An older Shiraz from one of Australia's more renowned regions for this variety, Heathcote in Victoria. This wine is, interestingly, sealed under Stelvin, which is somewhat unusual for red wines of this age. Although Mount Ida is a famous vineyard in Heathcote, I'm not especially familiar with its output, so this tasting was quite exploratory for me.
A savoury nose, some volatility, with earthy minerals, some astringent eucalyptus, roasted meats, slightly edgy oak. Far from a fruit bomb, this one. I find the nose complex and a little challenging in its angularity.
The entry has good impact and delivers flavour early in the wine's line. There are lots of distinct flavours here and, unusually for me, I found myself identifying a fair few. At last count, we have: pepper, sappy vanilla oak, some sweet leathery bottle age, dusty dark fruit, some cedar and slight ecualyptus character, plus a dash of sweet granite-like minerality. Phew. It's medium bodied and presents its flavours assertively. It's also curiously flat and almost cartoonish in its "surface level view" of flavour. The wine lacks a sense of depth and stuffing that, even in a lighter red, assures continued interest beyond any initial impact. So, despite a lot of qualities usually regarded as positive (complexity, intensity, distinctiveness) I wasn't especially drawn to the wine's flavour profile or structure. Fine tannins help the wine's dry finish to linger well.
This wine (or perhaps this bottle) isn't really my style, although some elements of the flavour profile (the minerality in particular) are pleasing. The other half loved it.
Mount Ida (Fosters)
Price: $A30
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: July 2008
It pays to check on wines now and then. The slightly old Rieslings I've tasted lately are proof enough, and this wine continues the trend. I remember tasting this at cellar door and finding it a steelier, more austere style than the usual Clonakilla. I loved it and bought several, expecting it to age slowly.
Hence, I was quite surprised to smell this and find savoury toast the dominant aroma component. But it's not a static wine, and the initial aroma soon disappeared, only to emerge half an hour later as a more complex profile comprising more toast, aggressively sour lime and a hint of honeyed opulence too. It's beguiling, perhaps forceful, definitely characterful.
The palate is even more surprising. As an aside, people always say aged wines, and aged white wines in particular, are a matter of taste, and perhaps they are right. But there's no doubt older wine is an education, and for my money a good aged Riesling (or Hunter Semillon) is worth cellaring purely to see how much it changes. This Clonakilla, for example, still shows powdery acidity, but a whole spectrum of bottle aged complexity overlays this firm structure. It's not a very old wine, for sure, but hints of honey and savoury edge (the unkind might call it slightly kerosene-ish) push their way into the dominant blanket of lime marmalade and floral talc. Quite unexpected in terms of the austerity of the young wine. Intensity is dramatic and, although part of me is tempted to think of this wine as vulgar, I'll settle for "confident." Lovely and clean through the after palate, with a finish that lingers very well without undue weight or clumsiness.
Quite a masculine Riesling style, and oh-so distinctive. It's interesting to see various Australian regions offer alternatives to the mainstream Clare/Eden Riesling style. A wonderful thing from the drinker's perspective.
Price: $A22
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: July 2008
Once you get past the ridiculously overwrought bottle - it's so big and heavy that no foil cutter I know of could possibly work - what you get is a wine that smells, well, expensive: generic New World Napa-esque fruit + some very expensive Bordeaux toast oak. Hm.
The surprise is entirely in the mouth: the weight is much more French than Napa, and it tastes mostly of very high quality oak. It seems just a little bit watery and then it's gone. There's a very small amount of tannin - frankly, it feels wimpy - and then it's gone. Again: Hm.
I'll come back to this later on and see if it improves, but as of right now, the bottle is the only thing that's impressive here, which is odd considering their $8 wines are pretty good (the Porcupine Ridge line).
Later: After an hour's aeration, this started to taste like mesquite or cedar incense, the kind you'd be in an American national park on summer vacation. Cedar, cedar, cedar, and more cedar. Yawn. Kind of tasty, but utterly lacking in personality. Avoid.
