Top wines from Yalumba

I tend to eschew wine from my homeland. It was all I drank until I was 26 and moved to the UK. Ever since I’ve been playing catch-up with the rest of the world’s wine regions, whilst earnestly defending Australia’s ability to produce excellent wine (perhaps a view that is gently being eroded the more my palate becomes attuned to old world wines).

Anyway, Australia DOES produce superb wine, as a tasting of Yalumba’s top cuvees yesterday, proved.

The star for me was the 2000 Yalumba ‘Octavius’ Barossa Valley Shiraz (£45). The nose is dark, introspective, brooding: cool coffee grounds woven with caramel, chocolate, vanilla and pepper. It is the Shostakovich of wines, or perhaps the James Joyce of wines – many layered, complex, difficult to understand and hard to consume in all but small doses. The palate is dense as a black hole but maintains its elegance. There’s no doubt this is an extraordinarily powerful wine, but not in a jammy, over-baked, overtly fruity, flabby way. It’s just extremely amplified. It's all muscle and no fat. Perhaps a good match for venison or kangaroo.

The 2002 Octavius is similar in style and structure, but a little too young for drinking now (the 2000 is developing nicely but still has many years ahead of it). The nose shows wood smoke, plum jam and perfumed violets. The palate, again massive, is still fresh and youthful with clean acid and tannins pronounced enough to maintain good structure. It’s hard to believe the Octavius is matured in American oak, let alone in such tiny vessels as the tiny 90-litre new ‘Octaves’ that are used, as the oak treatment is subtle. It lends a spicy hint to the wine – but not at all the dusty, woodchippy, bitter hiding that American oak so often gives to a wine.

Just to compare what the old world does with shiraz, we tried a 1996 Chapoutier Cote Rotie against the two Octaviuses (Octavii?). Here we move from Joyce to John Steinbeck. This wine has a fuck-off savoury nose, with celery salt, leather, pepper, bacon, dry meat. It is as if water has never deigned to fall on the land these vines were planted on. The thin palate has very developed dry cherry and leather-bound library book characters. It may have been open a little long – to my palate it was getting thin and tired, but still showed a remarkable contrast to the oily, voluptuous Australian versions.

The 2002 Yalumba ‘Menzies’ Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon (£23) is Yalumba’s top cabernet. At the moment it is far too young to drink but will get there, I think. The nose is laden with fresh green capsicum, cedar bark, menthol oil and, as my flatmate Andy’s friend put it – Silvo. The palate is very tight. After breathing for several hours it is more recognisably cabernet like, with blackcurrant and cedar characters. But frankly, everything is just a little too primary and aggressive at the moment. It had been said that the winemakers had made a decision to modernise this wine in recent years, making it less tannic and green. Having no basis for comparison, I don't know whether this has worked or not. To me, it was still a very tight, green wine. But in a good five years it may well be a different wine altogether.

Then a few odds and ends to finish off the afternoon. 2004 Hamilton Russell Pinot Noir just stinks of every horrible smell ever to adorn a South African wine – soot, ashtray, roadworks, burnt rubber, you name it. Underneath it tastes vaguely like pinot noir. And finally 2003 Pontodi Chianti Classico is a very fruity version. Heady maraschino cherry liqueur characters, with liquorice and strawberries. On the palate, some cherry blossom characters, a little smoky and great creamy length.

Sarah Chang and two New Zealand Pinots

Last night I saw Sarah Chang perform Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 1 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It was without doubt the most amazing concerto performance I have ever seen by any performer on any instrument. Jaws dropped into laps across the hall at the sight of Ms Chang whipping out the cadenza at the end of the third movement with more speed, force, texture and energy than I thought humanly possible, let alone ever expected to witness live. The poor girl sitting next to me actually covered her eyes and mouth at one point, presumably out of fear that the soloist was going to explode, or at least accidentally release her bow into the eye of an unsuspecting audience member. (She wasn’t too far off – Chang had broken so many of the hairs on her bow in her thrashing of the cadenza that in the brief orchestral tutti at the beginning of the fourth movement she jettisoned her bow altogether and commandeered that of the first violinist to complete the concerto!)

Anyway, it was a jolly good thing that I had had a few settling glasses of wine to anaesthetise me beforehand – I’m just not sure I could have withstood such exposure totally sober.

Tilley’s ‘Interesting Wine of the Week’ award goes to the 2006 Plozner Venezia Giulia Sauvignon Blanc from Italy. Gooseberries and mangoes on the nose. Limey palate, with hints of apricot and an agreeable oiliness finishing with racy acidity. Refreshing and interesting. And it comes in a bottle with a glass closure. Genius or gimmick? You be the judge.

Then a pair of New Zealand pinot noirs. 2005 Thornbury Central Otago Pinot Noir is translucent even red-purple in colour. Closed nose, slightly cedary and stalky. Red-fruit palate, very fresh and linear, but well balanced. At £9 odd it is remarkable value, especially as I had tasted it blind and thought it from Burgundy. 2005 Cable Bay Marlborough Pinot Noir is mid red. The nose is a mix of pepper, capsicum, cherries, stalks, caramel and hint of cherry sherbet. Palate shows strawberry and barn yard characters. On balance, I like it a little more than the Thornbury, but at about £14 it is less good value. My colleagues thought the Thornbury outshone the Cable Bay on both quality and price, but there really isn’t much between them.