Pinot Noir, indeed any wine, from the East coast of Tasmania is rare. James Halliday lists five producers in this (unofficial) sub-region, a few of which appear to be nascent operations. Despite this lack of scale, the area has an enviable reputation for Pinot Noir, the present wine being one of the higher profile labels.
There’s something unpleasant about the way this wine smells, but what is it exactly? It doesn’t really smell like viognier, that’s for sure. To me, it smells more like powdered milk, inexpensive celebrity perfume that’d excite Humbert Humbert, and low-grade canned peaches. There’s also something like unventilated FEMA trailers duking it out with bitter phenolics in a disused corner of your high school chemistry lab. Oh man, this is fascinatingly bad. I mean, yeah, I don’t really want to taste it but if you’re gonna go off, you might as well do it in a really interesting way, right?Greasy and plastic in the mouth, it does nothing for a minute before surging up on a Bit-O-Honey wave of sugary fruit worthy of a trashy Serge Gainsborough song before making a quick right turn into an unpleasant, gritty, almost milky finish with flashes of peppery notes that’s just a touch hot as well, making sure that virtually everything that can go wrong with viognier has in fact gone wrong by the time you’ll finish the bottle. And that, by any objective observation, is no mean feat. Congratulations to Te Mata for a job well done! Te Mata
Price: NZ $22
Closure: Stelvin
Clayfield Wines is a small maker in the Grampians region helmed by a most engaging winemaker in Simon Clayfield. I recently purchased the currently available range (three Shirazes), and this is the first I’ve tried. It’s the “second” label wine, priced at a very reasonable $A24.
Somewhat sweet and yet savory on the nose, this wine throw out associations with spearmint, roses, strawberries, and dried straw. There’s also a hint of typically Burgundian sourness there, framing it all to somewhat more serious effect; I’ve enjoyed just smelling this for a few minutes without necessarily feeling compelled to drink any. If anything, it smells unusually ripe, which is a bit of a surprise given the fairly pail, almost milky color of the wine.Somewhat broad in terms of structure and tannin, there’s a somewhat disappointing lack of strong flavor here, buttressed by firm acidity on the finish and a disconcerting aftertaste of stale wheat crackers. Sadly, I’m at a loss to describe what exactly this tastes like other than “like mediocre Burgundy” – it isn’t bad, exactly, and yet it isn’t doing anything at all for me in terms of pleasure. Weirdly, the only thing that comes to mind is something called Crazy Cow, which was a 1970s breakfast cereal that turned milk into strawberry milk upon application thereof. There’s an industrial strangeness here which, paradoxically, comes from a wine which presumably isn’t industrially made. Could it simply be that unusual ripeness in this vintage is overwhelming what interest there is behind relatively full sugars? I don’t know, but I’ll take a pass on this one.Sébastien Roux
Price: $20
Closure: Cork