RAISING THE GRENACHE BAR

Tasting the landlord's new wine
by PHILIP WHITE

While it seemed time to let somebody else have a go at it, I laid off reviewing my landlord's wines for awhile. But Peter Fraser's new release Grenache babies have shivered me timbers and rattled the sensory roofbeams sufficiently to set my knuckles cracking for the word piano. 

It seems like only yesterday I sat on the deck with Milton Wordley and some other very famous photographers he'd brought, toying with the new Yangarra Rosé 2011. 

As a colourblind person, I find the hues of rosé both challenging and delightful: rather than use the usual names, like pink, orange or red, it's safer for me to take a stab at metaphor and simile, so I've usually said they're the colour of raspberry, strawberry, onion skin, pheasant eye or whatnot, leaving the Pantone details to the more reliably sighted. 

On that day of the great snappers it was cool to hear eight much more competent and highly-trained eyes than mine discuss the glints in those glasses.

Yangarra Grenache 2011 ... photo by David Burnett ... other snaps by Philip White

Carignan, Grenache and Mourvèdre from baby bush vines were picked together at just under 11 Beaumé and the full bunches left intact in sealed cabmac bags for a week to make that wine, so the ferment was well underway within each berry and the juice had extracted quite some colour during that initial stage of ferment even before pressing. David Burnett's photograph makes me take a stab at that wine being raspberry red, but please make your own decision. It smelled vibrantly of stuff like Turkish delight, rose petals, maraschino cherries and pink grapefruit right from the press: you could smell it outside the winery. 

The new one, the Yangarra McLaren Vale Grenache Rosé 2017 ($25; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap) takes the colour thing way off into much more pale territory. It took me ages to photograph its tantalising hue. 

It seems Peter's been chasing texture and perfume more than pink, although it smells pink. He allocated baby bush vines that were picked early, specifically to make this. He pressed whole bunches, as if making a white wine, and let the wild yeasts take over and kept the wine on lees for a couple of months, stirring it weekly to magnify the comforting texture. 

It smells like babies: soft and musky, with faint hints of magnolia and jasmine. It has lovely subtle spices, a hint of banana and a summery dry topnote of lucerne hay and coconut husk. 

Taste-wise, it has the uncanny ability to be many things to many people. It has the pith, rind and juice of lemon, and to a greater extent, the less edgy lime, but with reflections of all those fleshy, alluring aromas. Nectarine and white peach. 

It's very slippery drinking: dangerously easy to quaff if all you need is succour, but there's plenty of complexity lying in there to feed those who like to think and talk about their drinks. That hay and husk in the bouquet returns as tannins in the long, dry tail. 

This wine levers Grenache, Fraser's cornerstone, into a new realm. And it shows how even rosé can be a much more serious and accomplished thing than the old raspberry cordial types that are always lying about the shelves and lists, sweet, dim and simple, giving the entire genre a bad name. This ain't that. 

Yangarra Old Vine McLaren Vale Grenache 2015 ($35; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap) is another benchmark. It seems that the fastidious biodynamic vineyard husbandry, the 1946 bush vines and  the established winery mentality have all arrived together to give a more complex and accomplished Grenache than before. Which is saying something. 

The vines were hand-picked and the bunches destemmed; then the grapes were sorted mechanically to remove all the raisins and squishy bits, leaving berries that look like caviar. Half of these were crushed, then their must wild fermented with the intact berries after a week of cold soaking. Thence into barrel for 8 months on lees, before blending and bottling without filtration or fining. 

The result has more spice than its predecessors. Mace and nutmeg brood away in there, sultry and moody with the fig, date and charcuterie aromas. Forget the polished silky sheen too many of us once expected of fine Grenache: here the firm natural acidity and the rich, velvety tannins all sit with easy poise, giving us nerds plenty to talk and write about, while offering the thirsty a wonderful, wholesome, adult slurp. Try it with crumbly cheese, complementary dates and figs and charcuterie meats.

PENFOLDS GRANGE 2013: FIRST TASTE

Classic 389, traditional St. Henri, huge RWT, elegant Mitsouko Grange
by PHILIP WHITE


It's like being in the engine room of some bloody great ship, sitting in the old stillroom at Penfolds Magill. The powerhouse of a towering palace, at least. 