Boekenhoutskloof
The surprise is entirely in the mouth: the weight is much more French than Napa, and it tastes mostly of very high quality oak. It seems just a little bit watery and then it's gone. There's a very small amount of tannin - frankly, it feels wimpy - and then it's gone. Again: Hm.
I'll come back to this later on and see if it improves, but as of right now, the bottle is the only thing that's impressive here, which is odd considering their $8 wines are pretty good (the Porcupine Ridge line).
Later: After an hour's aeration, this started to taste like mesquite or cedar incense, the kind you'd be in an American national park on summer vacation. Cedar, cedar, cedar, and more cedar. Yawn. Kind of tasty, but utterly lacking in personality. Avoid.
Boekenhoutskloof
Price: US $47
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: July 2008
It's a balmy Summer's Winter's evening here in Brisbane, and I'm in the mood for Chablis. Handily, I had this lying around the house. This particular wine sees no oak at all, so in theory should express pure Chardonnay fruit and, one hopes, its corresponding terroir.
Nice light golden colour with a hint of green. The nose is complex with powdery florals and a hint of sweetness, along with edgier notes that suggest minerals or crushed shells. There's also a slight smokiness or perhaps mushroom that I find interesting. It's attractive and bounces between austerity and generosity without landing firmly at either end of the spectrum. The palate, by contrast, sits more clearly at the generous end, albeit with a firm mineral backbone to keep things shapely. Mouthfeel here is quite round and smooth, creating a seductive impression on entry. Underlying this mouthfeel is fine acidity of the slightly relaxed type, but in balance and firm enough to hold the wine's line. Fruit is crisp and brisk whilst showing excellent intensity. Some pear, perhaps, and a sweeter edge that's not quite honey but more ripe stonefruit. I wonder if there is a bit of Botrytis here? Just when you think the mid-palate will collapse under its own weight, minerality kicks in and carries the wine home through the after palate. Finish is mostly savoury and quite long.
Admittedly, it's not the most elegant style, but I find a lot to enjoy in this wine. There's flavour in abundance, nice three-dimensionality and a very seductive texture in the mouth. Good value, I think. As an aside, the cork on this bottle was ridiculously tight. Worth the effort, though.
Price: $A38
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: July 2008
I've tasted a few not-quite-new Rieslings of late, and the 2002 Grosset Watervale has certainly been a highlight of the range. 2005 was another top vintage in the Clare Valley, so I'm hoping this wine has something special about it too.
The nose took a while to open up. I served it a little cold at first, but warmth and some swirling have brought forth the wine's character. It's quite unusual. Notes of apple, lime and minerally flowers mix with a richer dimension reminiscent of toasted brown spice. It's quite savoury and a little prickly; certainly not an easygoing aroma profile, but pleasantly challenging nonetheless.
Entry confirms the wine's structural youth, with bright acid the first element to register. It flows nicely along the tongue and ushers in quite intense flavour towards the middle palate. Again, the palate is mostly savoury. That nutmeg-like spice from the nose comes across here as more like kerosene, suggesting the very beginnings of tertiary flavour. Mostly, though, the savouriness is due to a prominent mineral/slate note that provides a foundation over which sweet citrus fruit slowly trickles. Structurally, the wine relaxes as it moves along its line, and deliciously sweet fruit sneaks past the acid onto the edges of the tongue. A nice floral lift towards the back of the after palate, and a high toned finish that pushes right up to the top of the palate. Good length.
There's a lot to like here, in particular its fascinating interplay of contrasting flavour elements. However, I'm not sure this wine is entirely coherent right now and, not having tasted it on release, I don't know if it's going through an awkward patch or whether it has always been this way. I'm certainly not going to write off a wine of this pedigree, or one that shows such toothsome intensity, so I'll make a mental note to revisit it in perhaps three to four years' time. I have a feeling it will show more positively down the track.
Price: $A35
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: July 2008
Another wine from the cellar, this time a Coonawarra Cabernet from a vintage perhaps somewhat overshadowed by its immediate predecessor.
