CHARDONNAY CHOICEST AT COLES? CLOSE!

OAK FERMENTERS AT KOOYONG ON MORNINGTON PENINSULA

Vintage Cellars Cuts Mustard
Coles Cultists Killing ABC Slide
Hey Hey Hey - It’s Chardonnay
by PHILIP WHITE - A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

Chardonnay took a long time to hit Australia. The earliest white settlers had brought the best grape varieties of Bordeaux, the French Mediterranean coast, Germany, Portugal and Spain, but perhaps wisely steered clear of the great white of Burgundy, where it snows.

Not many Australian wine regions get snow.

Sir Samuel Davenport (right), of Beaumont Cellars, recorded his belief that “Chardonet” would be a critical grape for South Australia, and perhaps planted it at Marble Hill and Macclesfield in the very early days; we do not know. His beautiful ampelography resides in the Adelaide Library, with his pencilled note from the earliest days of the colony.

The C word seemed hardly to be uttered again for 120 years.

It wasn’t until about 25 years ago that it was worth conducting a comparative tasting of Australian Chardonnays. These would come from Padthaway, Coonawarra, the Hunter, the Riverland, Barossa, McLaren Vale, and the Yarra Valley. They were largely terrible: oaked awkwardly with coarse American and Limousin wood; usually chips.

David Wynn’s Mountadam was also well underway then. Using cuttings from a single Marble Hill vine (destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983) and the Hunter, and better wood from the Allier, Troncais and Vosges forests, his High Eden Ridge wines were very good from the start.

As were the early Tasmanians, Pipers Brook and Heemskerk.

Encouraged by Len Evans, the Petaluma chairman who controlled the show ciruit, Chardonnay suddenly grew everywhere from Berri to Bourke.

There’s a push now to reverse the wise ABC - “anything but Chardonnay” - trend of the past decade, but this appears to have been hijacked by that small cadre of terroiristes headed by Grant Ramage in Coles’ premium wines buying sector. They’ve decided to show us a thing or two by having some of our better cool district Chardonnay makers prepare 2009 wines which they sell exclusively through Vintage Cellars. There’s no expensive middle man, so the prices are lower.

And the wines are very good.

Starting at the top end for those of us with no money, the cheapest is Emma Woods’s Seppelt Grampians Chardonnay ($19; 88+ points), a tight, steely wine with little discernable oak but savoury twists of butterscotch, honeycomb toffee and cushioning charcuterie fats. It’s your-right-down-the-line salt and pepper squid accompaniment: a lot more satisfying than 95% of the current squinty flood of Kiwi savvy-Bs.

The only one from outside Victoria is the Alterum Adelaide Hills Chardonnay ($25; 92+ points) made by Martin Shaw, of Shaw and Smith. Compared to the sparse Grampians wine, it’s a big step up in complexity, soul and alcohol, the latter factor probably due to the warmer nature of the Adelaide Hills. Its fruit is fresh, fragrant, and tropical, with lovely, lightly smoky oak. The palate is authoritative and weighty; there’s a pleasant powdering of oatmealy tannin in the tail, and very firm, stony acidity. Cook a braised free range chook in a hotpot in cider with onion, capers, and live tarragon, and you’ll be just juicy.

Kooyong’s Sandro Mosele (left) firmly holds a place in my Australia top twenty winemakers, and it’s a reflection of the Coles/Vintage Cellars buying team’s acuity that they’ve squeezed the Ballewindi Vineyard Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay ($30; 91++) from him. It’s a tight, complex, stony wine to sniff, with rusty iron smells as much as refined, juicy pears: Bosc, Anjou and Rocha varieties come to mind. There’s also a pleasant layer of pancetta fat, perhaps from some malo-lactic fermentation. It finishes dusty, stony and appetizing, in a perfectly Mediterranean manner. Napolitan spaghetti vongole would sit it pretty!

To the Yarra Valley next, and Dave Bicknell’s Oakridge Parish Of Gruyere Yarra Valley Chardonnay ($33; 90++ points). This is sharp, acrid wine to sniff: carbide and cordite give leading edge to a wedge of crunchy fresh pear and pithy dried apple aromas. In the mouth, an aluminium-like acidity dominates the tapering fruit, making a receding wedge … while it lacks complexity, it would beat many a Chablis of this price into my anxious glass. It’s long, lean and appetizing; go bouillabaisse!

