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

HICKINBOTHAM SPEECH RILES WINE POLICE

CASTAGNA'S BIODYNAMIC WINERY AT BEECHWORTH; BEAUTIFUL WINE REFUSED EXPORT APPROVAL

Great Aussie Plonky At Fault With Fault Obsessives
Letting The Wrong Crap Out And The Wrong Crap In
by PHILIP WHITE - A VERSION OF THIS STORY APPEARED IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY

The Ian Hickinbotham speech I quoted last week grew legs. Hick addressed the Sydney International Wine Competition, talking about bacterial diseases in wine, and human tolerance to them. He wondered whether the export approval tasters employed by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation were “actually stultifying individualism in our winemakers” by occasionally refusing export approvals to wines unfamiliar to them. His insinuation was that they imagined too many wines had bacterial spoilage.

Hick’s point was that the forensic scrutiny with which judges seek faults eliminates many interesting wines with organoleptic characters which they mistake as faults. He said that there are no bacteria in modern finished wines, implying that everybody should relax a little, and that maybe we don’t need these approval tastings at all. Huon Hooke reported this in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Steve Guy, who manages the export tastings, quickly reassured his troops that Hick was out of touch: things have changed; systems improved. But beautiful wines – Grange, Castagna, Torbreck etc. - have been refused approval in past years. These judgings have been like our wine shows: powerful levellers that can lop the eccentric, brave, and strange, and reinforce the industrial status quo which writers and drinkers all over the Old World are rejecting. They’ve approved thousands of dead flat boring crap plonks plastered with dot paintings and weird beasties, then denied the likes of Castagna et al an export approval because they thought they could smell something funny in one of his biodymanic beauties.

Having had one wine refused approval by two tasting panels, Julian Castagna told the authorities he would take the wine to London, call a press conference with television and all the wine critics who'd been suggesting Australian wines were all too boring and show them the quaklity of wines that we were not permitted to export. He suddenly got his approval.

Hick also took a typically obtuse swipe at writers who recommend wines which smell of lychees. “This disease is a consequence of bacteria attacking grape sugar during some stage of fermentation”, he said.

Lychee is an aroma, and flavour, I often find in gerwurztraminer. I like it there. Gewurz can also have lovely musk aromas, and rosewater, or turkish delight. Very few Australians have mastered this grape: this country is too hot for something that comes from the colder reaches of Alpine Europe.

Gewurztraminer succeeds in parts of New Zealand and Tasmania, but you need a hillbilly winemaker. Wild yeast, old oak, disdainful treatment is what it loves. No hard hats or safety glasses required.

In the early ’eighties, I learned to love the Reserve and Vendage Tardive gewurztraminer of Hugel, and my Alsace mate, Michel Dietrich, taught me how to drink this variety with his father’s Dietrich of Kaiserberg wines, with choucroute, the Alsace sauerkraut. You serve a great steaming plate of pickled cabbage with dollops of hot mustard and grilled smoked sausages of pork or game packed with chili and black pepper and you drink gallons of flinty, musky gewurztraminer.

Now, if gewurztraminer is not the ideal grape for this baked slab of country, I cannot imagine why on Earth anybody’d gamble for success with traminer, the original alpine white from which the slightly pink gewurztraminer mutated.

So why are Australian winemakers who have never worked in Alpine Europe suddenly growing, making, and marketing, traminer? They don’t attempt gewurztraminer. So why its awkward grandfather? And why are they calling it albariño?

Because they were sold a dud, that's why.

In the desperate search for new flavours, somebody in Australia decided that the punters would just love alboriño, the acidic thick-skinned white from Galacia and northern Portugal, where it’s called alvarinho. The CSIRO, in response to persistent demands, imported some, put it through the serpentine wiles of the government's quarantine process, and grew a scrillion cuttings, which they sold. These have been planted along the dead River, and everywhere from Orange to Clare, the Barossa, and McLaren Vale.

I expected it would take our winemakers a few vintages to work out what to do with the new baby. They seemed oilier, somehow thicker than expected. “They’ll work it out” I told myself thoughtfully. You can check my reviews by searching for alboriño on DRANKSTER. But it suddenly appears that the stuff they bought is savignin blanc B, a Tyrolean grape that also grows in Jura.

Even forgetting the freezing alpine nature of these places, which we do not emulate anywhere, it would be fair to say that the “yellow wines” which are where most European savignin ends up, are not too much in the way of your standard Australian industrial export-approved sort of a thing, if you get my drift. Try the Jura Vin Jaune recipe: six years in old untopped barrels, where a yeast like flor grows on the meniscus, slowing oxidation, to make a sort of unfortified sherry.

Savignin blanc B is traminer. Their DNA matches, like zinfandel and primitivo. Same diff. We may well see some respected albariños suddenly becoming savignin blanc B, much to the embarrassment of those critics who raved fulsomely about their quality and promise. To do their savignin blanc B justice, all Australian regions might have to sprout a snow-peaked mountain like the one on the Seaview bottle. Pity the whitecoats hadn’t done a little import checking and sniffed the cuttings for lychee.

But the lawyers will make up for them. This’ll take years.

COMMENT FROM IAN HICKINBOTHAM:

"I should tell you that the lychee smell of 'disease' is not that of Gewuerztraminer. It is possible you have never seen it, but it is most likely to occur in Chardonnay (where it does not 'over-lap' the pleasant lychee smell associated with that fragrant variety).

"Interestingly, Gewuerztraminer still only constitutes 0.5% of German vineyards (in spite of its name). People tire of it!"