A lovely colour that still shows flashes of purple in amongst its ruby clarity. On the nose, one's first impression is that of sweet silage, backed by clean blackcurrant fruit. It's a lovely nose and shows a nice mix of tertiary notes alongside a substantial chunk of fruited youth. There's also a good dose of vanilla and spice oak, which accompanies the other flavours well and strikes me as assertive without being unbalanced.
The palate is just lovely. A clean, mellow mouthfeel registers immediately on entry, and ushers in a range of flavours on the mid-palate. Here, more clean blackcurrant fruit sits alongside sweetly decaying foliage, some mint and another whack of oak. It's medium bodied, really quite intense, and complex enough to keep my brow wrinkled with each sip. As a youngster, I'd say this would have been on the fuller side, yet its structure is still firm enough to give the palate shape and flow. As the wine moves through the after palate, flavour flows quite linearly over the tongue. Grainy tannins also emerge, still quite drying and tea-like, and carry the wine to a persistent finish. It's one of those wines that seems to settle on the tongue like a blanket and sit there most happily. The sweet leather of bottle age is most evident towards the finish.
I'm really enjoying this one for its complexity and generosity. Lovers of aged flavours will want to leave it for a few more years to allow further flowering, but it's also a nice wine right now, with its mixture of young and old.
Price: $A35
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: July 2008
Several decades in to the ongoing, evolving project that is Bonny Doon Vineyard, it looks they may finally be arriving at the most interesting place yet - and ironically, it's an arrival that sort of predates the winery's founding. By that I mean that they're now trying to produce wine the way you would have done it a hundred years ago in France, except presumably with a few newfangled tricks such as refrigeration and proper hygiene.
This wine is one of the first Demeter-certified biodynamic wines they've grown, and the complexity of it suggests (to me, at least) that they might well be onto something. This is a far cry from the weirdly plush, microbubbled oddities they've been crapping out for a while now; instead, what you get here is a beautifully light-colored wine with a floral nose that's oddly like what I imagine Portuguese laundry detergent might smell like: rose petals and generic "clean" with an edge of cucumber.
In the mouth, this is fatter than you'd expect, with a finish that tapers off quickly to reveal a note of crushed seashells and faded lemon rind. Before it goes, it's a sort of dilute orange blossom honey note you've got along with, well, a sort of drying minerality. It's fairly distinctly itself, whatever that is, and as such it gets two big thumbs up from this drinker. I only wish I had a plate of fresh oysters to accompany it.
This wine is one of the first Demeter-certified biodynamic wines they've grown, and the complexity of it suggests (to me, at least) that they might well be onto something. This is a far cry from the weirdly plush, microbubbled oddities they've been crapping out for a while now; instead, what you get here is a beautifully light-colored wine with a floral nose that's oddly like what I imagine Portuguese laundry detergent might smell like: rose petals and generic "clean" with an edge of cucumber.
In the mouth, this is fatter than you'd expect, with a finish that tapers off quickly to reveal a note of crushed seashells and faded lemon rind. Before it goes, it's a sort of dilute orange blossom honey note you've got along with, well, a sort of drying minerality. It's fairly distinctly itself, whatever that is, and as such it gets two big thumbs up from this drinker. I only wish I had a plate of fresh oysters to accompany it.
Price: US $20
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: July 2008
A controversial wine. This benchmark Australian label in its 2002 incarnation was savaged by some prominent critics on release, then appeared at an enormous discount at retail. I picked up a couple out of curiosity and whacked them in the cellar. Here's a first taste.
There's a curious duality on the nose. First, hints of sweet dark fruit and sweeter oak. Second, an astringent, funky character that is hard to pin down but that exists somewhere between green bean and hot tar. For all that, it's quite aromatic.
