PENFOLDS NEW HYPERWINES

Grange: the Chiron of pyramids; plus other mighty reds at mighty prices
by PHILIP WHITE


Penfolds Grange 2014 
($900; 14.5% alcohol; cork)

Okay, folks, here's the annual pyramid of Australian wine. Just sitting there on the luxury goods landscape. Omnipresent. Ex cathedra. 

Apart from being a very impressive pyramid indeed, I reckon this Grange does two things very well. First, it's another step away from the overtly sappy American oaks Penfolds used most prominently through the '75-'95 era. Second, it's riveted to the very long-term Penfolds Grange style. Tricky act that two-way canal: takes a hardy hand on the winemaking tiller. 

How so? This seems a more acid-based wine than one built around oak sap. And by acid, I mean grape acids, in this case rich with the traditional formic Grange whiff. And yep, a waft of straightforward volatile acetic acidity too, along the lines of great aged balsamic: both cornerstones of the style since Max Schubert's day. 

Max Schubert photographed by Milton Wordley in 1983

Then the methodical forensics of fruit sourcing stacks an entire Central Market of aromas onto your gastronomic pyramid, from the Burmese and Persian spice girls through the mushroom tunnel to the Chinese grocery full of raw pork and soy and black bean sauces, past the smoky Barossa smallgoods, headlong through the fruiterers and confectioners and past the loose-leaf tea vendor to the coffee shop ... double-shot flat white and a slice of panforte, please. 

Whew. 

Barossa, McLaren Vale, Wrattonbully, Coonawarra, Clare and Magill Shiraz parcels were selected for this blend of 98% Shiraz and 2% Cabernet. As always, the barrels were 100% new American, but another year along the track on which Peter Gago and his winemakers constantly refine and evolve their interchange of intelligence with their Barossa master cooper, A. P. John. 

Coopers' hands at A. P. John ... DRAGAN photo

Which is all a bit technical, but hey, you're buying the drinker's equivalent of a Bugatti Chiron here. You'll want to know how big and how quick long before you need to ask how much. So how big? Very big. It's a pyramid. And how fast? This'll be hitting true Bugatti exhilaration in about ten years. Not too bad for a pyramid. 

From there it'll continue accelerating into oblivion, which it'll hit in about 20.  Years.

After that, who cares? 

Only the obsessive collectors of pyramids and Bugattis, methinks. The gastronomes with the cunning or wherewithal will have drunk all theirs by then.  

The Flinders Granges by George Grainger Aldridge now hangs in the premises of a Grange fanatic in Singapore
 

Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon 2016 
($600; 14.5% alcohol; cork) 

Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, Barossa and Adelaide Hills fruit jostled its way through the intricate Penfolds tasting regimes which gradually isolate the very best parcels, and then the best individual barrels for 707. 

Traditionally bound tight with bright new American Quercus alba oak, Bin 707, like Grange in its way, has long been an individualist Penfolds style more than a conventionally-templated varietal. Having watched generations of suits sluice through it with their beef, I always regarded it as Australia's most right wing wine. To me, it usually seems brash. But this year, I reckon I see that incredible fruit climbing all over the oak: it's time the left took a turn. 

Which is not to suggest any change of heart: the damn thing is still most determinedly 707, and it needs years. It's just harmonised more in tune with my personal preference, as the Gago team gradually got closer to the slow, steady heart of South Australia's 2016 Cabernet. 

So close, in fact that Gago's pithy tasting notes make a haemoglobin joke: this glorious gastronomic artefact is sufficiently intense and enveloping to invoke the blood of martyrs and saints, if it doesn't actually spill any. We wouldn't want any spillage, would we? Not with this sultry black thoroughbred. And I almost said Black Caviar. 

Just feel the throb. 

Penfolds RWT Bin 798 Barossa Valley Shiraz 2016 
($200; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap) 

While the Red Winemaking Trial [RWT] was from its 1995 conception intended to showcase top-flight Barossa Shiraz in the finest French - not American - oak, this release sees even that fine, spicy timber surrendering to a rise of pure, intense fruit. So sweet little 'sixteen grew the pizazz and sass required to dominate both American and French forests. 

I mean there's plenty of that gingery, cardamon/cumin/citrus rind French oak here, but like the 707, it's in the grip of whipsnake elegant fruit that's as intense and impenetrable as lithe. 

While they're chalk-and-cheese in variety, philosophy and style, both 798 and 707 are this year distinguished by their lovely staunch acidity and persistent  tannins. And this is brilliant, energetic Barossa Shiraz that's quite the opposite of the lumberjacked jammy gloop that far too much Shiraz lazily became over the last twenty years. 

