Results tagged “Hilltops”

Seems I had a similar reaction to last year's model. I thought it terribly spicy, perhaps more so than usual, yet here I am with the 2008, inhaling a veritable pepper grinder of aroma. Perhaps it's a function of youth; I confess to having drunk more of this wine with a few years' age on it than at release. Whatever, it's nice to be surprised year after year. 

Over the past several weeks I've gone through nearly a case of the 2001 and 2002 vintages of this wine, none of which was particularly good or drinkable; I fear it had either gone bad in transit to North America or else was suffering from a brettanomyces infection of some degree. After one too many bottles, opened and not much drunk, of strange, mousy, Band-Aid-y shiraz, I gave up, gave away the last few bottles, and glumly realized that I still have a few cases of this wine from 2003, 2004, and 2005. After opening this bottle, though, I feel much better about the situation.

At first, the smell of this wine could be mistaken for one of those gargantuan bath cubes that elderly German women seem to love so much, with hints of eucalyptus and sweet, chalky dirt. The color's still a vibrant, youthful purple; it doesn't smell particularly aged (which is a wonderful thing to me after the disappointment of the '01 and '02). There's a suggestion of sweet, smoky, bacon-wrapped prunes here too: it smells rich and wonderfully Christmas-y.

The taste of the wine is an elegant, shocking contrast to the smell of it. Instead of a fat, blowsy, American-via-South Australia shiraz, you get a lean, nervy, racy, well-acided syrah with supple dusty tannins and a finish that goes on for an age. It's the sort of wine you'd expect Kermit Lynch to import: strong enough for a New World hedonistic-jammy-fruit enthusiast, but elegant enough for Alice Feiring too. The overall impression is of restraint, of a wine that could just have easily gone the way of Barwang shiraz but instead decide to stop halfway. There is beauty in restraint, after all.

Six months too late to call it spring cleaning, I found three bottles of this hidden in the bedroom closet last weekend. Oops. Talk about suboptimal cellaring conditions: nearly 80 degrees in there all summer long. I decanted it, set the decanter in an ice bath to cool it off a bit, and waited an hour before drinking: I hope that mitigated any damage I did as best I could.

There's a visual texture to the wine that's unusual: there's a blackly rich core of fruit in the glass, thinning out to a less intimidating rim at the edge of the glass. Better yet, there's a suggestion of particulate matter, with bits stuck to the sides of the glass; presumably, more of the same in the wine itself lends it all an impression of body and richness. I have no idea why, but the older I get, the happier I am when my wines have a certain look of, well, relation to the world of the natural. I don't like wines filtered to a glossy smoothness; I want to be reminded that they were grown in dirt and raised in wood.

At first, the nose is off-putting, smelling sweet, strangely sweet, the sweetness of blackcurrant jam. It's only temporary, though: wait half an hour at least and its true nature will out. There seems to be an overall level of Brett here that teeters between "ugh, no thanks" and "OK, I can deal with this"; harsh patent medicines duel with roasted smoky notes, and no one comes out on top. Ultimately, the off notes mostly win out, which is a disappointment in the extreme; the quick flashes of roast coffee and bacon fat are there all too briefly before being one-upped by slightly metallic aromas of the medicine cabinet.

Still, there's enough interest here to make me want to finish (just) a (single) glass before tossing the rest of the bottle and waiting another year or two to try one of the six bottles remaining. The texture is beautiful, a rich, solid mass that glides forward on lovely, smooth tannins into a long, silky finish that most wines would kill for. Ultimately, though, the strange qualities of the wine carry the day, and you're left wondering what happened - I remember this wine being profoundly beautiful five years ago, but I'm just not feeling the love right now. Sadly, the warm cellaring spot probably didn't help matters. Oh well.

It's especially satisfying to follow a label over time and observe how it varies with each vintage. Sometimes an especially good vintage will show extra depth, or unusual complexity, or a particularly intense perfume, all the while retaining an essential consistency with its siblings. There's no doubt this is an excellent Hilltops, and it shows the trademark fruit density and character that I look forward to every year. But there's a powerful something "extra" in this release -- an almost flamboyant spiciness that is present both on the nose and palate -- that has me smiling tonight.

I picked this up for a song at a local bottlo in the Lockyer Valley. Not terribly promising provenance, to be sure. But it's drinking really well right now, so I guess this particular bottle hasn't had too hard a life.

Around six and a half years ago, I was preparing to leave for Australia. Me, I'm Californian, but I'd always wanted to visit; after many years of planning and saving, my partner and I decided to leave for Sydney in February 2001.

