Category Archives: Red

Grosset Gaia 2002

Posted on by
Reply
Style is, I think, of the essence when it comes to wine appreciation. Formal qualities such as complexity and structure are all well and good, but it all comes to nought if you don’t like the wine’s character and personality. I remember tasting Pinots in Central Otago a couple of years back, and being struck by how boring some (though certainly not all) the wines were, despite being quite correct and certainly well made.  There was nothing extra, no idea or beauty beyond what was in the glass.
 
Dark, somewhat impenetrable colour with flashes of crystalline ruby.  The nose is heady with cedary spice, brambles, clean fruit and higher toned powdery florals. There are also some light touches of sweet bottle age. In its delicacy, it’s closer to fine fragrance than wine, but none the worse for it. The aroma profile became more integrated and assertive through the evening.
 
The palate disappointed me initially, and here I return to the question of style. For the first hour or so, I found the wine correct, full of quality, but somehow underwhelming and perhaps a little boring. A very clean entry, with cool fruit and savoury leaf winding their way towards a medium bodied mid-palate. Additional notes of vanilla, dust and a bit of eucalyptus add themselves to the mix with time. Excellent delineation of flavour components. Bottle age becomes more evident on the after palate, with a lovely, lingering sweetness sitting alongside loose-knit yet still quite dry tannins. A nice lift through the after palate shows higher toned leafiness plus hints of plush ripe fruit too. The finish is excellent, clean and long, and leads naturally to the next sip.
 
It all sounds quite good. What changed after an hour is critical to the wine’s success but sits outside of a tasting note. The flavours clicked, merged and became utterly persuasive. It’s as if I was able to step back and see the wine as a whole rather than as individual components of flavour and structure. Its style, in other words, transcended the mechanics of its delivery and became the wine’s dominant face. And, happily, I think I got it.
 
GrossetPrice: $A50Closure: StelvinDate tasted: July 2008

Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

Posted on by
Reply

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

Price: US $47
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: July 2008

Katnook Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 1999

Posted on by
3

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

Rosemount Balmoral Syrah 2002

Posted on by
Reply

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

Lindemans Pyrus 1998

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
2

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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