This red winemaking trial looks like it worked. 

I'd be tempted to call it the Red Winemaking Correction. 

All boxes ticked. 

Penfolds Magill Estate Shiraz 2016 
($150; 14.5% alcohol; cork) 

It amuses me that the fruit of this vineyard, the surviving heart of Dr and Mary Penfold's Grange, is perhaps the most conventionally-styled of these front row Penfolds reds. It's pretty and perfumed - musk sticks - at the more frivolous end of its aromatic spectrum, with the classic Magill tones of black tea leaf and star anise decorating buckets of mulberries and blackberries down the deep soul end. 

In common with the other 2016s, the wine is marked by its lissom acidity and long fine slaty tannins. 

Without getting the sophistry many other Penfolds premiums are awarded in the cellar, this more demure wine actually reaches further into the Penfolds past than the more ostentatious and elaborate post-war extremes. It's a tidy, well-kept glass of the history of winegrowing on the Adelaide Plain and its rubbley piedmont. 

Too easily overlooked now, this is the one I'd be reaching for in seven or eight years. By then it'll be very much like something dainty you'd find - at a similar price - on the alluvial rubbles at the mouth of the Rhône Gorge. 

Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2015 
($135; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap) 

Once again, this is a fruitcake collection of the best little berries the Gago gang could wrangle and extract from right across the state. 

Done and dealt. 

But here it all goes into big old oak tanks to chill out and mellow with none of the taut anxiety stiff new tight-grained barrels offer, whether from France or Missouri. 

Musky confectioners' sugar dusts the topnote here; below that there's the usual deep well of orange-to-black Medlar gels. I've seen the label, of course, so I know what it is, and of course I'm far too aware of the size of the spend, but by this stage of the sniff, I'm a goner. This is the bargain of the bunch. 

Winemaking costs a lot less if you don't overoak everything with posh designer barrels. 

Which leaves me to mention, dammit, these goddam prices. If you're not already brow-beaten and bashed down and humiliated by the abject immoral ordure of the age and its evil, the annual Penfolds price hikes will knock out what's left of your teeth, if not your spirit. 

Obviously, enough people are capable of, and cool with spends of this level. They keep the coffers of Treasury Wine Estates flooded with the incoming Penfolds squirt, thankyou Mr Gago. 

Not many wineries make a goddam pyramid every year, or a smug feline sphynx like that St Henri. How I wish more of us could afford to contribute!

Fermenting Grange ... photo Milton Wordley, from our multi award-winning book A year in the life of Grange

Pardon my skiting, but here we are with our New York Book Show medals ... Milton was the instigator, photographer and publisher; to keep a promise to Max, I wrote it. We did it without any Penfolds editorial involvement. And not one free bottle of Grange.

NEW RANGE FROM TEMPLE BRUER

Organic, preservative-free, carbon-neutral and vegan friendly? Yep.
by PHILIP WHITE

Temple Bruer Wines Eden Valley Langhorne Creek Pure White Cuvée NV 

($22; 12% alcohol; cork) 

Chenin blanc, Viognier and Riesling? Why not? The three dance in smooth style in this creamy, slightly toasty/brioche-perfumed prettiness. 

Without getting too serious, it brings me soft almond biscotti, with poached pear and zabaglione. In other words, proper fizz at an almost improperly low price. The wine has more comforting viscosity than nearly all the sub-$30 suds: it's truly smooth and settling, leaving that gentle stream of very fine bubbles to look after the celebrating. 

Intelligent, inventive blending like this casts a shadow over Australia's insistence on making its low-cost sparklers from Pinot and Chardonnay: you just can't get Champagne-quality versions of these from our warm regions. We can grow it in the premium cooler spots, but that's more likely to cost you $50-plus per pop. That the Bruers have done this organically, with minimal preservative, in a carbon-neutral manner is very clever. This quality at this price is extremely clever. If its "vegan-friendly" claim permits no live yeast, that's impossibly clever. 

If I were a little yeast beast, I'd like to have the choice of whether I gallantly lay down my life fermenting sugars in the gizzards of a vegan, an ordinary vegetarian or a deadly gourmand genius like that master omnivore chef, Cheong Liew. 

