WayWood Wines Quattro Bianca Adelaide Hills 2012
$22; 13.2% alcohol;
screw cap; 90 points
One of the most unfortunate aspects of wine marketing is
the consumer resistance to creative blends of varieties; particularly anything
unusual. Winemakers think about a flavour, work out how to achieve it, select
the parcels of fruit, and make a wine. Sometimes they 'blend at the crusher',
putting all the grapes through so they ferment together; sometimes they make
separate parcels of wine and blend them carefully on the tasting bench, just as
a master parfumier constructs a new fragrance.
To me, the greatest fun in winemaking is this latter
exercise, polishing a blend with tiny dribbles of this or that until it sings.
To be at a mighty house like Champagne Krug during the assemblage is the
pinnacle of wine wonderment. Those rare folks lucky enough to have witnessed
the alchemy that occurs when over a hundred, sometimes two hundred, individual
components from different vineyards are painstakingly blended for a more
perfect result, walk away knowing that their wine knowledge has just done a
major, irreversible change of gear.
Then comes the trouble, in Australia at least: marketers,
retailers, sommeliers and wine evangelists all seem to agree the drinker is
deterred if there's a bunch of different varieties honestly listed on the front
label. So the maker who's gone to all that trouble then usually resorts to
dreaming up a new name instead, often working up a word that sounds like a new
single variety. Even then, the wine is usually tricky to sell, regardless of
its quality.
Andrew Wood dreamt this lovely into existence. He picked
Chardonnay, Verdelho and Semillon from a single Adelaide Hills vineyard and
co-fermented them. The vineyard's
actually in the very old rocks in the hills behind Willunga - stupidly called
the Adelaide Hills by the appellation doctors. The wine has the creaminess of
good Chardonnay and the butter-and-grass of Semillon with the more herbal edge
of Verdelho all in there, singing a lovely little harmony. The flavours follow
the same path, giving the drinker a smooth homogeny which is a better thing
than the sum of its parts. This is a wine which would offer a neat softening contrast
to sharper foods, like Tom Yum and the other chilli and ginger dishes of
Thailand. But it would also offer harmony to foods more akin to it, like the
buttery scallops I drank it with at The Currant Shed this week. It also goes
just slurpish with a creamy chicken liver paté. It's easy, slippery stuff. The
new website says it's N/A, which may be why Woody says he hasn't sold any there
yet. Don't believe it. There are good stocks in the shed.
Coates The Iberian
McLaren Vale and Langhorne Creek 2012
$30; 14% alcohol;
screw cap; 93++ points
Duane Coates is a well-travelled, well-fed thinking
drinker with dangerous parfumerie tendencies. This wondrous assemblage contains
Touriga Nacional, Tempranillo, Monastrell (aka Mourvèdre and Mataro), Syrah
(Shiraz), Malbec, Cinsault and Garnacha (Grenache). These are the varieties of
the Iberian Peninsula. The wine has alluring Iberian aromas which bring visions
of chorizos, warm black olives with garlic, sun-dried tomato and the black Jamón ibérico ham of Spain. There's
also a dark hint of Zorro's boots and well-dressed saddle. It's a smooth,
comforting bouquet, fleshy and reassuring. The flavours are more slender than
that aroma suggests in this its youth; they will swell and mellow. It tastes
nothing like any of its individual components, which is the point. It has dark
Valrhona chocolate flavours, with subtle hints of nightshade leaf and meaty
blueberry. It tapers off to an appetising, sinuous finish, slick and stimulating
as much as immensely satisfying. It will bloom into a more seductive delight
with a few years cellar, but it's a true bliss already, and grand example of
why gastronomically-intelligent blending often beats straight mindless varietal
wines hands down. Try it with any of the foods already mentioned, or a mouthful
of Lindt Blueberry Chocolate. Yum-o.
No comments:
Post a Comment