PINOT NOIR

PHILIPS WHITE AND JONES IN THE EXETER ... ADD ANOTHER L TO THE LATTER, OF COURSE (HE'S A VICTORIAN YOU KNOW) ... CLICK TO SEE THE ZITS ... THANKYOU MILTON WORDLEY FOR THE GREAT PHOTOGRAPHY


Hillcrest Yarra Valley Premium Pinot Noir 2004
$55; 12.6% alcohol; cork(!); 95+ points
Made by the much mythologised Phillip (sic) Jones, of Bass Phillip (sic), from the 34 year old dry-grown Woori Yallock vineyard previously used by James Halliday, I reckon this is the best Australian pinot I've had. Jones is tres feral, of course, and many of his wines are unfiltered and cloudy, like this one's groovy $38 (92+) little sister - they're both girls - but this has the extra spice of very expensive oak, and extra careful bunch selection. Jones thinks it's about as good as he gets. Rich, smooth, velvety, thick, healthy, breathtaking - very naughty Burgundy indeed, hiding in Australia like this. Coq au vin. www.hillcrest.com.au

Moss Wood Vineyard Margaret River Pinot Noir 2006
$53; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
She’s been sitting here for a week now, and I’ve still only managed to drink her down to the top of the label, while I’ve waited for her to show the slightest sign of breathing. Hardly any change. This wine will live for twenty or thirty years. 2006 being the coldest, slowest, latest Margaret River vintage in forty years, one might expect such royal disdain from this revered vineyard. It’s very clean cherry-plum-raspberry sort of pinot at this stage, after a week, just as it was after a day. Maybe it’s developed a little beetroot; a little tabac. It’s after the extremely plush patent leather rather than the silk then velvet manner. A rather mysterious raven in a tuxedo and Bal a Versailles, by Deprez. Musk. Dried apple. She’s got Kahlua on her breath. Stunning sweetness of fruit and perfectly poised, neck-turning tannin. It’s like thanks I’ll move along and then wha-??? And you realise there’s wickedness afoot if you’re extremely patient, remain very well behaved, and certainly don’t fidget. It’s one of those wealthy spunks John Singer Sargent painted. She’ll take you when she likes.

NEW!
Port Phillip Estate Morillon Tete De Cuvee Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2007
$46; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 15 OCT 09; 94+++ points
This is as good as Mornington has got thus far. It's mysterious, heavy and compressed. It almost smells of gun blue and gunpowder, but not quite. It reminds me of Domaine de l'Arlot Nuits Saint George 1er Clos des Forets Saint Georges 2004 as a young wine. It's black cherries, soot, black cats and licorice, with cassis and framboise below, which is not to say it's too alcoholic. It's just surly and authoritative and dense. The palate is lithe, tight, and ungiving, with little of the cheery raspberry and whatnot you'd expect, say, of Morey St Denis. This is one scary, sinister mutha. It needs at least a decade. Then, it'll kill you, but not by percussive intrusion. It'll slay by undressing itself, and then your defences. Forget all the firearms shit. This is a cross between Carmen Miranda wearing nothing but a hat made of fruit, and Nastassja Kinsky turning into the black panther in Cat People:

See these eyes so red
Red like jungle burning bright
Those who feel me near
Pull the blinds and change their... minds
It's been so long

Still this pulsing night
A plague I call a heartbeat
Just be still with me
Ya wouldn't believe what I've been through
You've been so long

Well it's been so long
And I've been putting out the fire with gasoline
Putting out the fire
With gasoline

If you haven't got my gist yet, this wine is not for you. It's for me. And I'll have to drink this bottle now, so I can join the girls.