The author smooches Cheong ... photo Milton Wordley

Temple Bruer Wines Langhorne Creek Riverland Cinsault Grenache Rosé 2017 

($22; 12% alcohol; screw cap) 

Tangelo, blood orange, pink grapefruit, watermelon and loquat are some of the things I smell here. Maybe pistachio; pecan ... it's a complex bouquet for a pink, much the better for that Cinsault, most of which was destroyed in the vine-pull of the mid-'eighties. 

We lost far too much old bush vine Cinsault in that taxpayer-funded disaster. Good to see somebody's gone to the trouble of tracking some remnants down. 

Given that aromatic complexity, the palate is a simple breeze; a bagatelle. It gets less complex, and I believe less rewarding, the colder you serve it. Chill it too hard, and it tastes more like an amorphous Riverland white. But serve it after ten or fifteen minutes in the ice bucket and you're rockin'. 

As it warms, you start to see naughty maraschino flavours and the rinds of those citrus fruits in a lemony Cinsault curd, which point me toward scallops or salt'n'pepper Coorong mullet with a sprinkle of dried hot chilli. 

Temple Bruer Wines Langhorne Creek Eden Valley Grenache Shiraz 2017 

($22; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap) 

Here's a red that shows how readily Shiraz can overwhelm Grenache. 

As if this wasn't so, the label encourages you to taste a regular Grenache signal, raspberry. Without saying who "they" are,  it says "They'll steal your heart with flavours of raspberry ... ", which is one of the things I wouldn't suggest to be prominent in this case. 

Which is unfortunate, because, as a 100% organic, preservative-free, carbon neutral, "vegan friendly" wine it's a pretty good drink at this price. 

When I get awkward about being so critical, I look in deeper, and yes, maybe there is a hint of raspberry. Think of raspberry jam on toast and you're close, but I still think it's more along the lines of mulberry and blackberry, which are usually Shiraz indicators, and appreciating its carbon neutral status, dare I suggest there's some sooty black carbon on the toast. 

If there is a strong Grenache hint, it's the savoury juice of pickled bitter cherries, but then there's so much about this wine that is unconventional, all these characters could well have been smudged by the typical Temple Bruer obstinance I first encountered when Kevin Bruer taught at the Roseworthy winemaking college in the '80s. 

The label also describes the contents as "oh so smooth" which probably indicates the winemaker's desire to help you overlook the prominent velvety tannins which howl for cheese. 

If I'd not read the stylish brochures, and paid no attention to the label text, I would have written a less complex, more brazen appraisal, and called it a furry, dry, fairly rustic south-of-France style of red for fun in dappled afternoon sun. It's a nuts-and-cheese slurp for the veranda, and a life-saving step above many of the murky, unstable, wildly "natural" wines that sit, pious and  sanctimonious, waiting for vegans up their end of the shelf

MORE SPRING-A-DING CLARE RIESLING

Pikes Traditionale Clare Valley Riesling 2018 
($28; 11.5% alcohol; screw cap) 

It's hard to believe it's 34 years since this proud label first appeared on a Clare Riesling. When I lived in Peter Doyle's convict quarters on Sydney's South Head he'd buy this by the pallet for his highly absorbent Watson's Bay fish restaurant. Where'd those years go? 

Neil Pike blends fruit from the family's home vineyards in the Polish Hill River valley with selections from Watervale, Penwortham and Sevenhill for this Clare classic. Clare, just to be clear, is not a single valley. It's a web of upland valleys, gullies and depressions in the North Mount Lofty Ranges. Which somehow grows remarkable Riesling. 

Beneath this one's typical regional waft of dry summer meadow lies a basket of fresh lemons. How simple and honest is that? The bouquet's as straight down the line as gingham, freckles and a dimple. If it don't giggle I shall. 

Similarly typical of the region is the palate: it's much more austere than that open-faced fragrance: linear, clean and polished like chrome. It's as if it suddenly feels a rush of embarrassment at how truthful it first appears, and then withdraws a little. 

But garfish or whiting please on a slab of crunchy, crusty bread with real butter will sort it out true blue if you haven't got a decade to wait for it to grow some toast. Damn thing makes me feel like a picnic on some sunny springtime sward. 

Pikes The Merle Clare Valley Riesling 2018 
($47; 12% alcohol; screw cap) 

From pure Polish Hill River fruit, this wine is immediately more complex and a little more threatening than disarmingly open-hearted. Without getting too overt, it has more tropical fruits and pears with its citrus pith, and there's a sense of muscle and sinew beneath its smooth, clean flesh. Pretty clear from the start: this one demands polished linen brocade more than picnic gingham. 