Thence up bigtime in price to the rk Beechworth Chardonnay ($58; 93++). Giaconda is the grail of most Victorian chardomaniacs, who do tend to xenophobia. 09 being a difficult year, what with the horrid incineration of the alpine forests and all, this is the only Chardonnay Rick Kinzibrunner (below) will release from that vintage: Coles got it all.

Easily the best of this entire range, it shows true Giaconda form: the slightly peachy, cuddly, squishy fruit, seasoned with the peculiarly spicy Sirugue French oak favoured by this maker. But there’s beautiful astringency, too: an appetising string of acid and very dry red earth tannin that stretches the palate beautifully. It’s by no means cheap, but it’s more modestly-priced than your true blue Giaco. Stewed fowl with fresh herbs; goose cassoulet; anything from Richard Olney’s immaculate Provence The Beautiful cookbook will be perfect.

Such endorsement of the scary big Coles will make me no friends amongst the small local producers of Chardonnay. But they should rest assured that this fine suite of good-to-almost-great Chardonnays will help reawaken your Chardonnay receptors, which is in their interest if their wines are any good.

No other single company but Penfolds can table such a platoon of Chardonnays, but their prices are as mighty as their wines. In the case of these Coles wines, the prices are very good. If you buy a straight or mixed case, you get another 30% off!

Since Coles have “let go” Jeremy Stockman (right), who played a vital role in the selection and blending of these wines, it will be very interesting to see whether they can maintain this quality. Very few independent wine stores have a Chardonnay shelf as reliable and well-chosen as this tight-knit bunch. You’ll usually have to wade through dozens of very awkward wines to find anything like these.

Jeremy is now working as a consultant: most Australian Chardonnay makers would be better off using his blending skills, if these wines are anything to go by.

And they are. So go buy.

TIM SMITH ROCKIN IT AT CHATEAU TANUNDA

TIM SMITH ON THE SHIRAZ HUNT

Quiet Triumph At Tanunda
Smithy Grabs Gold For Geber
And Makes One Personal Best
by PHILIP WHITE a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly
There is a mist and a wind-driven shoosh of sideways rain and up on the ridges where I prefer to be, the vintage is being scrubbed by brush and hose from tank and fermenter and people don’t know what to do because it’s over now and there’s not much of it left.

I kicked tanks in Chateau Tanunda this last week, which is on a sort of a ridge there above the cricket oval and Lot 1 Moorooroo, the first block in the Barossa to be surveyed. But it's really pretty close to the bottom of the Valley, topographically, while master winesmith name of Tim scours the upper ridges for the very best old Barossa vineyards. He has been known to do this on his classic Triumph Bonneville. He also plays drums in a rock band. He is also one of the best winemakers I know.

Of course there’s lots still to attend to vintage-wise: a shred or tonne or bucket of this or that are likely to emerge from here or there if the weather’s right. And then the wines which are finishing their ferments will gradually wriggle through the arcane twists and turns they persistently fizz, tick, or simmer through. There are barrels to wrangle and secondary ferments to steer, and fining and blending and polishing and whatever, but for a moment, the work is done.

Smithy was quite literally putting the last of the Chateau’s harvest through the fermenters. We sniffed and spat this and that, and I apologise to Joel Matchoss, who stuck his head out of the bottom of a vat with a brush in his hand and asked me to pass him a hose. I got a shock.

This is one of the very best vintages I can remember. I think that as individuals we can recall accurately maybe ten or twelve years of vintage reality: the essence of the flavours eventually fades from the vivid memory, and while one might still draw with great accuracy this and that from great old wines, and great old recollections, most people who were there when it happened forget the real flavours of the vintage before it matures. There is much braggadocio, and often remorse, but little true memory.

But I will remember the 2010 wines.

Some of the last fruit was Mourvedre. What we used to call Mataro, after the name of a town in the south of Spain where no Mataro grows. For some reason we didn’t call it Monastrell, which is its Spanish name, but now use the French name, Mourvedre. Amusing.

The prickly French stopped us using the name Hermitage for Shiraz, because they said we were passing the grape off as a French product. We respectfully called it Hermitage, like in Grange Hermitage, because our original cuttings came from the Rhone Valley vineyard of that name. But the Frogs have no qualms about us using their name for a Spanish variety.

As the Australian weather gets hotter, Mourvedre’s likely to be one major grape which takes some pressure from Shiraz, which seems to get too ripe and jammy far too readily with ordinary Barossa or McLaren Vale viticulture laziness.

