Slightly smoky, like prosciutto or gently-smoked bacon fat. Slightly acrid, like burlap, cordite, and the Mintaro slate quarry after they've split a big slab off in the summer sun. And then it's pungent with that smug aroma of grandma's lime-and-ginger marmalade on buttered white toast. I'm sniffing the Sevenhill Clare Valley Riesling 2006, which won the J. B. MacMahon Trophy for best white wine under $20 at the Royal Adelaide Wine Show of that year.
Take a schlück. My goodness. It's a rich and generous
feeling with a flavour like a miracle smoothie that somehow combines all those
aromas into a burnished mellow brilliance with the glow of brass like
you hear in Van Dyke Parks' Cannon in D. The aftertaste, with its persistent,
but polite wedge of firm acidity seems to turn a spotlight on the whole shiny
performance.
This experience is very much like one can derive from a
mild mature Burgundian Chardonnay. That smoke emulates the toasted oak such
wines involve. The cordite is like the nose-prickling mixture of sulphur and
yeast that you'll find most prominently in a younger Burgundy. Add a few slices
of stewed white peach to your marmalade on toast and you have a flavour
uncannily similar to good Chardonnay.
The biggest difference? The flavour of this beautiful
calm Riesling shows no oak. Apart from that semblance of toasted oak in the
fragrance, there's none in the palate, which only serves to make that part of
it vaguely resemble an aged Chardonnay from Chablis, that satellite sub-region
of Burgundy heading north towards Champagne, where it's cooler and they don't
use much wood. But while the wines there are grown in Kimmeridgian chalk and
clay rich in marine fossils, they can sure smell and taste slaty.
My point being? Good Burgundy usually starts at $120, not
$20. While the newest Sevenhill model of this Riesling may have crept upwards a
dollar or two, there's still a $100-plus gap before you hit much Burgundy worth
your trouble.
Considering this is what happens if you can afford to
cellar $20 Riesling for a decade, it's important to see what happens if you
have the twenty but not the time. So let's peel the finest rizza from Elizabeth
Heindenreich, who makes the wine there with Brother John May S.J. for the
Jesuits of Sevenhill.
Sevenhill St.
Francis Xavier Clare Valley Single Vineyard Riesling 2016
$35; 11% alcohol;
screw cap)
Yeah, I know, I know: this one's $35. That's because,
unlike the standard $22 jobbie, this is from the best tiny patch of Riesling on
the monastery: it's their top Riesling.
Which, knowing the acuity of its makers, suggests to me
it'll do an even better job than the less spendy model.
And yes, I did attempt a review of this wine in August,
when it was so young it couldn't talk. Now, half a year older, it really
deserves a second look: it's putting on flesh. It shows even more promise.
Lime pith, sliced fresh ginger root, all manner of citrus
blossom, and not so much slate or chalk but hard red dirt in the summer, just
slightly prickly. Stubble. Rustling everlasting flowers on the headlands.
That'll be your bouquet.
Schlück. Elegance. Intensity. Lime and lemon juice. Dust.
It's all locked in and tight as a drum. Adult. Austere. Grainy. Slaty, as if
you were licking the lichen from an old Sevenhill tombstone. It's sufficiently
majestic and removed to barely notice you.
Which all sounds a bit droll. If your palate is not
attuned to very fine young Rieslings, and you need more instant gratification,
go for the $22 one. But if you're even halfway to full-bore Riesling pervitude
this will play your brass for you.
The major difference being? I reckon that while this grand
wine will take a lot longer to burnish and soften, it will remain more
classically Riesling-like; it'll grow toasty and marmalady for many years
before it makes me think of the expensive Chardonnays of Burgundy.
If indeed it ever does. Maybe the Burgundy richistanis
should stick to cheaper Rizza. Maybe that's where most of Burgundy resides: down
there, well below the ranks of truly magnificent Rieslings like this.
There. I've said that, too. Better said than dead, eh?
One final point. These Rieslings don't smell of the
kero/flytox/petroleum stuff many British wine critics seem to expect of good Australian
Rieslings. An honest winemaker will tell you that aroma is a fault brought on
by lazy vineyard management: it's often the smell of berries burnt too much by
the hot summer sun. Keep those grapes safe and fresh in mottled leafy shade,
and you get no kero.
You get serious grown-up bliss.
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