Isabel Marlborough Pinot Noir 2004
$45; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
Swoon. Schmooch. Sigh. This is what it’s s’posed to be like in Pinot World. Luscious and viscous, spicy and totally seductive, there’s no point in resisting: she slides all over your sensories like some wicked therapy oil, massaging every little worry away. I’d always thought Martinborough, (North Island), was the sexiest NZ pinot site, but this beauty says the wide valley of Marlborough, in the South, can do it just as well. Something with truffles. www.isabelestate.com

Romney Park Reserve Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir 2006
$36, 13% alcohol; diam cork, 94+ points
Romney Park’s Reserve Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir 2006 ($36) was one of the few trophy winners deserving of its gong at the Adelaide Hills wine show. The peanuts in charge had served it in thimbles at that event, so now, with keener curiosity and a proper glass, I slid the proboscis in … I was already seated so I couldn’t sit down and weep, in the company of a polite couple I’d only just met, so I could barely disrobe and dance … The oak stonkered me first. Perfectly apt, old, seasoned French barrels had adorned the welling fruit with an edgy piquancy that reminded me of a Spanish lady I met on a train … All that fleshy fruit: a little roll of it protruding over the edge of her polished black satin. Like the cleavages between each toe, puffing up against the edge of the low-cut flamenco shoe leather, as mysterious as baby beetroot; but as simply obvious in intention, purpose, and presentation as pomegranite and raspberry; as tight with gushing blood as a juicy black cherry ... I licked it. Mmm. Tang of sweat, putting an edge on the savoury olive oil texture … and yes, a little kalamata amongst the cherry and baby beetroot, with a dollop of sour cream, like a borscht … “Utterly wicked and sinful”, I was scratching, “swoooonful! – now to 2014 – ” when the bodgie pterodactyls outside swooped me back to Hahndorf. Romney Park is named after the Romney sheep they once counted, with a doff of the beret to Domaine de la Romanée Conti, the sacred heart of Burgundy. While Ashton Hills pinot is probably closer to the austere DRC in style, this red is more like Smitty’s devine Domaine de l’Arlot: more amiable and fleshy from the start, with one less zero at the end of the price. 15 FEB 08

Marchand & Burch Great Southern WA Pinot Noir 2007
$70; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Burgundian winemaker/viticulturer Pascal Marchand is half of this hot partnership in the deep south west; the other bit’s Jeff Burch, owner of Howard Park. Think: traditional winemaking combined with the best cool fruit Burch could coax from the Porongorup and Mount Barker vignobles, and some determined biodynamic tendencies. Inhale: ripe wild cherries in chilli chocolate sauce, nutmeggy oak, and richly composted earth. Drink: silky syrup with slender, persistent natural acidity and extremely fine-grained, gently insistent tannins. Exhale: sheer, saucy, deep pleasure, especially when it contains some roast pork belly. Ponder: langorous, teasing, appetising luxury that hangs on and on.

NEW!
Port Phillip Estate Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2008
$37; 14% alcohol; Diam cork; drunk 14-15 OCT 09; 93+++ points
Spicy, not quite abrupt, Burgundian timber itches the inside of your nose when you put it in here. You don't have to put it in very far. But there are blackberries which ease this lumberjacked machismo. Deadly nightshade. Juniper. Anise. Dried figs. Baby spinach. Chicory. Peppery watercress, like the stuff Colonel Light left in the Delamere Creek in 1836. Some sorta thing blacker than a cherry. Dried prunes. That all makes your nose feel well scratched. I'd like to say that when you put it (the wine, not your nose) in where your teeth are, it's soothing, but no. It wangs around your mouth like a polecat in a cage trap. It's livid and vivid and very hard to feed. But shit it's a good wine. It has all the tight stuff, all the intense black devilry, all the hot gearbox and clutch of a pinot which will be a ravishing beauty in about six to eight years. So call it a Jaguar (car) and forget the polecat bit. No bullshit. The tannins (extra fine and velvety) and the acid (not quite Sandoz or Owsley, but pretty swift) and the sheer sinewy nature of the fruit and the sap all add up to a trip that's worth waiting for. And I don't mean a Ford with a Jaguar badge. I mean pre-aircon 4.2, stripped to the bones. Bravo, sweet Sandro Mosele!