But there a few of us sat last week, leering at a table laden with the cream of Australian premium wine. Peter Gago AC kept our snifters trim. 

Here, following are my initial favourites from a very impressive release from the world's biggest boutique winery, which is what the best end of Penfolds has always been. And I pay passing homage to a couple of significant majesties that'll be very popular but just ain't my style: 

First, there are four exemplary white wines. The Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling 2017 ($30; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap) is more like actual glass than say chalk or slate. Sure, it does have some granular action in the tail but it's closer to the pith of some tiny limes I recall from Dum InMirree, a flat slice of mud and lush jungle with crocs on the side off Dundee Downs on the Timor Sea. Sorta takes your mind off lime pith, eh? 

But go back there and think of cool lime juice and its thickish texture and gingery chilli broth and perfect glassy clarity and you have something like this or go all Issye Miyake and Hendrick's Gin with cucumber. 

Near the top, there are three Chardonnays. The Bin 311 Tumbarumba 2016 ($45: 12.5% alcohol; screw cap) is one for wusses. It seems full of isovaleric acid and cheesy tropical umami: soothing, brow-stroking notions of motherly pulchritude. It's the one for avocado lips. Millions will love it.

In the belly of the beast: tasting in the old still house at Penfolds Magill Estate: Milton Wordley, Nick Ryan, Anthony Madigan, Peter Gago, Huon Hooke, the author and Emma Franklin

Yattarna Chardonnay 2015 ($150; 13% alcohol; screw cap) is the huge cushy limousine. There are no bumps. This is royal lavishment: poached peaches and crème brûlée. Gago says there are oatcakes. I reckon it's more like buttery shortbread down beneath the plumpedness. Somewhere in there. Serious king-hell luxe, mon. Town car. This be the squish. 

Like other recent years, the Reserve Bin A Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2016 ($125; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap) is marching off into barren stony ground in its style, far away from the cushion of the Tumbaramba or Yattarna. Its most immediate fruit starts out somewhere tight like grapefruit or even more like the pink grapefruit or the artery juice of the blood orange without so many red corpuscles. Then it marches off into the wilderness, driven, aloof. It's stunning wine. 

Now for austere; a decade later for slightly older austerely scrumptious. 

You prefer curvy? Go Tumbarumba or Yattarna. 

While we're on angular wine, the Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon 2015 ($500: 14.5% alcohol; cork) has been cornered in brand new American oak hogsheads for twenty months. While I'm sure this wine is dead true to its heritage and tradition and made from the fastest tightest deepest vineyard selections from Coonawarra, Barossa, McLaren Vale and Padthaway, I have never been capable of loving Quercus alba wood of this concentration. Never been a lover of such ramrod stiff right wing stuff. This wine is angular, man. It'll make the wheelwrights and lumberjacks purr from right across the yard. It's a record-breaking 707 for promise and accuracy: if you like 'em you'll love it. But it just ain't me. 

On the other hand, the Bin 407 South Australia Cabernet Sauvignon 2015 ($95; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap) has confectioner's sugars and musk all over its crystallised violets, meadow blooms and hedgerow. I felt it was from chalk and turns out to be primarily from Wrattonbully, Coonawarra and Limestone Coast chalks before they gave it admixtures of McLaren Vale and Barossa. This has some supple form and some sensuality and some older barrels (in with 25% new French ones) set it afloating and playing about without getting bargey. It's spritely and perfumed. 

My romantic pick of the Cabernets this year isn't even that. It's the blend our earliest white forebears brought from Bordeaux, in the days when those  Aquitaine reds often contained a sploosh of reinforcing Hermitage. The Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz 2015 ($95; 14.5%; screw cap) is a beauty. It's had only Quercus alba, but equally spread over new, one and two year-old barrels. So it has plenty of that classic old-fashioned Penfolds shellack in with the snakes draped panting in the blackberry vines and the hillbillies burning offcuts to boil their still out the back. A bastion of the great Penfolds castle, and a very good example. This wine is a piece of serious regional pride. Very posh but never fancy, the 389. 