But that extra might and complexity also brings some soul and comfort to the flavours: this is altogether a more calming and luxurious night out. I see fleeting insinuations of starfruit, cherimoya, tamarillo and persimmon sliding by with the buttery pears in the lime syrup ... this one calls for scallops on the half-shell, grilled with mandarin peel and dressed with fresh spring onion shreds ... a bit of candlelight would suit. Brahms. 

Gaelic Cemetery Vineyard Clare Valley Riesling 2018 
($25; 11% alcohol; screw cap) 

Neil Pike makes these two Gaelic Cemetery Rieslings from Grant Arnold's Celtic Farm, north of Clare at White Hut. No relation. This opener is a cheeky, frivolous titillation. Regard it a little like a dry moscato d'Asti: it's the picnic wine you have when there's no bread, butter or gingham - maybe not even a glass. It's the sort of drink I kept in a wet footy sock in my panniers in the old touring motorbike days ... pull over on the hilltop above Cape Jarvis and take a schluck as your eyes fill with the sight of the ocean and the island and your nose adds that bracing vista of aroma to these pretty Riesling exhalations. Ramones in the cans. 

Or dammit, take it to a restaurant. T-Chow chicken. 

Gaelic Cemetery Vineyard Clare Valley Premium Riesling 2018 
($38; 11.5% alcohol; screw cap) 

Something about the aromatic of this wine reminded me immediately of my old Shetland gran, Sarah, cooking smoked kippers. Butter the opened side, and put that face down in the pan so the skin keeps the aroma in ... but then as a kid I asked her once whether she spoke gaelic and she gave me a warning grandmotherly whack around the ear as she thought gaelic was a Roman Catholic tongue ... a love pat she repeated only when she caught me playing The flowers of the forest on my twelve-string, inside the house. You can tune a twellie so it has lots of drone notes, like bagpipes. But being a dirge to dead men and boy warriors, a lament of such weight could only be played outside, preferably over the graves, where the women never venture. Not to be morbid nor introduce grandma-vi. Let's just say this summer dust-and-citrus rizza pulls my strings. 

If I were formal enough to line this Clare quartet up logically, I'd go Gaelic Cemetery (standard), Pike's Traditionale, Gaelic Cemetery (premium) and then The Merle. Take the trip.

THAT NEW COONAWARRA SUPERWINE

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Right up to your chin: an old Scot's Coonawarra offspring mobs the table
by PHILIP WHITE

Douglas Balnaves is a man of his word. When he wrote to me of our joint responsibilities cavian in response to my bit about William Wilson, sight undrunk, he promised a bottle of the new red work of the Redman's and the Balnaves families. 

Here it be. 

It is beautiful fragrant wine. Yep, it'll cost a couple of haircuts, but to certain levels of the luxury bibulant spender, what's a loose hairshirt among the discerning hirsute? The bearded aspirant? Like a great malt, the new Balnaves/Redman is perfect for special friends on special days. Plan a raid. Dig out the plaid. Steal some.

William Wilson Coonawarra Shiraz Cabernet 2016
($300; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 250 cases) 

It's not as raw as I recall Peppermint Pattie being, but holy hell this is an exotic pretty that reminds me of that legendary Mildara Coonawarra from 1963. That old glory was all Cabernet, mind you, and probably not quite as ripe as this, but keen as I was to get the damn cork out from under this wax, I sat bumped square on my arse once I got the smell of it flooding across the table. 

It's an incredible gastronomic ornament, and its floods like a big fluffy musky marshmallow cushion of loveliness that comes right up to your chin. You need only lean the hooter down a few inches to get a proper headful. Whoosh! While the Pattie was more raw eucalyptol at a dozen years, this is the whole damn confectioner's shop, from crystallised violets to spun sugar fairy floss pashmak to red and black currant fruit gels and the chill Malay shaved ice dessert, ais kacang, with all those jungle syrups dribbling over it. 

Which doesn't sound much like a proper bottle of red wine, eh. Nope. And this is not. This is a freak. Grown and made by the Balnaves and Redman families, it's named after their common ancestor, the canny Black Watch Highlander Wilson who was probably the first white bloke to appreciate the gardening potential of the long terra rossa bank that stretches from Penola to Coonawarra. 

Old William would have turned 200 this year. It's all his fault. 

This wine, his namesake, really is a freak. It's lithe and spritely, but never sinewy or tough. It's so pretty with all those confections that it sometimes seems barely vinous: you might forget that's dry red wine in your glass. Which it is, or course. It's just that this wine is so cutely balanced and disarming in its dimpled youth you might forget it's likely to rock along, cork willing, for a couple of decades yet. 