Romney Park Pinot Noir 2007
??; 14% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
This wine is tighter and meaner than the 2006 ever was. It has the trademark Hahndorf acidity jammed through it like a stake. Even at 14% alcohol, the natural acid is fierce. The wine has many facets of wild black cherry and hedgerow berries, even black tea, but it's as tight as a fist, and will need a good lie down before it'll be letting anything loose. I'm not saying it's not pretty or entertaining or anything, for it most mercifully is, with cute raspberry gels, lemon drops, and lollyshop topnotes in general. But that palate is as tight and disciplined as I've seen in Hills pinot, maybe ever. These minimal oxygen wines of the Shorts are the opposite in style to the less retentive pinots of Steve George. It will be fascinating to have a pair of 97s in a decade! 04 APR 09


Morillon Port Phillip Estate Tete du Cuvée Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2006
$??; 13.5% alcohol; Diam cork; 93++ points
I spose if you’re copying a wine style from France you might also copy their ling. This coulda bin called sumpin different. But it doesn’t jam in my craw, the ling. Nor does the wine. I like the fact that it’s not a juicy fruity pinot, filling the Port Phil’s top bot, nor is it a big tannic bugger, pretending it contains shiraz but not really. This is perfectly balanced, perfectly formed young pinot, understated in almost every way. But add all that understatement together, and you’ve got a simple, humble, plainly crafted antipodean wine that should have the haunches of all Burgundy ashiverin. Nice knock. Spare ribs.

Grosset Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir 2006
$65; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
Probably Grosset’s best pinot, this won’t be out for a week or two, but there’s only 300 cases, so jump the queue or squeeze out a pre-release squirt. It’s a different style to Steve George’s exemplary “lightness of being” DRC models, with their paler hues and firmer acidity: it’s built more around riper tones and more obvious, hearty oak, closer to earlier Penfold’s than current Ashton Hills. The flavours are of the chewy black cherry family; the aftertaste still quite acidic, but with black tea tannins in place of the tight raspberry-and-lemon finish of Ashton. Great with T-Chow duck. www.grosset.com.au (9.2.8)

Montalto Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2005
$37; 13.2% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
Montalto is one of the more stunning vinstallations on burgeoning Mornington; it’s more of your Shaw & Smith (with a shiny bolt-on restaurant) than Rockford, with PR flak packed with shrapnel like “spectacular…natural…premium…extra virgin…springfed…pure …natural wetlands…highly-regarded…award-winning…self-sustaining”. What? No “nestled in”? Nope. But here’s a damned fine pinot. Nutty, and more astringent wild cherry than simple raspberry, this is firmly acidic, firmly tannic, clean-as-a-whistle pinot for the cellar, more DRC than Juicy Fruit.

NEW!
Blind River Marlborough Pinot Noir 2007
$40; 14% alcohol; screw cap; drunk 14-15 OCT 09; 92+++ points
Many Kiwi pinnerwahists (they really call it pinner wha in the Land of the Wrong White Crowd) seem to be stuck in an oak addiction similar to many Australian redmen of the seventies and eighties. This wine is acrid with sharp blackwood sap. But there are many cherries (wild little black ones, and marello), a hint of persimmon, some kalamata and some anise, all adding up to quite a smell. The swaller department is more entertaining and fruity, as those dark fruits climb over the carpentry in a determined manner, leaving the drinkers grinning that mad purple grin that people develop when they're in red heaven. I've enjoyed shlucking this baby, but it'll be more sinful sensually, and less schoolmarmish paddy whack wise, if you let it forget the examinations, roll a few doobies, and sleep off the rest of its secondary schooling in the dungeon. It has sufficient acid to eat some of that oak and support some of that fruit for, well, what? A decade? If you prefer a bit of biffo, get it now at Vintage Cellars, which means you'll have to come to Australia.

