Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport

What better way to celebrate Australia Day than with a swift bracket of tasty little numbers from downunder. I know I can get a little bit evangelical about Australian wine and how fucking awesome it can be, but I think this weekend’s experience confirms that I’m right in my views. Some observations:

1. White wine. Hello? Since when did Australian whites become this elegant? From Clare Riesling to Hunter Chardonnay I was really surprised with the refinement of the white wines. Typically they did not live up to the reputation of alcoholic fruit juice, with “pineapple lumps” notably absent from the tasting notes. Instead, elegance and complexity were found in spades.

2. Age them. Yes, I will admit that in a bracket of 6 or more reds, one does see the words “jam” and “caramel” come up with abundance, but with 10 years’ age or more, these wines really settle down to become generous wines, without aggression, and with plenty of interest from secondary flavours, as well as layers of fruit in abundance.

3. Freshness. Even in the reds, I’m pleased to report that even with high – sometimes massive – alcohol, the wines still have excellent acidity making them not too overwhelming. They’re still a bit too amplified for my liking in many cases, but it’s good to see that things are being kept in balance.

I started my warm up at lunch time Friday with a couple of Barossa Shirazes. The 2005 Colonial Estate Mungo Park Shiraz (£45) is everything about the current state of Australian wine in a single bottle. It is indeed a splendid wine, huge but fresh. It has a great peachiness to it and fresh acidity, but it is absolutely massive. 15.5% alcohol is more synonymous with McWilliam’s port drunk out of a brown paper bag on the steps of the war memorial in Hyde Park than a highly priced table wine. After about 3 mouthfuls I wanted to lurch outside and pick a fight with a random passer-by. The 2005 Gibson Shiraz is more in line with the traditional Barossa style: fresh ground coffee on the nose, an attractively jammy palate.

Then on Australia Day proper I headed up to Oxford for a Wines of Australia blind tasting.

We began the whites with the 2001 Brokenwood ILR Reserve Semillon (Hunter Valley, NSW) (£17). Semillon is a massively underrated grape, and I’m astonished that this is the only Hunter Semillon I could find on sale in London with a modicum of effort (although if you’re only going to have one, this is a good one). Still pale in colour, the nose is honeyed, with lime, wax, straw, and even a hint of toast coming through. The palate begins with tingly acid, leading to a tight lemony palate with a waxy edge. Very clean and pure, yet showing some attractive developed characters. Surely one of the world’s great wine styles.

We then moved onto the 2006 Knappstein Hand Picked Riesling (Clare Valley, SA) (£6). Clean citrus nose – fresh lime and Sunlight soap. Nic identified a hint of “India rubber”, which I quite agree with. The palate has loads of fresh lime, orange blossom and Granny Smith Apple. Piers thought it a bit flabby – and beside the ILR Semillon I must admit it appeared so, but it’s a bit unfair to put them side by side. For a budget wine, the Riesling performed admirably, and has plenty of acid. Great value.

The whites ended with the 2005 Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay (Hunter Valley, NSW) (£18). Light gold, the nose is buttery, peachy with hazelnuts and some restrained French oak influence. The palate is medium bodied and peachy, with a rich creamy mouthfeel and elegantly high acid. An exercise in restraint and complexity, it really is a very complete wine that, despite coming from a very hot climate wine, comes across as very understated.

An extended bracket of reds began with the 2005 Punt Road Pinot Noir (Yarra Valley, Vic) (£11). It has a vinous nose with ripe strawberry jam characters. The palate is quite round and generous with ripe pinot flavours and a hint of caramelly oak. Well made. Although obviously New World in character it is a ripe and friendly without being bloated.

2005 Cape Mentelle Cabernet Merlot (Margaret River, WA) (£10)
Purple. Intense nose – coffee beans, aniseed, ripe green peppers, mint. Herbaceous. On the palate some caffe latte, cassis liqueur flavour and ripe soft tannins. Perhaps a bit young, it could age for a decade, easily. Piers wasn’t impressed with it, but I think it was a good example of the Margaret River style, although perhaps overbearing because of its youth.