It has many brazen hearts to break, this beauty, and as many broken ones to heal. Whadder you got? 

Other than that total warp in the Mildara cosmos from 1963, maybe the only other Coonawarra reds much along the lines of this would be Penfolds hyper-luxuries, like the staggering Penfolds Bin 620 Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2008. Which was $1000 a pop before it sold out in a flash upon release in 2011, if you need some price relavisin'. 

I'm not suggesting anybody should blithely duck out and buy a couple of cases of this: it's expensive. I can't afford it. But now and then when somebody needs a very special gift this would be the business. This would please every party. This is extra. Just remember: two glasses. One corkscrew. No wolfhounds. And a suite.

LOCALS REGROUP IN TEETH OF DRY SPRING

High Sands Grenache just sprouting their 2019 shoots: the sheep now moved away until harvest is over; the deep sand opened with a dodge plough ... photo Philip White

Big political reshuffle in wildlife hierarchies round White House
by PHILIP WHITE


This spring is dry. Last week I watched a peregrine reaching to pluck flesh from the sky over the Onkaparinga Gorge at Hickinbotham Vineyard. It seemed too hungry too early with those relentless darts and stoops across the bleak grey space: yearnings too fast for the untrained eye. 

Now the vines around this Casa Blanca cottage are shooting, the ewes with their generation of new leaping lambs have been moved away, so a few hares are coming back. The cloven-hooved sheep seem to deter hares from nesting. Hares don't dig burrows. I watched two boxing the living shit outa each other on a headland yesterday. They fight like kangaroos, up on the hind legs. They'll bash away for a few minutes, then take a break before the next round. Once one male is clearly dominant, he'll then move on the female they're competing for, and if she's not in the mood she'll be up on her haunches boxing the exhausted rampant bloke. I can smell their wild perfume. Their social media would be sumpin else. 

When the sheep leave, the spur-winged plovers, or masked lapwings, also return. Like hares, they make a sparse nest on open ground, and if the parents werent' there with their vicious ack-ack-ack swooping, one could easily step on their freckled eggs. 

There's been a flush of quiet pride locally with the return of the southern brown bandicoot to these Kangarilla hills. This little critter hasn't been seen here since the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983, but they're back, gradually snuffling down the creeklines, following the sand. This means the feral cats are finally in decline. And I suspect the foraging bandicoots are happy to find places like this, which have been free of glyphosate for years. 

Similarly, we're seeing echidna back on the patch. One belligerent local called Spike freaked the life out of the lab cleaner when she interrupted it beneath a bench in the winery next door. Why Spike would travail so far across that vast concrete apron into the clinical sanctity of a laboratory beats me. Marco Polo? Looking for a red? 

The western grey kangaroos are rabid. There's a ghetto of about sixty in a red gum coppice on the fen across the track. Many more than normal. They are big, hairy and confident, and the blokes are scary. 

They're always bashing fuck out of each other, too: it seems the dominant buck doesn't stay king too long. 

Bacchus only knows what sort of a mess they'll make if the dry continues. In the ranges, they've eaten so much of the understory vegetation that the tiny critters, the hopping mice and wrens that usually live and shelter there are under very real threat. 

Within a month or so, the only green vegetation in many locations will be vines. 

The koala, meanwile seem happy. They keep to themselves. 

Gum control by George

I live on a ridge between two creeklines, which have not really run this year. Usually, with sunny warm days like this, they're screaming with frogs, especially when the Moon's full. Uh-huh. Not this time. While one can usually measure the health of the red-bellied black snake population by the intensity of this immoral frog frenzy, today the vipers will be waking from their winter snooze to find no Cuisses de grenouille au beurre aillé et persillé served with the rosé. 

And this year the field rodents are noticeably absent, so who knows what the red bellies will eat. 

That's enough fauna. Flora time: as well as that brisk bouquet of drying meadow, the season is also marked by its early proliferation of allergens: the stolen breath business is thick and startling. These irritants are both natural and otherwise: while I'm always wary of the male brown sheoak and the cursed golden wattle, "the emblem of our land, you can stick it in a bottle, you can hold it in your hand," it's the odd waft of wind-blown chemical spray that gets you while traversing the roadways. My sniffles and gasps are immediate responses to whatever's on the air as we pass. 

This delight usually arrives later in the year, with the cursed olive blossom. 

Creekline 2017: the ground's not making water like this in the dry '18 spring

Not good for wine evaluation, the old raw face syndrome. 

No tasting notes today. 