NEW!
Moss Wood Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2008
$??; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; consumed 21-24 OCT 09; 92+++ points
On first opening, this seemed simple. Maraschino, raspberry, maybe some grilled cashew, and alcohol. It almost went down the sink. But on day three, whoop-y-doo! We got us a convoy. Spicy Burgundian oak, cherries, vanilla bean, creme caramel, firm yet sort of distant acidity ... suggesting the wine should be left in the cold for four years, or decanted for about four hours. The typically brief label text suggests the wine was made to the Moss Wood recipe on Mornington, but names no culprits ... Sando Mosele is my bet, but theplace is Dromana, not Red Hill, where Sandro waves his wand. When Clare Mugford gets back to me I'll let you know. In the meantime, this is the lighter, simpler little sister to the Moss Wood Margaret River model lauded above. I'll be keen to discover why the Mugfords went to Mornington, and not Tassie, for this distant addition to their fold.

Eldridge Estate Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2006
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 24-28 APR 09; 92++ points
Deceptive wine, this, as many an alluring pinot finds itself. It's delicate and nutty (cashew) with stacks of cherry (marello and maraschino). It also has a fascinating savoury tweak of Chinese olive. The oak is subtle and gently spicy (ginger and nutmeg); the flavours gentle but persistent, with precise acidity and elegant tannins to offer perfect counterpoint to the wine's finely viscous texture. It's too cute now: it needs three more years to properly vol up to us. It was perfect, though, with rabbit liver pate on rye, one caper per slice, at breakfast in the rain.

Hurley Vineyard Estate Balnarring Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2006
$40; 14.8% alcohol; Diam cork; 92++ points
A sinuous, complex mess of black cherries, beetroot, fennel, cedar, old nutmeg, musk, confectioner’s sugar, anise and whatever you’ve got the time to wait for, this is an alluring and engaging pinot from one of the southern hemisphere’s best pinot sites. And it’s not a mess, really. It’s quite neat and tidy. But it’s not behaving yet; it’s not trained. It lashes restlessly about the mouth like a sinuous beast, leaving a light coating of black tea tannin and a long acidulous astringency. It’s big, but balanced, long, intense and strapping. I’d love to drink it in four years, but it’ll go much longer than that. Give it plenty of decanter, serve it in big glasses, and have it with classic boeuf bourguignon. And somebody whose eyes you can gaze into for at least two bottles. One before; one after. FEB 09

Paradigm Hill L’ami Sage Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2005
$40; 13.9% alcohol; Diam cork; 92++ points
Just under a tonne to the acre on the smug cool of Mornington must mean extreme intensity, in any variety. Make it pinot and you’ve got my nostrils flaring. A whiff of sooty oak opens the glass, then, reluctantly, a long, tight, infuriatingly shy red gradually exudes. Beetroot, black cherries, bilberries and blueberries simmer away in it; charcuterie meats hover below it; magic ethereal topnotes will gradually evolve above it. It has svelte acidity and the muscles of a sprinter. Wait five or six years. Duck.

Toi-Toi Central Otago Pinot Noir 2008
$??; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 20-23 June 09; 92++ points
While I reckon this may be quite a lot more alcoholic than the above claim, this is a wine of some elegance and poise. Prune and beetroot abound, but there's a lovely burst of florists' and confectioners' colour at the top of the bouquet, teasingly dancing through and around the blazing staves. The palate has a cheeky raspberry gel simplicity and texture about it, and then the cooper comes knocking again. Repeat the whole exercise, and the glass fills up with exquisite Morello cherries. Not too bad at all.

Herbert Mount Gambier Barrel Number 1 Pinot Noir 2006
$??; 13.6% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
Black tea and walnut shells seem to add their dry, dark, woody aromas to this, the best barrel of Herbert’s in 2006. Below those moody, slightly acrid topnotes there wells a bowl of beetroot, prune, raspberry and marello cherries. The palate’s beautifully viscous, with all the above flavours in neat balance. If there’s a style hint required for tragic Burgundy nuts, think along the lines of a junior Domaine l’Arlot. Like the standard 05 model, the wine is better for its honesty: it’s not forced, sophisticated or pretentious, but just, simply, overwhelmingly, HERE, NOW. Juicy pork cutlets.