A few weeks before we did, I met Julian for the first time: we had mutual friends in Sydney, and it was clear that we were both, well, obsessed with wine to a certain extent. I brought a couple of bottles of wine to Australia with me - Bonny Doon pinot gris, I believe - but schedules didn't work out and we didn't get a chance to meet in person, unfortunately.

Six weeks later, I found myself in Melbourne. I'd already begun having a look around Australia's wine regions - most memorable were Moorilla Estate (for verging on the ludicrous - think tacky art museum with an utterly trashed tasting room with no actual wine available to taste) as well as Golders Vineyard (probably the first pinot noir I'd ever had that verged on the transcendent). In the meantime, I'd arranged to get together with Julian the next week in Sydney, but of course I wanted to find some wine from my home state. You know, the usual home town pride, nothing special.

According to Bonny Doon's importer, there was one small shop in Melbourne that carried Le Cigare Volant, which was just about the only Californian wine I was able to find in town. Strangely enough, a wine sales rep noticed I was buying it and started to gossip about how Bonny Doon winemaker Randall Grahm had just been in town for some kind of international Shiraz symposium. He'd basically trashed the entire Australian wine industry for producing nothing but "raspberry motor oil" - but did concede that there was one winery in the entire country worth its while: Clonakilla.

As luck would have it, Clonakilla isn't far from the Hume Highway (that's the road from Melbourne to Sydney for your Americans). It's just a short detour of about half an hour and besides, I'd never really seen Canberra.

I made the detour.

An hour later, I realized that I'd probably just had one of the key experiences of my life. Clonakilla winemaker Tim Kirk heard our ridiculous Californian accents in their small tasting room and decided to come check it out; we wound up being invited to taste barrel samples, which had never happened before. I was incredibly grateful and embarrassed, really - it's unusual for anyone to be that generous in my personal cultural experience, so I didn't know how to comport myself. To thank Tim, I gave him the bottle of Le Cigare Volant that I'd bought in Melbourne; he gave me a bottle of port in return.

The next morning, after breakfast, I bought the most expensive bottle of wine I'd ever bought in my life: a bottle of the Clonakilla shiraz viognier. It had been sold out at the winery, but one shop in Clonakilla still had some. It cost me US $28, which was unspeakably expensive. (It now sells for US $65, assuming anyone has any in stock, just six years later). Julian and I drank that bottle together; it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship (what can I say? As a Californian, I'm prone to inane movie quotes from time to time).

Today's a typical San Diego June day. It's cool, mostly sunny. I headed into our tiny 1940s garage and grabbed the first thing I could find, and it was a Clonakilla wine. If there was ever proof that a winery's generosity to a total stranger can pay dividends, it's the simple fact that I've been a loyal customer ever since.

In the glass, the wine is behaving French, not Australian. There are tiny particles clinging to the side of the glass; the color is noticeably young - surprising for a five year old wine - all crimson blacks and vibrancy. The nose is unspeakable; by that I meant that it shuts even the most loquacious wino up faster than anything short of La Tâche. It could be meatloaf. It could be an old leather bound book that fell behind your carrel in the library basement. It could be sheets that have been in the closet too long. It could be fresh blackberry jam with demerara sugar. It could be any number of things. It is, at any rate, fascinating.

It appears to be a very young wine at times; at other times, aged notes sneak in. They don't detract from the wine, not at all; instead, they serve as a gentle reminder that this wine, too, will fade at one point, so you'd best drink it now. There's bright acidity, yet not too much; the initial attack fades quickly and you're left with a sweetness supported by nicely resolved tannins, a certain smoothness, and a gentle finish that reminds me of croutons and pancetta. At other times, there are decidedly smoky notes, bacon fat, water crackers, and possibly even something like roses. I'll stop now; I'm sure you get the drift.

In my room, it's 2002 again and I'm standing outside in the Australian sun wondering how the hell this stuff exists. It's a religious moment as I'll ever have. I'm grateful to have a glass of this in front of me, I really am.

Clonakilla
Price: US $17.99
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: June 2008

McWilliam's seems to have taken a stealthy approach to marketing of late, as some of their brands have decidedly slipped off my radar, Barwang included. I remember having some lovely reds in the late 90s from this Hilltops winery, and the prices were always excellent for the quality. But not so much visibility of late. So, in an effort to remain "with it," I thought I'd give this Chardonnay a go tonight.