There’s a reason why I’ve not posted recently, and it’s not entirely related to a lack of time. I have indeed tasted several wines this week. And they were all crap. Which does wear one down after a while. The point of my drinking, or so I have convinced myself, is to enjoy moments of abstract sensual pleasure. I drink wine for the same reason I listen to music; to hear, feel, disagree, discover. In other words, I drink to experience beauty. So a series of ugly wines gives me absolutely nothing to write other than tiresomely self-reflective introductions like this.
Anyway, it’s Saturday night and I’m worth a good wine. So out popped this sample from my tasting pile, a wine that has been waiting a few months to be experienced. I tasted the companion Barossa Shiraz a few weeks ago and found it intensely pleasurable. So it was with pleasure that my first smells and tastes of this wine revealed a similarly characterful, regionally-driven wine. Which you prefer may simply come down to your passion for one region’s flavour profile over another.
Fabulous aromas of dirt roads and crushed stone, along with warm blackberries and well-judged, nutty oak. This is one to smell through the course of an entire evening, and to watch duck and weave through its full range of expressions, including the merest hint of aged leather. To be sure, there’s a lot in here, yet it’s not a self-consciously difficult wine. It just is, with a sense of easy, natural vibrancy that speaks both of its origins and its intent.
Entry brings dense, liqueur-like fruit into focus at the temporary expense of some minerality, but the latter is flung back into the picture on the mid-palate, which is the wine’s high point of complexity. The structure is notable at this point, with firm underlying acidity and plush tannins keeping things in shape without ever seeming like the main event. A bit of vanillan oak pokes out its head through the after palate, but this wine is and remains all about spectacular fruit character; squashed blackberries and stones and dusty summers.
What a treat. This is easily a $40 wine.
Karra Yerta Wines
Price: $A25
Closure: Stelvin
Source: Sample
And after a week spent talking about yeast efficiency and residual pesticide toxicity, a good bottle of wine is important, nay necessary.
I like this line in particular, for it sums up exactly what makes a wine (and notably this wine) simply great:
“It just is, with a sense of easy, natural vibrancy that speaks both of its origins and its intent.”
Well said
You’re not wrong; I feel like I’ve been tethered to my computer for months. Oh wait… I have been! Ugh.
But to this wine, I’m pleased that line resonated with you, because that aspect is what makes this wine so enjoyable but also, I think, so stealthy. It’s never going to jump out and demand love, yet it’s just so sparklingly regional and perfectly formed on its own terms. This is the sort of wine I like to drink more than any other.
Thank you, Julian. That’s yet another awesome review! I am really looking forward to sending you the 2008’s:)