Stefano Lubiana Primavera Tasmania Pinot Noir 2006
$28; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
Dear Stefano’s been plugging away there on the Derwent for nearly twenty years, after the shock of telling his family their Riverland vineyards weren’t what he wanted, selling out and moving so far south they could hardly see him. This is the result: a hearty, fruity, honest son-of-a-gun of a pinot, gloriously wholesome and healthy. Black cherries. Crème caramel. Dry dark spices too hard to track down. That’s the nose full. The palate? Lovely neat acidity, all natural, with fluffy raspberry and cranberry whip around it. Like a trifle. Wet sponge cake. Cream. Cassis. Vanilla custard. Leaves the mouth like a sylph on the fly. Pork cutlets.

Stonier Mornington Peninsula Reserve Pinot Noir 2005
$45; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points
It’s a good thing, watching the Mornington wineries hit their straps. Stonier is one of the oldest, and the vines that went into this fine pinot are around twenty-five years old. It’s an elegant, yet complex red, with harmonious twists of dried fig and prune humming along beneath a dusting of lightly sooty oak and the beginnings of leathery maturity. There’s some appropriately cute tannin, too, drying off the tail. Half an hour in the decanter really sets it loose. Confit of duck. (18.11.26)

Herbert Frosted Mount Gambier Pinot Noir 2005
$25; 12.2% alcohol; cork; 90++ points
A tweak of spicy, slightly sooty wood gives this ripe-raspberry-lollies-and-marello-cherries delight a pleasant walnut shell edge. Like all three current Herbert pinots, it’s disarmingly open of face, reminding me of the parlour maid in The Duchess of Duke Street, which is before any of you were born. This one has the most prominent acidity, and will be the best performer in the dungeon, if you feel a little Max Mosely sesh coming on. It’s simple, but never duh-dumb nor pretentious. Perfect fare for smoked hocks served on blue cabbage, with poached beetroot, Spanish onion and kalamata olives.

Cloudy Bay Marlborough NZ Pinot Noir 2005
$40; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 90 points
Martinborough, at the bottom the north isle, truly owns the Kiwi pinot throne. But this naïve south isle blossom proves that even Louis Vuitton can do it there, on a mighty industrial scale. Such sanitary wine is scarce in Burgundy, but the simplicity and barefaced cordial nature of this fruity cutie makes it the perfect tailgater to the CB savvy b along all those endless boulevards of thirsty blondes and tan blokes with deck loafers and no socks. Made for chargrilled meats, red or white, served by big Greeks.

Hurley Vineyard Harcourt Balnarring Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2006
$49; 14.9% alcohol; Diam cork; 90 points
Too much, too much alcohol. What a pity. If your pinots are hitting the scales at 14.9, you have to start wondering why you’re growing it there if you really can’t face picking it at 13.5%. Maybe you should be growing grenache. Not posh, though, grenache, especially on a peninsula like Mornington, where there are more Ferraris than school buses. Or there used to be. Maybe now that the money’s all evaporated we might see some grenache planted there, and a few more school buses. Now, this wine. Black tea, black spice, black soot, black cherry, black iron like a steam locomotive, maybe some old pre-ground black pepper ... then a slurp of viscous, elastic goo goo like that stuff that sticks to the wall when you hurl it, but black again. I want pinot to be full of dark pink and eventually some russet. FEB 09

Stoneleigh Marlborough Pinot Noir 2005
$19; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 89 points
Burgundy must sweat when it sees pinot of this quality, made after its own traditional manner, at this price. The free-draining river stones of Marlborough, at the northern end of New Zealand’s south isle, grow pinot effortlessly, reflecting the sun’s heat from beneath the vines to ensure full ripening. Supple cherry, raspberry and prune flavours abound, with hints of dark charcuterie meats. Saltimbocca. (18.11.26)

