WINE CELLAR
SUPER-LUXE REDS
Tony Harper unveils the cream of the Australian red wine crop.
IF WINE WAS A CAR, these would be Bentley, Ferrari, McLaren. If wine floated on the ocean, these would be the mega-yachts dotting the coastlines of Monaco, northern Queensland, the Amalfi Coast. If wine was food (which it almost is) these would be caviar, wasabi-root, foie-gras, truffle. They are the super-luxe reds – whites will have their day, just not yet – from some of Australia’s best vineyards and producers. And I’m talking about the stuff that sells, on release, for more than $500 a bottle. When it comes to Australian wine it’s a small club, but growing.
78 covemagazine.com.au
– Issue 91
The obvious front-runner is Penfolds Grange. Is it worth the money? Of course it is, assuming you have a love for wine and the funds to fork out that sort of cash for a taste experience which (depending on the situation) might last anything from five minutes to an hour or two. Or you are a canny investor. Despite the fact that its production quantity and vineyard sources vary like a winter wind – it is an amazing wine. It has unabashed fruit richness and gorgeously obvious oak. It is a wine that has shaped hundreds – maybe thousands – of other Australian reds into something perhaps not so special, but certainly following its groove. Grange made the pattern for modern Australian Shiraz. It is also the wine that made the world take our wines seriously. To further the car analogy, it is easy to think that Grange is all testosterone – Transam, Corvette, WRX, Nissan GTR – but it is so much more, and so much less than that. The less begins with weight; Grange is a rich, layered, intense wine, but it isn’t big. It floats. It is Ali on his best day – a heavyweight with fast feet, fast hands, and nothing at all ponderous about his movements. It’s a flat-six, perhaps a Porsche GT4, powerful, fast, elegant. The more is in its never-changing/everchanging persona. Each vintage is a different wine, of a different blend, of a multiplicity of vineyard sites. So it’s a more that keeps the wine true to form, regardless of vintage abnormalities and yield issues. There is hardly a shiraz grower in South Australia that doesn’t (rightly or wrongly) claim to grow grapes for Grange. Current Vintage: 2017. Price: $950. David Powell, unlike Grange, is firmly rooted in the Barossa Valley. He, over the years, has launched three wines into this rather rare collective. In his previous life as founder and owner of the Torbreck label he created The Laird; a silky, dense, multi-layered red from old Barossan Shiraz vines (planted in 1958), farmed by the Seppelt family in Greenock.
It was a bold move, entering the market with the 2005 vintage, released five years later at around the $700 mark. The Laird continues to wow critics and collectors. Current vintage: 2017. Price: $800. Dave Powell’s other two players are under his current Powell and Son label; one which draws on his lifetime in the Barossa Valley, and the vineyard contacts he has made over that time. Powell and Son Kraehe Shiraz, from an oldvine plot in Marananga holding vines older than the Queen. It’s intense, bright rather than brooding, and as rich as you’d hope expensive Barossa Shiraz should be. Current vintage: 2017. Price: $750. Powell and Son Steinert Flaxman’s Valley Shiraz comes from a five-acre vineyard in the Eden Valley, planted more than 120 years ago. You can sense that time in the wine – in its depth, its gentle power, its layers. And it also has that wonderful fragrance and brightness that is inherent to Eden Valley Shiraz. Current vintage: 2017. Price: $750. I assume we’ll see more releases from Powell and Son in the $500-plus zone. Chris Ringland is another Barossa legend, and he was an early entrant to the zone with Three Rivers Shiraz (a Robert Parker favourite) that quickly became one of the most expensive and soughtafter Australian wines on the global market. The Three Rivers moniker has gone, renamed in 1998 as simply Chris Ringland Barossa Ranges Dry Grown Shiraz. These are always rich, powerful wines, unashamedly opulent. Definitely in muscle-car territory, but something spectacular like a Bentley Continental GT. Current vintage: 2015. Price: $890. Production: less than 170 dozen. He is also part of a collaboration – along with Adrian Hoffmann and Nathan Burley – in a label known as North Barossa Vintners. Hoffmann Vineyard Barossa Shiraz comes from Adrian Hoffmann’s vineyard in Ebenezer in the northern reaches of the Barossa. At 15.5% it is a kind of gentle giant (the Ringland style is one of ripeness and power). Current vintage: 2013. Price: $550.
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