I thought of this passage of the zephyrs and their various contents in a car yesterday as we drove through pretty springtime florals to sudden hits of stock dung, acrid roadkill roos and then aggro pollens and human-spread irritants. Not going for sympathy, but it's like a Space Odyssey, suspended out in here in a realm where I struggle to identify them, and in the case of wine, describe their aromatic wiles and allure in a language which has very few words specific to flavour or aroma. 

In this line of work, we are forced to resort to simile and metaphor when wrapping English around a task it was never built for. 

Even further off the track, another highlight of this strange season's been watching Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), that vast luxury champagne, liquor, perfume and fashion house, spend a squillion on its current attempts to photograph aroma in a big vid campaign promoting its latest fragrance. 

As I reckon Gus Howard and I did making the first movie promoting Australian wine to Europe for the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation in the early 'eighties. Need immediate access over-ruling all security extant? Wear a uniform. That's the Steingarten behind the Orange Man below, doing the white balance.

It's obvious Emma Stone's journey in the old Merc sports doesn't take her through a waft of sulphur spray or old buck roo piss on the roadside, but I reckon they've done a pretty good job of visually triggering the sense of an array of pleasing aromas. 

I'm not in the business of promoting expensive perfumes yet unsmelled, but I wonder how many hints of fragrance you can count in these very cleverly  sophisticated images? They evoke a long list of wines in my post-perfume brain. Mainly white. 

Now for the smell of ripe wombat. This underground sub-contractor dug his way out of China through North Korea to eventually emerge in Osaka. 

CRAP THAT GOES ON BOTTLES

classic colonial imagery in this 1880s economy: South Australian wine label art from the Bremer Valley vineyard and winery of George Burney Young and his son Harry Dove Young; eastern estuarine side of the Adelaide Hills bit of the Mount Lofty Ranges ...  

David 'Unaipon'Ngunaitponi, the revered Ngarrindjeri anthropologist and inventor worked in these cellars, as did the great French winemaker Edmund Mazure, who worked on his St Henri Claret recipes here in the late 1800s


Wrap some facts around your bottle: try selling some simple clever honesty 
by PHILIP WHITE 


Awoken last night by my mates Valmai Hankel, the great librarian, historian, desert traveller, writer and book expert, and her carer, the illustrator George Grainger Aldridge, talking wine literature to ABC Adelaide announcer Peter Goers, I'm sure I heard the latter complain that he thought my reference once to a wine smelling like lignite was pushing my descriptors too far. 

This usage seems to have annoyed dear Goers for years. 

Grape skins, from whence the winemaker takes colour and flavour, are composed largely of lignin. The oak of barrels is made from lignin - it's the scaffolding that holds plants up. Toast the barrels toward the point that Bourbon makers call "gatorback" and you oxidise that lignin. Add a dash of the yeast, brettanomycaes, that lives on sugar in the wood, leaving mainly oxidised lignin aromas and you shouldn't be surprised if the eventual drink smells a bit like lignite, which is brown coal, which is oxidised lignin, no? 

As a little kid growing up in the mountains overlooking the La Trobe Valley, I learned very young that aroma of the coal trains scurrying along the valley floor, carting coal and briquettes from Yallourn to Melbourne. It seemed an opposite aroma to the freshness and bountiful growth of rainy Gippsland. 

While this slight whinge about usage came amidst some very kind praise, thank you, it reminded me of the current state of wine labels and the mess of mangled grammar that finds its way onto many back labels. I wouldn't expect notable levels of English descriptive literacy from a winemaker any more than I'd expect it of an accomplished potato farmer or slab chemist, but jeez, some of it leaves a fair bit to be desired. 

I suppose it adds something folksy to the product, but they forget that what I want is copy in a face large enough to read, in colours chosen to assist the large number of folks who like me have rather challenging colour-blindness. 

I want to be able to easily see the alcohol level, in the hope the winemaker hasn't taken too much advantage of the slack law that permits 1.5 per cent variation in the ethanol degree - either side of the claimed amount. This means many wines that claim the standard 14.5 per cent level are actually closer to 16 per cent, a degree that puts your table wine closer to the realms of port strength than the polite amount you might expect to enjoy with your average-to-standard chook. 

Not that I haven't enjoyed too many wines that were perhaps a bit too strong for me. 