From which we make a neat sideways step to wine of a style we once called claret, as in fine and tending to austere: St Henri Shiraz 2014 ($125; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap). Almost so shy and refined as to avert its eyes, this is a relic recipe followed to the T. It almost has tea leaves rustling in its bouquet, but that's pink everlasting flowers and lavendar floating on a genteel syrup of prune and currant, chicory, fig and juniper, all perfectly harmonised and settled after a year in bloody huge fifty-plus years-old oak vats. Damn thing glows. 

With respect to the great Edmund Mazure, this one's really after the old style. Prim and proper, but practising sensuality. 

Much more boisterous and bumptious is the RWT Bin 798 Barossa Shiraz 2015 ($200; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap). All French oak, 83% new, this is like interrupting somebody like the king in the royal vestry. They've not cut short the oak polish budget but they know if you can smell it you shoulda saved that money for starch and ironed it into the raiment cuffs and the ruff collars and the doilies. 

But that recent touch of dusting cloth and polish is rich and hangs about the sense of somebody very big and so damn royal that you daren't even look up. That's Barossa Shiraz. 

This is a mighty wine, but that authority is still so noble as to show the sort of soulful motherliness Max loved. So it's not really so bumptious as we expected. It's gruff, but it'll take your hand. 

Which brings us to the Grange Bin 95 2013 ($850; 14.5% alcohol; cork). Goodness me. 

Peter poured this with a 2012, which reassured my initial notion that this is a more supple and sensual wine that that. 'Twelve was indeed mighty; a bit lurchy yet. This is a fitter, more svelte prince. The black armour lacquer smells like a waxed Japanese screen. Soy. Big thundery summer ozone raindrops in the dust outside; in here a vase of marshmallow, elder and hawthorn. Sense of humour: there's a crown hanging in the damn hawthorn. It - no he - has dashed through to dining where there's prunes soaked and smudgy plum and struesel fresh yeast kuchen blackberries and mulberries. Linen in the press. 

Drink: incredibly fine and silky; precisely sensual; yearningly slender and languid; many single-line poems on reflection. There's a trunk of copperplate lists and dust from the verge of the austral zones ... those big raindrops ... This is a more serene, reflective Grange than usual. It's the Guerlain Mitsouko Grange. Perfection. 

I didn't mention money, did I? Damn!

photos by Philip White

KRUG VINTAGE 2004: FIRST TASTE

Chardonnay in the press, Clos du Mesnil, Champagne, 28th August 2014 ... first 2014 pick in the bin, below ... photos Olivier Krug

New Krug 2004 - a Chardonnay year for an early Chardonnay vintage
by PHILIP WHITE

Olivier Krug had a barely got back to vintage in Reims, Champagne, after releasing the new Krug Champagne Vintage 2004 in London, and there was Peter Gago AC and the Penfolds Magill Estate people pouring one in Adelaide. 

It was a generous thankyou to a few privileged souls who had foregone the Royal Adelaide Wine Show tasting to respond to Treasury's invitation to Magill to taste the new Penfolds Collection. On rocket week. 

The Magill Estate restaurant people pride themselves in offering bottles of  nearly one hundred small Champagne producers barely-known (yet) in Adelaide; scoring this royal baby was like having the King or the Pope or somebody in the room to visit them. Encouragement, you know. 

It wasn't all that long back Mr and Mrs Prince of Wales dropped in there for a schlück, but they drank only Grange, poor dears. 

Hardcore Krugistes will shimmer with delight at this 2004: it's a finer, tighter, meaner drink than other recent vintages. It seems Olivier was so excited that it had finally begun to sing that he simply had to get it out and on the market: the wine was disgorged way back in 2014. It is 39% Chardonnay, 37% Pinot noir and 24% Pinot meunier. 

One could say it's the unusual Chardonnay dominance of the year that's beginning to give the wine some fru-fru and frisson, but while the Chardonnay produced a generous crop in 2004 the full assemblage story will be a much more complex business than Chardonnay alone. 

While I said "sing" I didn't mean to suggest you should expect the full mezzo soprano Dame Joan thing. So far this is more your Girl From Ipanema slinking by, the bright mirage shimmer of the ocean behind, blurring her sandy, slightly breathless edges. For now. Only once you get to look properly into those eyes do you realise the steely resolve and determination that will keep this show on track for what Olivier says will be a good thirty years. 