Herbert Mount Gambier Pinot Noir 2005
$18.50; 12.8% alcohol; screw cap; 88 points
Considering this lovely bright young thing is made from only one clone (55V12), while deities like Steve George spent 25 years cutting 2? clones down to six in pursuit of pinot truth, this is a fair dinkum cutie. It reminds me of the first Morey St Denis Jaques Seysses made at Domaine Dujac in Burgundy, all those years ago. Nutty, with pretty maraschino fruit, and just a hint of suitably spicy oak, with a nice, thick, almost waxy texture, it’s a primary duckster, or maybe chook-a-vin accompanist. Good thing is it doesn’t try to be anything it’s not.

Moorooduc Estate Devil Bend Creek Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir 2007
$25; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 88 points
The devil’s in the detail: while this label’s a tad ambiguous, this is not an estate wine, but a blend of grapes from around Mornington – it’s their cheapy. Nothing cheap about its production, however, with all the proper pinot business going down in the winery. Pleasantly unobtrusive oak adds a dry spicy edge to the marello cherry/raspberry/beetroot fruit, and to the palate’s nicely viscous texture. The flavours are pleasantly nutty, like cashew, in a conserve of all those fruits in the bouquet. 2007 was a disgusting year across Victoria, so it’s a wonder this got through the crap. Roast duck or pork.

Oyster Bay Marlborough Pinot Noir 2007
$23; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 87 points
Aniseed and licorice aren’t the sorts of things I expect to find growing in pinot bottles, but they seem to be growing very well in here. Hard to say how much of that comes from oak, and the lumberjacks have certainly been at it in here. There’s fruit, too: minty blackcurrants and black cherries, but more kalamata. So it must be seen as a savoury sort of pinot: one that irritates enough to make one hungry. (“Would one be interested in giving one one?”, Billy Connelly asked last time I saw him, but he was speaking of neither me nor a drink, as he’s not allowed to drink. He was joking about the language and his beautiful crazy wife, Pamela.) So this is black licorice more than raspberry. Big volume commercial pinots like this seem to be tending toward a generic soft dense shiraz sort of style, which might be what Burgundy was like when they regularly topped it up with shiraz from Algeria or the Languedoc, or, if they could afford it, the Rhone. Syrupy smooth aniseed balls. Or rings. Well waxed. You’ll not be coughing up fur balls after drinking this polished rake. Or his tattooed missus. FEB 09

Holly’s Garden Whitlands Pagan Pinot Noir 2006
$??; 13.5% alcohol; cork; 86++ points
Whitlands is high (850 metres), cool and beautiful. The pests are phylloxera, wombats, currawongs and humans. I can’t understand why this wine smells a little porty, and yet is only 13.5% richter. It’s thick and pagan to drink, like some witch’s essence, with beetroot and blackberry and carbon, like a fresh-shaved Staedtler 6B artists’ pencil. It has no finesse. It’s thick and velvety with tannin, then it gets thicker and more tannic. I know that sounds tough, but, well, I can stand a pinot that sucks your lips into your oesophagus with its astringency, but I’m scared of this one waving a spear at me.

Deviation Road Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir 2007
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 83 points
You don’t often encounter porty pinot, so this is a novelty. 2007 was a hot drought year in the Hills, and it’s been very well captured in this bottle. I’m not saying it’s simple: it’s black and thick and stacked with licorice and aniseed balls, and it’s got unobtrusive oak and strapping acid, but let’s face it, why not make a shiraz? I can’t hlep thinking this would have been better picked at 13. Sure it would have been acidic, but it would have been more like presentable Burgundy.