Now I see a return to some more classical labelling on front labels. We've had a few years where the shelves bulged with a great cacophonic mess of label art, amateurish, confusing and confounding. We got past that phase where mum and dad would sit down at the table with a Biro and pad and design a label, and got to the point where it was young Pebble Brook and Fern Raintree, the kids, designing imagery that ranged from head comix and Mouse Studios' Grateful Dead posters in style, to rather infantile drawings of fairies and glitter. 

Often this matches the mood of the murky, naturally oxidising tinctures within; just as frequently it serves as a warning to this prospective buyer.

Stanley Mouse for The Grateful Dead

Never, man, NEVER do the late teen retro Mouse fudges emerging now match true Mouse. To avoid this confusion, it seems there is a return to providing some basic essential information about strength, grape type, source and age. This is good! 

One of my mentors was that erudite wine man and art collector, David Wynn, who wanted to be an architect or a sculptor more than a winemaker, even after his old dad, Sam, convinced him instead to follow the winemaking game upon his demobbing from the Air Force. 

David was exceptional in the degree of fuss he put into his label design. Foremost is the example that survives to this day on Wynns Coonawarra Estate bottles. 

Having congratulated him on never changing it, and keeping it constant, he chuckled and showed me how over the years, he'd made constant, almost imperceptible micro adjustments to his design, which was based around Richard Beck's perfectly simple woodcut of John Riddoch's 1890s winery and distillery. David had commissioned Beck very early in the piece: it bravely announced a new direction for the region, and in the 'fifties, was alarming in its modernity. 

David claimed to be the first winemaker to use the word "Estate" in relation to his holding, and while he left Beck's distinctive illo unchanged, he struggled and fiddled each vintage to ensure the words "Wynn's Coonawarra Estate" and "Coonawarra" appeared as many times as possible on his bottle. It was on the capsule (twice); it was on the cork. It was on the front label, prominently, and repeated in finer print at the bottom as the estate address. Turn the bottle around, there was a map showing Coonawarra, with, yep Wynn's Coonawarra Estate smack dab in the middle. It was repeated there again, in fine face, top and bottom; even in four point, up the side, as a code. Just to be sure. 

"If you're on Norwood Parade," Wynn told me, "and there's a bottle of my wine on a table on the other side of the road, I want you to recognise that bottle as Wynn's. If you walk into a liquor barn, and there's a bottle of my wine on the shelf right down at the back, I want you to recognise that bottle, walk straight to it, pick it up and buy it with confidence and pride. Between the shelf and the till, I want you to read 'Wynn's' and 'Coonawarra Estate' as many times as possible." 

So if you study the bottles from Wynn's era through several corporate takeovers to today's ownership by Treasury, seventy years on, you'll be alarmed at the repetition you'd never noticed before. That woodcut stays distinctive through all manner of adjustments and tweaks, even surviving brilliantly the inclusion of a black background and a bright red stripe. 

To Wynn, that map on his back label (long gone, mind you) was much more important than any attempt to describe the contents beyond those basics: owner, source, type, strength and age. He had a new region to promote - nobody had heard of Coonawarra, or knew where it was. Wynn believed that if the brand was sufficiently distinctive to earn respect, the drinker would quite simply trust the contents without having to interpret some winemaking waffle about smells and flavours and whatnot. 

David Wynn, Howard Twelftree and the author at the twenty years of Mountadam Chardonnay tasting at the winery on High Eden in 2004 ... photo Adam Wynn

With all that digested, I'm not here to say winemakers shouldn't attempt to somehow describe the style of the drink they want you to buy. Get the biro out. Have a bit of a write. Get an editor to have a go at it. Designers are not editors. 

But if your wine smells a bit like lignite, I wouldn't be bragging of that on the back. I'd leave that mining to the critic, hoping such a discovery would never be made. Go solar.

The auth0r visiting Maire Mannik at the Mines Department in Rundle Street Adelaide in 1973 ... I reckon that ute had a diff from a supercharged Terex V16 fifty tonne dumper in it ... taking it out to beg Dick Cavell at Cavpower for help ... dear Dick died a few weeks back ... he was a good bloke ... this photo Chris Langman using Stuart Young's Nikon

A LIGHTER SHADE OF PALE

Light and precise: see how these Grenache rosés have grown paler with consecutive years ... photo Philip White

Firsts for South Oz: pale, precise rosé; more boisterous chrome Blanc blend
by PHILIP WHITE


It is no secret that I live like a crofter hermit with a pen on the back block verge of Yangarra. Neither is it an accident: for many years I've been fascinated by this unique slice of terroir, and how its manager/winemaker, Peter Fraser, respects it and reads its best potential. 