2005 D’Arenberg “The Custodian” Grenache (McLaren Vale, SA) (£10)
This is where one begins to descend into anonymous heavyweight Australian red wine territory. Although individually a good wine, you could really just pick up any £10 Australian Rhone blend and it would be as attractive. Blackberry jam, damson plums, coffee bean, and something very hard to describe and raspberry like. I find Grenache terribly hard to describe. Other people’s use of strawberry and raspberry I find don’t quite hit the spot. For me the only word is “purple”. That bright purple that Ralph Wiggum gets around his mouth sometimes when he eats jam – that’s the flavour of Grenache. The acid was nice and crisp.

2005 Yering Station Shiraz Viognier (Yarra Valley, Vic) (£10)
Purple. Sweet jammy nose – spearmint, stone fruits. The wine has on orange/peachy hint that provides interest, with good tannic grip on the palate. I think this is a really attractive wine – a good house style.

2004 Fox Creek Short Row Shiraz (McLaren Vale, SA) (£15)
Dark Purple. Very typical McLaren Vale – caramel, liquorice, coffee on the nose. Rich unctuous palate, heavy and juicy. I really enjoy this wine but it didn’t seem to please the crowd as much as the Yering Station did. Perhaps the line-up was beginning to defeat them.

Over dinner, I opened two old favourites from my collection and we were not disappointed. They proved how superb and un-bloated Australian wines can become with a decent amount of age on them. Both were from the 1997 vintage, a fairly underrated vintage, squeezed between the excellent 1996 and 1998, but not to be overlooked.

1997 Grosset Gaia (Clare Valley, SA) (£30)
A blend of 75% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Cabernet Franc and 5% Merlot. Very expressive. Pure mint, leaves and dark chocolate on the nose. Sumptuous palate – fresh dark fruits, ripe supple tannins, mature but youthful. Drinking beautifully and will continue to do so for some time.

1997 Rockford Basket Press Shiraz (Barossa Valley, SA) (£60)
Dark red. Loads of elegant sweet fruit on the nosed – apricot, plum, and lashings of caramel. Rich syrupy palate, leathery, with fresh, lively acid. Soft and generous with a hint of burnt sugar on the finish. Fantastic.

Red and Brown

This week I didn’t take a crap between Wednesday and Friday. Is that normal? I can only think of two things that might have provoked this problem (now allayed many times over, in case you care, although if you do I’d be worried about my demographic…) My flatmate has just started learning the saxophone, and I’ve taken to reading the London Review of Books whilst on the loo. I was sort of hoping that the combination of brown tones and purple prose would keep my bowels in their pre-existing state of equilibrium, but apparently not. Clearly too much saxophone. I swear to god that if Adam plays Fly Me to the Moon one more time with the same wrong note in bar 7 (he clearly hasn’t learnt the “sharp” sign yet), he’ll have that saxophone so far up him it will be him that isn’t shitting for days at a time.

Of course, the other thing about Wednesday and Thursday was that I didn’t drink. (Or Monday, for that matter, although that had no effect on my "regularity"). This is all part of my new “drink nice things a couple of times a week, not plonk several times a week” regime. But the new way did not serve me all that well this week.

On Tuesday night I was at the annual Denning Society dinner. As functions of this sort go, it’s quite nice really. You get a good meal, and for two years in a row now the after dinner speaker has been funny, and you get to dress up, and there are people less than 40 years one’s senior there. That’s pretty good as posh lawyer dinners go. At comparable events one usually listens to old farts say things like “Oh, you just can’t get a good hotel in London for under £400 a night” and you can’t even respond by saying “Oh come on, the Comfort Inn King’s Cross isn’t bad if the hookers are having a slow night” – instead you have to say “oh yes, yes, one’s better off staying at one’s club, although the tariff at the East India has been creeping up for the last few years.”