In the south of France, in places like Bandol and Minervois, Mourvedre rules the roost, often blended with Grenache and Shiraz, but usually over-ruling them in the blends, as its flavour is more intense. In some cases, I think it’s far more interesting.

I saw great Mourvedre last year, in site of the blistering heatwave, and here it was again from a cool, polite vintage: one tank bright with the smell of Morello cherries, another with the sinister gunmetal glint of swarf and carbon. They will make a great blend, these two components. The former tank reminded me of the wines of the Mornington Peninsula wizard Sandro Mosele. It could almost be Pinot noir. I mentioned this to Tim. “I went through uni with him”, he said. “We sat together. He’s great winemaker.”

The second tank reminded me of the mindblowing wines Edouard Labeye helps to make in Mirnervois, near Sete, on the Mediterranean. “He’s awesome!” Tim said. “I’ve met him in France. He’s a great winemaker.”

This is how vintage goes, always reminding me of how few great winemakers there really are, and how the top of the great squishy wine pyramid, the pointy end, contains so few true heroes. Smithy’s got the touch. He’s in my top thirty Australians. To rub that in, we now have over 2,400 wineries. And as if show awards were something to boast of, the Barossa paper calls him Tim Goldsmith. He'll be a true local when they start calling him Goldschmidt.

He poured me the first of the finished - bottled and released - wines I’ve had from 2010, the Chateau Tanunda Barossa Tower Moscato. Eight per cent alcohol, $15, and perfect to settle that bleary vintage visage at about ten o’clock in the morning. It’s sweet and ripe and gently fizzing with estery banana, rose and musk. “It needs to be chilled”, Tim said, nose down. “And while people might think it’s a simple sweet thing, it gets all the proper respect. This is from thirty year old vines.”

Get your shiny bottom up to the astonishing Chateau Tanunda now, and buy a case of this delight. Then wrap your sensories around the new Terroirs of Barossa Shiraz wines: one from Lyndock, one from Ebenezer, and one from Greenock. Smithy’s golden touch is beginning to emerge in maturing Chateau Tanunda wines like these. At last John and Evelyn Geber’s multi-million dollar restoration of Sir Samuel Cleland’s mighty stone Chateau has some wines to match the vision and endeavour of such admirable capitalists.


Chateau Tanunda 100 Year Old Vines Eden Valley Shiraz 2008

$95; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
It’s a bit silly putting points to a wine of this provenance in such an infant stage, but we do it. This is mighty. It has Tempranillo-like Parade Gloss bootpolish tones in its confounding depths. If its vineyard was not quite so venerable, it would fit perfectly in the $48 Terroirs trio, as it’s not like any of those. It has posher French-coopered oak, because it deserves no less. Between that spicy decoration, and the schisty, stony tannins which glower below, there’s layer upon layer of fleshy, intense, devilishly seductive Barossa Shiraz of the highest calibre. Cellar.

Tim Smith Barossa Mourvedre Grenache Shiraz 2009

$28; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
This is Tim Smith’s best wine yet, which is saying something. It pulls you up. Great noses which generally sweep over glasses are suddenly brought to a dead halt when they hit this one. It’s harmonious; perfectly formed and alive, with all the right stuff in abundance: the nightshades, the carbon black, Smithy’s forge, prunes, Morello cherries, dried fig … buy some quickly, but drink it slowly: it needs a decade of dungeon or a day with the top off. Forget Bandol and Chateau-Neuf: this new Australian sets a standard that renders your regular GSM null and void.

The succulent succulents of Mornington

by PHILIP WHITE

Yesterday, after a feast of fresh crab at Greg Fahey’s stylishly modernised pub, The Maid and Magpie, on Payneham Road, Adelaide, Kevin Greg, publican of the legendary Exeter, handed me a glass of wine to appraise.

“It’s Mornington Peninsula pinot noir”, I said. “Made by Sandro Mosele”.

Indeed it was. The Scorpo 2006.

So how did I know?

I’m a fan of Paul Scorpo’s wines, and regard Sandro as a winemaker who truly has the touch: he shows a rare gastronomic intelligence and the sensitivity pinot demands.

Some Mornington Peninsula wines – pinot and chardonnay in particular – tend to display an aroma and flavour spectrum which for some reason reminds me of coastal dune vegetation, like the smell of pigface, Carpobrotus rossii, from the Aizoaceae family (pictured). I reckon I see the same characteristics in some wines from the seaside vineyards on South Australia’s Limestone Coast.

Whether or not this is an admirable characteristic, I wonder precisely what it is. Any ideas?