With these two new wines, he's raised the Yangarra bar, but also opened a new gastronomic track for McLaren Vale. 

Yangarra Estate Vineyard McLaren Vale Grenache Rosé 2018 
$25; 13% alcohol; screw cap 

A few decades back, a great deal of the grand old vine Grenache that South Australia grew went into sweet lollypop pink rosés. 

The Tollana version was a fine example, coming in its flattened pear-shaped bocksbeutel after the Mateus style. This ancient shape was developed to prevent bottles rolling away from the drinker but became very handy with the invention of the fridge: you could slide 'em in the door rack where they looked extra neat and tidy and wouldn't fall over if you slammed it. 

In recent years winemakers have learned to make very fine red wines from the Grenache that survived, inspired in some cellars by the style of Pinot noir perfected in Burgundy. 

Yangarra Rosé 2011 photo by David Burnett when he came to visit.... others by Philip White

But still a determined few have been honing more adult styles of rosé, reaching past the red skins into the berries for their most fragrant, elegant heart juice. 

In the case of this svelte delight, the winemaker has preferred to keep that pale blanc-de-noir hue by rigidly limiting the duration of skin contact, a method which also stops short of extracting much phenolic tannin from the skins, keeping that juice as fresh and fine as possible. 

This is assisted by picking early, before the skins ripen fully. The result is an alluring aroma that avoids the usual overt, even brash raspberry/redcurrant/cranberry characters. Instead it offers a distinctive agave/prickly-pear juice finesse after that delicious cactus fruit adored as the heart flavour of spring and summer by the Maltese since they were Phoenecians. 

Yangarra Rosé 2017

So we have a wine that's pretty much along the lines of a white Grenache. The curious side of me would be tempted to pick some even earlier and make a serious sparkling wine after the methode Champenoise. In either case, I suspect it would attract the sort of drinker much less likely to let the bottle roll away or kick a fridge door shut. 

Yangarra Rosé 2014

I'm very happy indeed to sit toying with this mischievous wine, sans suds. 

Speaking Mediterranean, it does a proper job with most of the snacky platter cuisines from Lebanon to Morocco. Very old ideas in a new style; a new direction. Get down. 

Yangarra Vineyard Estate McLaren Vale Blanc 2018 
$25; 13% alcohol; screw cap 

Here's a brand new blend for Australia: a push into realms paler than that posh pink above. 

Convinced that his upland old vine Grenache indicated a very special affinity between Yangarra and the north-west Mediterranean, winemaker Peter Fraser has spent ten years importing the white varieties of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. 

This wine is a certified biodynamic/organic blend of Grenache Blanc (35%), Clairette (30%), Roussanne (20%), Picpoul (10%) and Bourboulenc (5%). It was made with indigenous yeast in 675 litre ceramic fermenting eggs. 

"Back in 2009 we had an attempt to first bring in Grenache Blanc." Fraser says, "but it was rejected in quarantine. It had corky bark virus. When a variety is first imported, it is only in very small quantities. It takes time to pass quarantine, and then some years to populate the planting material to have enough for commercial plantings." 

Very gentle tootsies on some 2014 Roussanne

As it's a first on many levels, it's not surprising that this Blanc doesn't remind me much of other Australian wine. Nor for that matter, even the whites of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. They tend to have a more rural/rustic approach than Fraser's measured blend of science and nature. He gets more precision in his chaos. 

It is a reassuring, wholesome wine of a special finesse. Its fragrance is once again after the cactus flower and the juice of the agave, aloe and prickly pear, with the accent on streamlining all that into a tight chrome sheen. It's polished; seamless. It has a tad more tannin than the Grenache Rosé, giving it more authority, but overall it's a smooth and shiny thing. It needs no oak. 

In the 170 years since white boozers pushed into this Kaurna country. the embayment and uplands of what became McLaren Vale after a surveyor, Bacchus only knows how many white varieties they've tried here, but it's pretty much everything from Sauvignon blanc to Savignin; Chardonnay to Chenin. 

Most forgettable. Although I have had some lovely Rieslings from the northern uplands of the vignoble, some Cudmore Kay showed me at 30-35 years of age. Golden beauty in those caterpillar/barrel flagons with the cork. I think Sam Wynn invented them for recycling. And I've had some lovely early 'nineties Rieslings made by Brian Light at Tapestry from Yangarra vines. All gone now.   

Dare I suggest this new selection of ancient Mediterranean types offers better hope, in these days of new heat, less water, and a much more discerning drinker? 

Funny that it took us so long. Try it with a cool bean and pork belly stew.