Category Archives: Red
Ngeringa Syrah 2005
Whilst Ngeringa’s
Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
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
Katnook Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 1999
Another wine from the cellar, this time a Coonawarra Cabernet from a vintage perhaps somewhat overshadowed by its immediate predecessor.
Rosemount Balmoral Syrah 2002
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.
Mount Pleasant Rosehill Shiraz 2000
Checking in with a favourite friend tonight, the 2000 Rosehill Shiraz. Most visitors to the Hunter Valley (and there are many every year) will pass by this vineyard, sited as it is on Broke Road, gateway to the wine region. I wonder how many of them get to taste the fruit of Maurice O’Shea’s labour?
Lindemans Pyrus 1998
On release, I liked this wine more than its siblings, the St George and Limestone Ridge. I can’t remember why, exactly, so this tasting is a good opportunity to find out whether it’s as special as I remember. The colour is garnet with some bricking at the edges. The nose is a classic mixture of tobacco, vanilla oak, dark fruit and a bloom of aged influences expressed as sweet leather and mushroom. Assertive, seductive and lush, despite the abundance of savoury notes. The palate shows some surprises. Youthful red and black fruits register first on entry, followed by a series of more savoury elements, such as leaf and leathery notes. These add complexity to the core of sweet fruit, though never quite dominate it. A remarkably persistent intensity of flavour kicks in towards the mid-palate and dominates one’s sense of the wine from that point onwards. This is a very assertive wine; fruit and delicately sweet aged characters attach themselves to the tongue aided by a blanket of fine tannins. These flavours stay attached through the after palate, and it’s only towards the finish that other influences, such as sappy oak, start to displace them. Length is very impressive.Interesting wine, this one. Initially, I was super impressed with its intensity and impact, but realised after a while that these qualities mask a certain one-dimensionality to the flavour profile. It’s still a good wine, just not the most elegant style, or perhaps it’s not at an ideal stage of development. I wonder, too, whether the fruit character hints at DMS. If you have some, wait a little longer. I suspect if the fruit recedes a further notch or two, it will be more rewarding to drink.LindemansPrice: $A50Closure: CorkDate tasted: July 2008
Mount Pleasant Old Paddock & Old Hill Shiraz 1996
There’s something about wines that are potentially great: when you get them in the glass, no matter of time spent sniffing and thinking seems to offer so much as a suggestion as to what exactly this wine is supposed to be. Most wines offer easy clues: raspberry motor oil? Congratulations, you’ve just bought a high octane Barossa shiraz? Your grandmother’s toilet soap mixed in with Hawaiian Punch? Congratulation, you just bought a trendy Shiraz Viognier that someone hurried to market in the early 2000s.And this wine? I’m stumped. Is that earth? Dried dates, perhaps? No. Something like nail varnish and vetiver? No, that’s not it either. It’s definitely old – as I poured it into the glass, its color was hesitant, shy, unwilling to assert itself. Cloves and camphor? That might be more correct… at any rate, there is still some kind of primary fruit hanging on for dear life here, combined with somewhat “off” (yet likeable!) notes of dirt and sharpness.Surprisingly rich in the mouth, it still defies easy description; this isn’t really like any wine I know. There’s something here which reminds me of a discontinued chocolate sampler left over from last season’s Valentine’s Day shopping: the tiniest bit musty with a fruitiness of confectionarial trends long since past. There’s almost a horehound medicinal aspect here too, but not really; menthol, perhaps, but more of a folk remedy than cheap chewing gum additives. There’s absolutely lovely viscosity here as well; the feel is surprising and welcoming; there’s also a curiously high-pitched tangential note that enter early on and remains for some time. Finally, there still seems to be some sweet, woody character here that still supports it all.So: I’m not sure what the heck to say about this wine other than it is strange, strange in the best possible way. Everything they teach you in wine school turns out to be wrong in this one case: you can’t grow grapes in such a terrible climate, you shouldn’t age New World wines that long, you name it. But what we have here, ultimately, is (I think) terroir, plain and simple. Somehow, the local pioneers sussed that the Hunter Valley does in fact produce phenomenally good wines – wines that are in fact better than good as they’re entirely sui generis. And that’s no small achievement.Mount PleasantPrice: No idea (this was a present from Julian); Wine Searcher says about A$42 for the current releaseClosure: CorkDate tasted: July 2008
Penfolds St Henri 2002
Out of the bottle, this wine shows as a dark, heavy Australian shiraz with distinct aromas of hazelnuts and burnt sugar. However, it doesn’t come across as overly complex; it’s a bit dumb, strangely enough; with some more time and air, it didn’t seem to progress much beyond an agreeable but slightly generic “warm climate Syrah” note.Drinking the wine is an exercise in the texture of luxury; this is as plush as Beverly Hills plastic surgery, round and full at the edges, but (surprisingly) not overdone: this is not a humongous Barossa Valley fruit bomb in the mold of a Parker 95, but something far more difficult and rare: a balanced, well proportioned wine that is absolutely lovely on its own terms – and thankfully without a face-numbing hit of alcohol to back it up.The finish turns out to be the most amazing thing here: if it weren’t for the finish, you wouldn’t think this wine’s as expensive as it is. It lasts. Minutes later, you still have the impression of savoriness; it’s umami beyond belief and reminds me of ketjap manis and dark chocolate ganache. Long after you’ve swallowed, it’s still there… and there seems to be just a hint of minty eucalyptus that sneaks up after a minute or two. Delicious.PenfoldsPrice: US $40Closure: CorkDate tasted: June 2008
Chehalem 3 Vineyard Pinot Noir 2006
I just moved the final 11 cases of wine from a storage space in downtown San Diego to our garage. Ouch. Remind me to never, ever move again – it’s been one year since I moved here, and I still have no idea where half of my wine is. That bottle of Ch. Musar Dad gave me? I dunno, maybe under the guest bed?Anyhow, I tried and somewhat succeeded to jam it all in a cheesy DIY “500 bottle” stand-alone wine cooling unit: it didn’t quite work, so I decided to just pull all of the stuff in Stelvin out and keep it in the one cool spot in the garage. I figure I’ll try to drink it this summer or serve it to wedding guests in August, what the heck.This brings us to this lovely bottle of Chehalem pinot noir. Oddly enough, this is the first red wine I’ve ever drunk from Chehalem: I love their rieslings and their pinot gris is pretty darned good too. They are of course from Oregon, however, so I’m obviously way behind on the Pacific Northwest boosterism/logrolling schedule, so here we go.First off, there’s a soothing, transfixing cola nut and Rainier cherry note that springs up the moment you unscrew the cap. It’s the kind of smell that instantly puts you at ease: whew, I just blew twenty bucks on a bottle of pinot and is thankfully not crap. It’s just a little bit sappy, so it doesn’t really strike me as a truly high end pinot, but the quality to price ratio? I can work with that just fine. There could also be just a hint of spicy barrel in there as well, and there’s even something like fresh roasted chestnuts (without the roasting). Go figure!Color is lovely: a milky light red that’s miles away from the overdone dark of some New World pinot. The flavor comes as a bit of a (welcome) surprise: fairly acidic and bright, no obvious sweetness, good body, with a bit of wood (?) supporting full, vibrant cherry and other red fruits. This is a fine example of standard quality Oregon pinot noir, and it’s very good value for money.NB: there seems to a very slight spritziness here that dissipates quickly; you might want to decant this one.ChehalemPrice: US $32Closure: StelvinDate tasted: June 2008