NATASHA'S GASTRONOMIC INTELLIGENCE

NATASHA MOONEY: KICKING AUSSIE ARSE WITH THE NEW WAVE OF OLD WORLD VARIETIES




After The Albariño Affair Knocking Off A Few Marines Tash Mooney's Got The Touch!

by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

When somebody, somewhere, decided that the Iberian variety, Albariño, was the great white hope to save Australia’s wineries from damnation, this writer was confounded by the reasoning. What would we be copying? Had anybody actually been in Spain and Portugal to see how, why and where it was grown and made? Had they checked the source geology to see whether we had anything to match it? Had they considered its tendency to put on high alcohol, given the world’s abandonment of our narcotic deadhead plonks?

Highly sceptical about the first efforts made here – they seemed too oily and lacked the precision of good Alboriño – I tended to put their awkwardness down to naive winemakers struggling to perfect something new. But the stuff wasn’t Alboriño at all. It was Traminer, an awkward grape indeed, used mainly for making autumn-brown sherry-like wines in Jura, and fairly agricultural, messy things in other obscure bits of the Old World. Somebody’d imported the wrong cuttings; the CSIRO distributed them; everybody planted them.

Now they expect us to drink them.

Traminer is the warty fat grandfather of the stylish, aromatic Gewurztraminer, a much more alluring variety which Australia has singularly failed to perfect. We can’t make the easy one, so what do we do? Attempt to make its awful progenitor, and call it Savignin, because that sounds a bit like the mega-trendy Marlborough, NZ, Sauvignon blanc which we drink by the oiltankerload. Sheesh. Who do they think we are?

Knocking off a few marines with Natasha Mooney before Jesus’ birthday, I tasted her range of “alternative varieties”, and immediately nominate her to be the selector of new things we should try: while she admits to being a learner, her uncommon gastronomic intelligence sees her doing greater things with the newbies than most blundering tossers.

After Roseworthy, Tash worked through some rather serious wine stables: Penfolds, Lindemans, and Barossa Valley Estates. Wisely selecting fruit from the ancient vines of the two mighty Elmores, Roehr and Shulz, she virtually invented E&E Shiraz. Her first bash at this beauty got her best red, then best wine, at the International Wine Challenge and only the second Australian to make the Wine Spectator top ten. So she has a profound and abiding respect for the works of those who went before, and understands, as she says, that “profit is still shiraz-driven.” But her experience working vintage across the Old World is what we see emerging in her brave new landmarks.

She tipped me an Arneis from Caj Amadio’s vineyard on the banks of the South Para Reservoir, north of Kersbrook. It’s for the pointy end of her Fox Gordon range: branded as Anniversary Hill. It equals the two excellent 09 Langhorne Creek whites – a Fiano and a Greco al Tufo – that Briony Hoare released last year under her Beach Road label. Beautifully aromatic, richly flavoured and textured wine, with only 11.9% alcohol. This is the duck’s guts.

If purple had a smell it would be her Barossa Aglianico, an obscure variety from Greece via southern Italy, which was next. Blanched cashews and deep cherries in a silk sheen that gradually becomes velvet as the tannins rise and the swooning begins. Then a Barossa Sagrantino, the Umbrian grape: all musk sticks, beetroot, prune and white pepper; impossibly enveloping in its aroma, and yet fine and focused and furry with lemon pith tannins as it winds its way down your little red lane.

A bright and cheery Sangiovese next; squishy and jolly; bouncy and beautifully bright; a drink that leaves the purple kisser grinning while the paw goes out for more. Just to show she can do the odd Parkerilla, she showed a Zinfandel, made big and alcoholic for Darryl Groom’s Californian business.

“To me it’s good honest fun mucking about with these varieties, and while this is a very difficult one – there are better varieties than this – these guys are very persistent about the style they want, so it’s a pleasure, in away, to learn. But my other hobbyhorse is Cabernet ... ” and on she went to explain her concerns about how much of the new varieties the community can absorb, and just how great the traditional stalwarts can be, pouring classic Cabernet sauvignon, Shiraz, and blends of the two, concluding with her mighty Barossa Valley Estate E&E Black Pepper Shiraz 98.

“You’ve got to respect the old masters”, she added, staring into the glass. “We’ll never replicate this with new varieties.” And then, with the wonderment of a teenage pop fan, she explained her thrill when, delivering Meals on Wheels in the Barossa, she discovered her next call was Ray Beckwith, the great Penfolds wine scientist from the thirties, who among other world-breaking discoveries first revealed the importance of pH in winemaking.

“It was like serving David Bowie”, she said. “I want to go back and listen to him."