Even the wine wasn’t bad. With the fish course we had a 2006 Caves de Haut Poitou sauvignon blanc – fresh and inoffensive, with crisp tropical fruit, but nothing to detract from the sparkling conversation we were having about Lord Denning’s judgment in Vandervell's case. With the main course there was a 2003 Chateau Lescalle Bordeaux Superieur, which had respectable blackcurrant-driven cabernet fruit and a soft mouthfeel. The oak was of on a planet of its own, but you can’t have it all.

And that was it until Friday, when I pulled out a bottle of 2003 Te Awa Hawkes Bay Cabernet Merlot (£9). I’ve waxed rhapsodic about this wine in the past, but I must say that on subsequent occasions it has disappointed me. It works best decanted and with plenty of time to breathe, whence it shows lovely cool climate cabernet fruit. But on Friday (and also when I tried it before Christmas) it was thin on the palate, although still showing a good nose of mint, blackcurrant and plum pudding.

And that was it again until tonight. I’ve spent the day buying up wine for a couple of up-coming tastings, and decided to road-test the 2004 Castello della Paneretta Chianti Classico with my dinner (£12 at Majestic, £10 if you buy two or more). On its own it’s a bit of a wallflower – closed nose, vinous palate. But with food it comes into its own, with aromas of dark chocolate, cherries, dried herbs and spicy oak, and fresh acidity on the palate.

Adam has just started up again, so I’m going to put on Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and pour another glass. Only the atonal can drown out the atonal. With the help of alcohol, that is.

Wine Diary

I’m starting a drinking diary because I just don’t have that many profound thoughts about wine to write proper pieces on themes and hot issues in the wine world, like real wine writers do. But that was the original point of my blogging adventure in the first place, so I might as well give effect to it. Consider me a vinous Chris Gillett, the opera singer who photographed every meal he ate for a whole year and then exhibited his 2000+ photographs in a gallery in Bradford-on-Avon. Except that, sadly, I don’t drink every day, nor do I photograph the bottles. So I’m not really much like Chris Gillett at all. Anyway, this week’s adventures (plus other stuff I’ve drunk so far this year, noted retrospectively):

Friday 4 January 2008
2005 Yves-Boyer Martentot Meursault (£20)
Here’s a stunning wine. Golden. The only way I can describe the flavours that come out is that they form a “perfect score-order release”. That’s a musical term. It’s what an orchestra aims for when it finishes playing a sustained note: high instruments like piccolos stop playing a fraction of a second early, while tubas and double basses cut off last, so that to the listener the finish sounds in proportion. Like a pyramid of tumblers, you want the ones on top to jump off first, otherwise the whole thing collapses. This wine opens with high level delicate flavours – minerals, lemon, dried apples, white flowers, then blossoms into bigger things on the palate – stone fruit, vanilla, toasted marshmallows, integrated oak, and a lovely toasty finish. Highly complex – every mouthful offers something new. Could age for 2-5 years and be even better.

Saturday 5 January 2008
My parents were in town, from Sydney. In Sydney, you can take your own wine to restaurants, so you can actually drink something decent with your meal without paying an extortionate markup. You can’t do that in London (well, not usually), so rather than go out for dinner and keep the bill to a minimum by supping Kelly’s Revenge, I had them over for dinner, where I daresay both the food and wine would be better than anywhere within winter walking distance of my house.

2001 Reinhold Haart Piesporter Goldtropfschen Spätlese Riesling (£12)
Bright light gold, tinge of green. Delightfully aromatic nose of lime, green apples, white flowers and orange. Spritz on the entry, lemonade/sherbet sweetness, a slightly greasy hint, and fine acid on the finish, if not quite enough of it for my total satisfaction.

2001 Delas Marquis de la Tourette Hermitage (£16)
I had the 1999 of this wine a couple of weeks ago when my pupil master took me out for lunch. Mid red, brickish rim. Opulent nose of spicy oak, leather, chocolate, dried fruit, ground coffee, warm bricks, white pepper at times. It evolves in the glass, but always with a brandy/lit Christmas pudding streak. Palate is warm and rich, rounded, with supple tannins. Classic Hermitage. The 2001 is a completely different story. Bright translucent red, its colour is pinot-like. Forward nose, energetic, jammy, with roast meat aromas too. The palate is hyper-savoury, with white pepper and minerals, but quite restrained.