SHIRAZ

Penfolds Grange 2003
$550+; 14.5% alcohol; cork; tasted FEB 08; 95+++ points
Perhaps this is a release which will break the market’s obsession with collecting only the even vintages of Grange – you’d be mad not to stack this away if you can afford to. Another step upward in the inexorable evolution of Australia’s greatest red, it’s simply stunning. There’s no obvious American oak, but suffice. It’s a spicy as a Persian market. It has supple green nettle and rhubarb tannins which will soften, but that majestic black cherry fruit, as mysterious and phenolic as coca AND cola, is a towering monument to the genius of Schubert, Gago, and all who came between. Royalty.

Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2004
$90; 14.5% alcohol; cork; tasted FEB 08; 95+++ points
This is the best new release St Henri I can recall. At this price, it’s the bargain of the batch: an impossibly soft and seductive wine. It oozes the smooth, umami-like flavours of oyster mushrooms, wood fungus and truffles. It’s supple, slender, silky and juicy, with no component overshadowing the rest. While the Grange really demands a couple of decades of dungeon, this one will perform as well as that ’71 St Henri in the very long term, but it’s perfectly approachable now. A thrilling, marvelous exercise in luxurious, perfectly harmonious shiraz, and a lesson to all those winemakers with wood fetishes.

Penfolds Grange 2002
$700+; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 95++ points
While Max had been making Grange for two decades before I was old enough to drink them, I was lucky that he lived long enough after that to share most of his favourites with me. And I've certainly had all those made since he retired. So I can confidently say that this is the freshest, most sanitary, finest, slender and sexy Grange ever. (Apart, perhaps, from the 1954, which was always overlooked in comparative tastings.) Juicy and cute, yet mightily concentrated and dense, this one's easy to guzzle now, but will gradually explode in the cellar. www.penfoldswines.com.au

Charles Melton Voices of Angels Eden Valley Shiraz 2005
$55; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++
Another of Charlie’s new single-vineyard creamers, this veritable choir of angels is more along the Aretha Franklin singin’ black gospel in church than anything blue-eyed or palely Lutheran. It’s from the deepest south of Eden Valley, and it’s utterly hard-core chickenskin music. Perfect new oak, black black berries, gun oil – hot damn, it even smells like the sands of Africa. Velvety and bone dry, sinuous, it walks, it talks, it crawls on its belly like a reptile at a revival. And it’ll cellar brilliantly: this blessin’ll just keep on ringing your heavenly bells for twenty years min. Cracklin’ hog. www.charlesmeltonwines.com.au

Karra Yerta Flaxman’s Gully Barossa Shiraz 2006
pre-release unlabelled sample; ??% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
The stony, barren ridge at the top of Flaxman’s, where the ancient rocks poke through high above the Barossa, is the home of some of the world’s most expensive and elusive shiraz wines. (Think Ringland, next door. McLean’s Farm at the northern end; Mountadam at the southern.) This vineyard is windswept and wild, freezing in the winter, and even cool at night in the midst of the most vicious heatwaves. So this rare tincture has quite a lot to live up to. It has the most intense and complex bouquet, riddled with twists of beauty that seem so blacksmithed into compression they unwind in a dreadfully gradual and teasing manner. Musk, lavendar, violets, licorice, mint, cedar, sandalwood, vetiver, blackcurrant, blackberry, beetroot, morel, porcini, ancient soy, salt, schist, podsol, guano, gunpowder, swarf, burlap ... I dunno. I could go on, and I’ve only had my hooter in the glass for thirty minutes. I know now that this wine is gonna be a king hell striptease viper with a voice like Barry White and Grace Jones for a Mum. The palate’s disarming and confronting from the first sip: just mildly viscous, especially compared to the intensity of its flavours, with, yep, the lithe form of the black whipsnake slithering around your mouth like some professional girls apparently dance on poles. It’s strangely compact and intense, as I’ve said too many times, but still seems ethereal in its saucy habit of letting little shots of its myriad components just go: they’re there for a flash as they evaporate, and suddenly they’re replaced by something else. And on and on it goes. The dance of the hundred and summit veils. Sometime a long way off all these bits and pieces will assimilate and homogenise and the damned thing will be mature and formal and very, very famous, and those astonishing components will let go at the same time in equal proportions and really, really gradually, but shit, that’ll kill people, and by Bacchus I love it now. I doubt that I can stay alive long enough to drink it at its peak, and if I did, it’d kill me anyway. Karra Yerta has never hit the top ten in the glambam gobstopper any price you like stakes, but it will, and it will outshine most of those wannabeez and cooderbeenz. This is a stunning, secret wine. Gimme! JAN 09

ps: Next day: I've just discovered this wine includes some trempranillo and cabernet. Perfect blending.