Julie Cavil, the Krug oenologist, calls this bright demeanour "luminous freshness." That'll almost do me. But I reckon it'll be so wild and bright you could add the possibility of that husky voice growing all silvery and shattering glasses in a decade. Empty ones, anyway. 

While all this kerfuffle and vintage and everything being coincident was tricky enough, Olivier dropped a rare fizzbomb in the water by suggesting too much of Champagne was picked too late this year. His candid criticism was a rare enough event for any Champenoise, but coming from such a mighty house whose wine usually makes all the speeches, Olivier's opinion sure rattled some parochial French rafters. And he wasn't talking about the management of the huge houses being responsible, or the Champagne committee which makes the annual vintage date announcement: he blamed village politics. And business. Local parsimony. 

While the Comité Champagne had set a start date of 26 August, which was very early due to unseasonal heat then humidity, Olivier told The Drinks Business that "the responsibility should lie with decision-makers among the grower-community in each village, who are tempted to wait until September for the start of the harvest to save on paperwork. 

"Usually there are people with a bigger voice than others who decide the start-date in the village; it is not coming from the houses," he said. "And these big muscle people said ... 'begin on Monday 4 September' because they didn’t want pickers to start in August because then they have to make two payrolls for thousands of pickers ... to pay a salary for the work in August and then another for September." 

Ha. On my way to the Penfolds tasting, a Persian friend, a cab driver, had asked how it was possible that using the same common plant, some winemakers charged hundreds of dollars for a bottle of their wine, while others charged only four or five. It was confronting, but refreshing to be asked such a simple question. My answer was about laziness, disease, greed, stupidity and such, as opposed to conservative and responsible garden husbandry and the respect of quality and provenance. 

Pity I'd not really been fully aware of Olivier's thesis until after I'd tasted the wine and taken my boggled brain home to do some further research. Around the digital chat alleys his harvest criticism was a bigger deal than the launch of one of the world's truly great wines of recent decades. If you read my in-tray after I'd written whatever I have describing recent less-than-ideal years in Australia, you'd think it was impossible for two-thirds of an industry to make a dumb mistake about something as straightforward as a picking date. They give me hell if I say they left it too long. What would I know. But here you go: this is Champagne. And it's simple. "Some might say start on 1 September, but, because it was a Friday, they waited until Monday," Olivier told London. "By delaying the beginning picking to 4 September, it meant that the harvesters could avoid working over two weekends." 

One can only forecast that when these 2017 village wines emerge, there'll be some riper fizz in that special big fridge at Magill. 

It's been a tricky year, rain and botrytis following a bistering summer. Krug sensibly started early, picking Chardonnay in Clos du Mesnil when the grapes offered alcohols between 10.2 and 10.3% and natural acidity of 7.5 to 8 grams per litre. It's another "Chardonnay year." But Bacchus be damned if we can afford to wait as long as the exquisite 2004 has taken. In fact, Bacchus can be damned that I can't possibly afford the hundreds that sublime luxury will cost once it more formally lands on our shelves.

Krug's Clos du Mesnil: The Champenoise take on the walled village: 1) plant Chardonnay 2) build a wall around it to make it a clos 3) build houses outside the wall

POUR A WHISKY AND READ THIS

ANOTHER PAROCHIAL DAWN

A bloke I know in Melbourne thought he'd let me know a lot of his mates thought I was parochial. I considered that this morning once I'd worked an hour, put the second pot of coffee on and opened the front door curtain to see this. Talk about parochial. That's a Zen corner of the Ironheart Shiraz vineyard on Yangarra Estate. Then I took the little Sony around to the east and saw this: 

that's baby bush vine Grenache, in a few inches of dirt on slab ironstone ... the old vines of the future ... photos by Philip White, chthonic parochialist, currently superterranean

SLOW LAUNCH FOR WINE IN SPACE

Feds and big winers slow to catch Jaylon juggernaut in big export opp
EXCLUSIVE: Philip White

It was a shame that the wine industry was far too busy preparing for this week's Royal [sic] Adelaide Wine Show to squeeze a wee sponsorship out for the International Astronautical Congress, the largest and most significant yet staged on Earth. 

