SILKY HEIRLOOM RACE TO THE LACE

Heirloom? This word brings polite images of chintz and old lace and the safety of powdered aunts but I warn you: With slow, careful calculated accuracy, Elena Brooks properly bruises your pixels with reds like these. You can tell from the start that good things are going to be what happened. Like this damn Heirloom Vineyards McLaren Vale Touriga 2014 ($40; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap) just seemed to disappear. Left me all smudged. Smoky, sultry, moody, silky stuff. It's a slinker. Coffee and cigarillos on the breath. Probly a bit more McLaren Vale than Touriga. Head up over the Willunga Fault to Kuitpo for the Adelaide Hills Tempranillo  2015 ($40; 14%; screw cap) and we pick up a whiff of shellack and maybe a tiny sliver of wintergreen and a little more focus in the surgeon's eye. It won't hurt, either. It just goes in like red obsidian. Barossa Shiraz 2015 ($40; 14.5%; screw cap) gets you a little pepper on your tart but then again it's just all slick and steeped in perdition and dark dry chocolate and yes please oh the bottle's done and you too: jeez what was that sort of stuff no going back praised be her precious and healing name so might just as well slide over the Stockwell Fault to their hills to Valpurgis or somewhere with some Independent Baptists taking the starchy edge off the old Lutherans for the A'Lambra Eden Valley Shiraz 2014 ($80; 14.5%; screw cap) and finally you hit the lace you'd totally forgotten. A bowl of licorice allsorts on the walnut. Oh, that was an extra forty, was it? Really. Phhooof! Wake up Mr President, it's time to blow up the world. She'll be right Pizzapants, you can do it. What was the time? You gotta be joking! See. We never went wrong. Did we? Did I? Did we do it?

Devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own.

Billy Joe Shaver sung that.

These are real good wines. Trust Unca Fillets. I said that. Philip, sorry. 

Bruised pixels, see? Purrfect. I'll make some coffee. You stay there.

Joseph leads Mary up the street ... photos by Philip White ... lyric by Billy Joe Shaver