Sunday 6 January 2008
I had some very optimistic Rioja out of a tumbler at my local pub. They do fantastic food there. I’m not going to tell you where it is because then you might go there and ruin it.

Then I went to work for 4 days and didn’t drink at all. It was awful. There was the possibility of going to a Burgundy tasting on Tuesday but I don’t pay to go to wine tastings (only the gullible do that) and the person I was going to go with (the deal being that he would pay for my ticket if I talked him through Burgundy for the evening) apparently forgot, or decided not to go, or something.

Friday 11 January 2008
1999 Chateau Les Coustets Bordeaux Superieur
My cousin Tom gave me this for Christmas. He has worked in a bar so I trusted his judgment and didn’t immediately give it away as gift to someone I don’t like. But I’m afraid I won’t be praising this wine from the rooftops. It’s so pale that I probably could have passed an eye test reading the bottom line of the chart through this wine and still not needed to have my prescription increased. Similarly half-arsed fruit on the nose and a rather dilute palate, finishing with an offensive metallic aftertaste just in case you had any lingering doubts. Still, I only gave him a bottle of margarita mix, so it was a nice thought.

Saturday 12 January 2008
2005 Eugene Klipfel Cuvee Louis Klipfel Pinot Gris (£11)
I came across a cute little wine stall at the farmers’ market in Canterbury today, with a small but interesting range. They had the 2006 Loimer Gruner Veltliner there which I’ve been looking for ever since I tried it at Upper Glas (a Swedish restaurant in Islington that I recommend in its own right). It’s got a bright colour, hint of green. Very pure nose showing soft pear, grape and lime. Palate continues through with Tinkerbell delicacy, precise, razor sharp acid and a chalky finish. I think I’ll make this my house white this summer – Gruner has to be the next big thing (although the drinking public still has a lot of catching up to do with the many other “big things” that I have benevolently pointed out, all of which continue to be ignored), and I’ve tried some great ones recently. The 2005 Huber Gruner Veltliner, which you can get at any Oddbins (not usually the greatest advertisement for a wine) has a nose of lime, orange rind, white pepper and a hint of liquorice. Palate is very clean and austere, showing lemon and grapefruit flavours and great length. And the 2004 Loimer Kaferburg Gruner Veltliner is a really serious wine: reluctant nose – hint of minerals, lemon zest, apricot sherbet; peppery palate, really interesting. Anyway, back to my bloke in Canterbury. Since he had the Loimer I trusted his judgment and picked up as many whites as I could carry home (6 as it turns out), including this Pinot Gris, which I opened with dinner. The nose takes time to open up, and shows honey and hay when it does, along with an animalistic sweaty smell. The palate has some nice smoke and pear features, apricot, honeycomb and a bit of weight too. There is some interest here, which is welcome, but it’s not a wine to remember. Still, worth a try.

Sunday 13 January 2008
NV Chapel Down Downland Dry
Neil’s local pub in Canterbury, the Dolphin – a fantastic pub, incidentally – serves this English wine for about £11 a bottle. It’s a blend of Seyval Blanc, Reichensteiner and Muller Thurgau, but before you go turning your nose up at it, it’s a perfectly acceptable pub house wine. The nice thing about it is its crisp, refreshing acidity – such a welcome change to the usual cloy that cheap wine has (or so I’m told). There’s not much else going on – some fresh white fruit flavours, but it’s otherwise pretty forgettable. But I was more interested in other things – the log fire, the free board games, the dishy waiter, the immense length of the guy’s bum crack sitting at the next table (I just couldn’t stop looking at it – it must have had its own gravitational force) – oh, and the delicious prawns on toast with lemon mayonnaise. Delish.