Since I ceded responsibility for the annual wine races to younger folk with so much more to learn, it is nevertheless fortunate that the intergalactic export potential available to South Australian winemakers has captivated my good friend Mr Elon Musk. 

In our years of private negotiation, we have made great progress in the matter of wine in space. Musk was just a kid when together we perfected the screw cap, one huge leap for man previously obsessed with bashing the unsanitary organic bark of Portuguese trees into sterile silica bottles. 

He was the first to realise the risk of bashment relative to Newton's Third Law in environments of weightlessness, a dictum former Prime Minister the Hon. Tony Abbott MP and Mr Astro Labe realised last week in Australia's principal satellite, Tasmania. 

The keen young Musk was quick to realise that applied to popping corks in enclosed weightless environments with unconfined liquid ethanol, Newton's Law had tricky implications. 

In space? Screw, don't pull. 

Perhaps by the advent of next year's Royal [sic] Adelaide Wine Show the learned judges and their associates from Wine Communicators Australia (WCs) will be better prepared to trial the SpaceXL6 solar-built wine snifter. 

I can reveal Musk has invented and perfected this using fine South Australian glass sand previously regarded as an inconvenient contaminant in his Lithium Battery Mines in the sandy deserts of the Pastoral Lease country. 

This Sahara-sized stretch of mineral sand overlies the radio- active bounties of the Gawler Craton, north-west of the old Roxby Downs Station. It must be removed before we can get to the uranium deep beneath. 

When not in use, this radical SpaceXL6 stemware is designed to hang in racks inside spacecraft windows, where each unit harvests sunlight to drive its own interior gravity field, making possible, in weightless environments of challenging gravity, the standard swirl developed by wine connoisseurs over the ages. 

The interplanetary passenger can now swirl, sniff, sip and swallow without globules of the wine straying loose in the cabin. 

Titanium, another contaminant in the lithium extraction business, is used to coat the glass crystal in an invisible protective layer. When exposed to the ultra-violet light of the spacecraft window, this conveniently renders the snifter non-stick self-cleaning properties without the need for water or dangerous detergents. A small solar-powered fan above each glass rack removes remnant wine particles and sends them to the spacecraft's liquids recyling system. 

A matching crystal spitbucket has been perfected, using the same theory. We are convinced that in the normal gravity of the Earthly competitive arena this brilliant glassware will guarantee substantial savings in standard industrial-level wine show spillage. 

Once this news filters through, the WCs are certain to love it: Musk plans to make available a substantial grant for their members to develop the products' sales brochures and website, stressing this non-drip convenience. 

It's important to appreciate the long-term co-operation that existed between South Australia's arid-land pastoralists and the early space business. This commenced when the young Byron H. MacLachlan tasted his first Château Lafite, which he'd discovered in his father's Jumbuck House cellar during World War II. 

Having convinced them of the advantages of vast amounts of space as a visionary defence tool, B.H. made available to both British and Australian governments his properties and those of his neighbours, vast swathes of sheep country like Commonwealth Hill (10,000 sq. km.), Balgunya and Mulgathing Stations, for use as a downrange landing zone for Woomera rocketry. The subsidy he thus collected was equivalent to these pastoral leases increasing their stock intensity from half to two-thirds of a sheep per square mile.

With his new bonanza, B.H. was able to develop and expand Australia's largest premium French and German wine importing agency, which used the Adelaide Club and its associated establishments in other capitals as its distribution arm. His eager young accountant, Mr Brenton Fry, quickly adapted his skill - checking timesheets and making $6/week pay checks for jackeroos - to managing this booming Premier and Grand Cru wine agency. It eventually became the famous Negociants Australia, the lucrative wine distribution outfit further developed by Mr Robert Hill Smith when Fry took his services from Jumbuck House in French Street to Hill Smith's Yalumba cellars in Grote Street. 

Another great progress in outback wine appreciation was the government's installation of blast-proof bunkers on each of B.H.'s vast pastoral leases. 

From the introduction of the radical Black Night Rocket in the mid-'fifties, through the giant British Blue Streak ICBM, stray spent space vehicles frequently splattered themselves around this country. 

