($18; 14% alcohol; screw
cap; 300 dozen)
"We
have been asked by customers and the wine trade if we could make a less
expensive, everyday drinking wine and we have worked on ways of keeping costs
down," writes winemaker Duane Coates.
"We have started with good
vineyard sites, but kept down costs by not using new oak, utilizing less
expensive glass for our bottles and maintaining a 12 month barrel maturation
regime. The base wine uses 2/3 Langhorne Creek Syrah and the rest Adelaide
Hills pressings."
Nevertheless Duane let natural yeast do a three week ferment
before shovelling the pulp into his "favourite
½ tonne Mori basket press ... that gives a great flavour and soft tannin
profile ... [our] traditional approach precludes the use of the additives and
fining agents such as tannins, enzymes, egg, fish or milk products. Bottled
unfined and unfiltered in February of 2016."
The result's a
sinfully smooth, intense, adult, juniper-and-fig beauty, with the texture and
some of the flavour of the heirloom "peach plum" I recall from my
childhood, and peppery Dutch licorice without the salt.
Then, yep, soft and
fine tannins. Schlurp.
I admit to harbouring a shard of doubt when Duane
suggested the wine would still be drinking well in eight years, but here I am
finishing this bottle a week after opening, and it still tastes bloody lovely. It'll
go a decade easy.
Which is probly why it's sold out.
Watch for the '16 model!
Coates Robe Vineyard The Malbec 2015
($25; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 240 dozen)
Malbec,
or Cot, is another of the Bordeaux red varieties left in the shade - or the
wake - of the big hit Cabernets. It now lives on
both sides of the equatorial Andes, and a little in Patagonia.
It makes muddy
soft floodplain red at Langhorne Creek, gunbarrel blue juniper and ozone
elegance at Frankland Estate in Great Southern near Albany, and some of the
best, most intense and elegant red of all in the formidable arsenal of
Wendouree in Clare.
Because of the climates and proximity to the Great Southern
Ocean, I approached this expecting its Limestone Coast fruit to show
similarities to the Frankland wine. It's not quite so fine and taut as that: stylistically
it's somewhere between that Frankland form and the blues-and-funky soul of the
traditional Langhorne jobbies. So atop all those usual black-and-blue
fruits, there's that chocolate Mississippi mudcake, but also a most intriguing
whiff of the curry tree, Bergera koenigii.
Like the Petite Rouge, this more surly natural yeast wonder is still drinking
fresh and clean after a whole week of air. It'll live for yonks. Lamb korma,
ta. Or kedgeree.
Coates Langhorne Creek
Cabernet Sauvignon 2014
($30; 14%
alcohol; screw cap)
This mudflat baby is chockers with the minty eucalypt
those Langhorne vineyards exude. It smells like your first big inhalation when
you alight there from your car. Not to mention the feeling y9u get through the
aroma and flavour sensors in your skin.
There are the usual maritime Cabernet
characters, too: blackcurrants, blueberries, juniper and cedar.
It confirms my
forty-year suspicion that if managed carefully and harvested before it turns to
gloop, Langhorne Cabernet can get very very close to that other estuarine vignoble,
Medoc in Bordeaux. It's almost as austere as an average Medoc, but that extra
Oz breeze of red gum in with the forgivable, nay, likeable brash edges of youth:
it will tighten and polish up to a shimmering sheen in five years. Masterly
wine. Brilliant.
Pity so few Langhorne winemakers ever get near this. Maybe
they're just too busy drinking beer.
Coates
The Iberian McLaren Vale Langhorne Creek 2013
($30; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 270 dozen)
Touriga Nacional (44%),
Tempranillo (14%), Monastrell (11%), Syrah (9%), Carignan (6%), Garnacha (6%),
Cinsault (6%) and Malbec (4%)? Why the hell not?
How does one little Peninsula,
this bonnie Fleurieu, produce wines so akin to Hermitage, Bordeaux, Italy and Spain? Why do so few winemakers
understand this amazing potential? And how come so few ever get to squeeze
those visions so successfully into bottle?
Intelligence. Worldly knowledge.
Acute epicurean awareness. Patience. Wisdom. Money. Skill.
Of all this suite,
this is the ravishing black-haired beauty that has just grown more sultry and
broody over the week I've taken one glass per day. Now on the dregs, I wish I'd
missed days two to six, and still had five glasses to go over the next days.
Maybe it would start to show signs of fatigue during that remarkable excursion.
This is indeed very Iberian. Black ham; warm black olives; chorizos ... yum. Then
it tends to yearn its way east toward the more perfumed Bandol and I think of Helmut
Newton photographing Charlotte Rampling naked on the table in the bullfighting
committee's meeting room in the Hotel Norde Pinus in Arles ...
"The use of
selected French cooperages (Seguin-Moreau, Nadalie, Marsannay, Dargaud &
Jaegle)," Duane writes, "in a mix of puncheons, hogsheads and
barriques provides complexity, integration and harmony with our intended style."
Very few winemakers can say that. Very few have dreamed or attempted a wine
like this.
And $30? You gotta be jokin.
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