The palate is revealing, as it more strongly contrasts sweet fruit against powerfully astringent, somewhat bitter flavours. Just full of contradictions, this wine. There's definitely some ripe, black fruit in there. It's emphemeral, though, and hence teases the palate without providing a sense of closure or completeness. Instead, the wine is somewhat dominated by apparently unripe notes and bitter coffee grounds. It's all slightly dirty and quite out of keeping with my understanding of style and balance. Some sweet vanilla oak sneaks into the after palate, and the finish is quite long.
I left a little in glass overnight and it calmed somewhat, but with this diminution of difficult flavours came an overall dullness that is no compensation. I should note, though, that we finished the bottle between us, and it's ironic that a wine about which I have so many questions can still be oddly drinkable. The other half certainly liked it more than I, so maybe it's just not my style.
Price: $A20
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: July 2008
I didn't taste every Australian Riesling from the 2005 vintage (far from it) but, of those I did, this was my favourite on release. I remember a wine of beautifully austere aromatics, steely palate and extraordinary acidity. I also remember buying a fair few to cellar. I don't have much experience with this label over time, though, so the cellaring adventure is a bit of an unknown. One wouldn't expect such a highly structured Riesling to change substantially in three years, but I am still interested to know how it's travelling, and hence checked a bottle out of storage to see.
Bang; lime sherbet and talc, just as I remembered. In fact, this wine seems not to have budged at all, at least on first sniff. It's still a very high toned aroma profile, good complexity, with a feeling of weightlessness and intensity all at once. The palate, by contrast, is showing the first hints of development. There's no overt honey or toast as yet, but there is a fullness of fruit weight that I didn't observe in the young wine.
Entry is tingly with acid that starts bright but quickly moderates to a level allowing fuller lime sherbet notes to show through. Mind you, this is far from a relaxed wine, and acid still dances down either side of the tongue, keeping fruit flavour focused down the centre line. Steely mineral notes take over from the middle palate and tip the wine towards a fairly extreme austerity of flavour. Not to all tastes, perhaps, but I dig it. Flavour shows good intensity in the context of an assertive structure. Just after the mid-palate, the acidity kicks back in and fairly swamps the tongue, temporarily erasing fruit flavour but creating the most beguiling textural experience. Acidity fades on the finish, leaving in its wake echoes of lime and talc that linger on most satisfyingly.
This wine's structure is still the key, and dominant, feature of this wine, although the gradually accumulating fruit weight promises some interesting times ahead. Overall, I prefer the more extreme expression of structure shown by this wine on release, and consider the wine right now to be in a slightly awkward stage of development. Good bones, though. I'm expecting very good things.
Price: $A30
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: July 2008
Some time ago, a lovely visit to the Helm cellar door resulted in the purchase of this wine amongst other things. Interestingly, Helm's top Riesling isn't made from estate fruit, but rather from that of a nearby grower who is reputedly fastidious in his viticultural craft. On release, I remember this wine as a tight, floral/powdery/slate type of Riesling, and one that struck me at the time as designed for cellaring. Time to check on its progress.
Youthful colour that doesn't betray any significant change through bottle age. The nose is similar to what I remember, with aromas of flowers, talc and so on. There is, however, a fullness to the aroma that seems new and reminds me of spicy, lightly tropical fruit. Quite pretty. The palate shows greater intensity than anticipated and confirms the nascent development of this wine. Clean, lemon flavour registers soon after entry and becomes richer towards the mid-palate. Although acid provides adequate shape, it's relaxed enough to enable a generous flow of flavour over the tongue that widens along the line. A hint of honey and an interesting savoury edge become more prominent on the after palate and create an impression of rich, spicy preserved lemon. Excellent drive through to the finish, where a sweetly floral note, combined with delicious sourness, lingers on for quite some time.
To my taste, this wine's silhouette is a little lumpy and doesn't reach any pinnacles of sophistication. There's perhaps a slightly clunky relationship between each element of flavour that prevents the seamlessness I enjoy in a top wine. Still, a very drinkable, characterful wine that I look forward to revisiting in a few years.
Price: $A35
Closure: Stelvin
Date tasted: July 2008