Desert dwellers, like DRINKSTER illustrator George Grainger Aldridge, have been forced to employ arcane voodoo rituals and sonic ectoplasm to detect and deflect errant rocketry (see above). 

Based loosely on the original sod-roofed cellar built by John Reynell at his pioneering Château Reynella in 1845, the bunkers government provided to wealthy sheep cockies are permanent vibration-free, constant-temperature storage capacities for the extravagant vintage collections they procured from MacLachlan, Fry, and then Hill Smith in the comfort of the Club. 

By the end of this week's historical Congress, we are assured these significant achievements will be freshly recognised by the conservative Federal government and its friends in the wine industry councils. 

These bodies are currently preoccupied with the Royal Adelaide Wine Show and spending the $50 million taxpayer-funded grant recently made available to them by the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, the coal-loving Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and his assistant, Senator Anne Ruston. 

This generous gift is designed to assist our biggest irrigating wine companies mount terrestrial wine tastings. Insiders say it's only a hint at the rivers of backing the Federal government suddenly sees necessary to fully develop wine appreciation classes for inter-planetary tourists. 

The first pastoralists to settle and develop sheep runs on other bold leases elsewhere in this solar system will also require safe, cool, taxpayer-funded  cellars. 

Once these beachheads are secure, the potential of intergalactic wine export is out there for the taking. 

Wine leaders guarantee they'll have better time to address these issues after Friday's big WCs' wine awards lunch at the Royal Adelaide Showgrounds. 

It was a telling seminal signal this week that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sent his Education Minister, Senator Simon Birmingham to the space Assembly early in the piece. There he delivered promises of further Federal funding to alleviate charges of the initiative being one-hundred per cent the work of the Jaylon Axis, a keen intellectual business partnership of South Australian Labor Party Premier The Hon. Jay Weatherill and our other visionary friend, Musk. 

Significantly, Birmingham took to the Education portfolio like a fish to water after his long faithful service as a lobbyist for the wine and hotel/gambling industries. He is a seasoned expert in his field.  

 These accomplished gentlemen are not fools: they can now see the future brightly through the crystalline brilliance of the SpaceXL6.

GRIFFITH WARS AND YELLOWTAIL

I once asked Coonawarra and Mountadam winemaker David Wynn why Australia's biggest official internationally recognised wine appellation was called South East Australia.

"Because they won't say 'Griffith'," he said with a chuckle.

David had been deeply involved in setting up the current model of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme (MIA) with the Whitlam government in the early 'seventies. This was made possible by the diversion of Australian Alps waters as the finishing touches were being put to the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Australia's huge hydro-electric generator in New South Wales.

Various branches of the Wynn family ended up owning big MIA vineyard blocks at Griffith, along with their generous irrigation water allocations.

David Wynn with the author and Howard Twelftree, aka John McGrath, in the early 'noughties.

Terry Jones was the editor of the local Griffith newspaper in those heady days when not only enormous amounts of cheap wine came from Griffith, but also a great deal of Australia's marijuana. 

The veteran Late Night Live broadcaster Phillip Adams has reviewed Terry's new book, The Griffith Wars, co-written with Tom Gilling, and just published in paperback by Allen and Unwin.

You can hear Phillip and Terry discussing it here.

The growers of Griffith are quick to hit the streets and demonstrate, like when the Murray Darling report came out, advising irrigators that their water allocations may be reduced to keep Australia's biggest river system alive.

Meanwhile, talks of the Mafia drug connections outlined in The Griffith Wars linger on.

Pertinent to the wine industry, former Yellowtail director Marcello Casella remains on bail after his alleged involvement, with two other men, in a $5 million drug bust.

In 2015 Casella, a champion clay pigeon shooter, and owner of Australia's biggest ammo factory, Bronzewing, which he built in Wynn's old Yenda winery, paid less than $3000 in fines after Griffith police seized five tonnes of ammunition and 86 kilograms of explosive propellant illegally stored in a shed on his property. Those charges forced the closure of the factory.

To read an expert outsiders' view of the Yellowtail business, check David Morrison's blog The Wine Gourd. 

To view Yellowtail's contentious 2017 Super Bowl ad, click here. As if the lingering whispers of those bad old days were not enough, this ad was widely ridiculed for taking the image of Australia and its wines back to the Ocker seventies.