi glorias please.
Torzi
Matthews Vigna Cantina Barossa Valley Tempranillo 2014 ($25; 14% alcohol; screw
cap)
Brazenly Tempranillo in every way, this joven style red reeks of all that
Spanish leather and coal dust the variety boasts at its best. It smells complex
and deep like a glowering well of country goodness.
Once again, the flavours are
secondary to the wine's grainy texture - it's the rewards one finds in the
exhalation that give it that long, satisfying finish. Which is never to suggest
it's not appetising, too: this is one for a steaming stack of big field
mushrooms, pan-tossed blue cabbage, and/or lightly-poached baby beetroots, with
or without a dribbling haunch of beef.
You can spend a lot of hard-earned
searching for Spanish Temps that never approach this one for sheer gastronomic
delight.
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