Which she has since done, and will do again. As well as taking the odd Harley scoot with her winemaking husband StepHen Dew, of Kaesler Wines, managing two scarily sharp kids, and training thoroughbreds by riding big time trackwork every morning of the week. I dunno how she does it.

CHECK TASH'S FOX-GORDON RANGE FOR A LOOK AT BOTH PAST AND FUTURE

From the vineyards up

by PHILIP WHITE
This was first published in The Independent Weekly in August 2008

“Mr. White, I’m not like you”, James Hook said as I settled in his ute. “I am a scientist.” He then took me to show me a thing or two about McLaren Vale, where he worked for the Grape, Wine and Tourism Association.

In this business, you don’t meet many so certain about their roles and their determination to fulfil them. Ian Hickinbotham spoke in such a manner when first introduced some thirty years ago; his son Stephen, was another. Ray Beckwith, too, now in his mid-nineties, is still similarly precise. Probably no other Australians have had such influence on wine as Hick Snr., and Beckwith, with their ground-breaking work on pH and malo-lactic fermentation, now taken for granted by winemakers the whole world over. Had Stephen not been killed in a plane crash, I’m sure he would have gone on to show us another thing or two.

So here was your writer, suss that we’d run out of such people of serious category, and jaundiced by the thousands of cocksure pretenders and self-promoters who fill the vast gaps between. “Their obituaries describe these people as successful businessmen and they pass promptly into oblivion” wrote Walter James of this mob in 1970. I don’t think this will be said of James Hook.

I’d seen Hook the scientist at work when he’d been called in to make an independent judgement on a grape crop. With another viticultural scientist, Derek Cameron, they succinctly disproved an allegation that the crop was diseased. The brewery which had tried to evade its purchasing contract was forced to keep its bargain, and the conscientious, terrified grower stayed in business.

And now in McLaren Vale, Hook gradually unfolded a severe arsenal of knowledge and attitude. Not only did he show a rare savvy about vine husbandry, but his deep appreciation of the folly of greed and environmental destruction left most of the wine business for dead.

Then he sent me some shiraz: an understated bottle, displaying a dancer resting on a chair, named Lazy Ballerina after a canopy management where the vine’s canes were organized to resemble the dress of a ballerina. That wine, and another release since, with a little viognier, impressed me very deeply, with its intensity of character, gastronomic intelligence, and promise for the future.

With his parents, James has purchased an unusual, if run-down, European garden on the big bend at the south end of the Kuitpo forest. A new tasting room is nearing completion; the garden is gradually regathering its beauty, its silver birches and healthy river red gums standing in bright contrast to the wall of pines opposite, a carpet of winter blooms spread beneath. A peacock admired himself in the reflecting door as we nudged the glasses last week.

James, the viticulturer, had planned four shiraz wines and managed their vines accordingly. Two were from vineyards he considers sufficiently distinctive and suitable to be released as single vineyard wines, to offer numerous points of difference for discussion about the nature of McLaren Vale shiraz. Another is a cross-vineyard blend, designed to follow the style of his earlier releases; the fourth is a shiraz viognier.

“I have planned these from the vineyards up”, he said, introducing a string of barrel samples. “This exercise is to test my plan, to ensure the wines are sound and true to my original goal, or if any of them require tweaking or blending.”

The wines from Dudley Brown’s Inkwell vineyard, near the Gulf on California Road, was tighter than most shiraz, reflecting an uncommonly dense grape cell structure: elegant, but highly focused and intense. No changes required. Next was the contrasting monster from the piedmont of Sellicks Hill, from the vines of Paul Petagna. Whilst closer to typical Vales shiraz, with its cuddly big chocolate and licorice, this, too, was tight with mighty tannins, and ever so gradually tapered off into a tail uncommonly elegant and refined after such an opening. Right on the knocker.

The blended wine, from various sources, followed closely the earlier Lazy Ballerina style – read masterly - and the last, the shiraz viognier, is a lesson to those who mindlessly blend these varieties in the name of fashion alone. No peach syrup in this baby. Uh-huh. It had all the austere acid and tannin elegance of the first three wines, but with the added tannic finesse that only tiny additions of early-picked, cool-climate, co-fermented viognier have to offer.

Only one barrel was faintly suss, still showing a little lazy malo-lactic ticking away. It’ll be fine when the Lazy Ballerina tasting room opens in the spring. Which is something worth waiting for, given the maker’s success in defining the flavours of his finished wines in advance, then selecting and managing the vineyards to achieve his goal. We have a new benchmark forming up, there in the forest. I’m hooked.