d’Arenberg The Dead Arm Shiraz 2006
$65; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Dead Arm? What happened to his arm? Trapped beneath a stillborn twin in the womb? If the writing on his back was five or six points bigger we might find out, but I actually believe, and I’ve got this on really good sniff, that the arm was never there. This is the One Armed Man. He’s an ironmonger who swings his hammer with that one mighty right arm. Underneath the chestnut tree the village smithy stands. The muscles on his mighty arm are tight as iron bands. If you boiled down all the reviews in the SHIRAZ section of this blog, and half of the GRENACHE, fed ’em to your local Bubba – ’Lo, m’name’s Bubba, what’s y’all – got the local deaf reporter to interview everybody in a real deep investigative sense, then got Bubba to eat the shorthand notes, and THEN cut off his arm, you might get this. And they reckon they can teach winemaking in universities. I coulda talked about berries and tannin, acid, for heaven’s sake, and juicy strapping fruit, and Chester finally turning his back on the petrochem sprays and recreational cultivation and the near impossibly ideal conditions of 2006, but you’d still be wondering about whether the guy who never had the arm was an improvement on Bubba after you cut one of his off. And what’d you do with one you cut off? Is that the one that keeps reaching out for more cabernet? Eh? Chester mighta put it in the GSM, but it’s certainly not in the cabernet. So what's all this microscopic rubbish on the back label?

Greenock Creek Seven Acre Shiraz 2006
($48; 18% alcohol; cork; 94+++ points)
Aroma: sweet, alluring, dark chocolate, blanched almonds, dried apricot, dried prune, coke, swarf, railway sleepers. Flavour: licorice, aniseed, beetroot, juniper berries, gin, hot alcohol, red dust. Texture: thick, syrupy, irony, extremely dry tannins. Aftertaste: hot, sweet/dry, juniper tannins, challenging. Summary: Back when the Seven Acre roots were just beginning their extremely difficult journey into the fractured siltstones and quartzites of the Tapleys Hill Formation, its wines were pretty confections to sniff, and neat, if intense, cordials to drink. Tapleys Hill Formation is made up of deposits that settled at the bottom of very deep, still lakes after the retreat of the ocean that left us the Yudnamutana sediments. As these tough roots delve further, the wines become much more complex and challenging. This is the most intense and powerful Seven Acre yet. Incredibly, it seems destined to settle in a balanced, if overwhelming state of grace. Its acidity and depth of flavour are as tight as iron, yet those pretty, teasing confectionery bits of its bouquet remain as felicitious and salacious as the first Seven Acre bouquets. This is breathtaking, astonishing wine. I know it’s hot, but so is gin. Anyway this serves a different purpose. You can drink it with steak.

La Curio Reserve McLaren Vale Shiraz 2007
$31 ret $28 dir; 15% alcohol; cork; 94+++
We may have a new shiraz king. Adam Hooper, King of the defunkting Redheads Studio gutter rats McLiavalleyan red explosion, has this blood all over his hands. Best you can get: maybe his most conventional current wine to sniff, but more in the line of the old doctrines, in that it has the sort of balance and thickness of effective platelets to make the lips go wobbly in slow motion to suck blood back into the head, so it doesn’t all fall out through the stabhole in your gizzards, which you suddenly realise is the source of that wicked life-and-death Scarlatti crimson rosejuice smell! Then, and this probly happens only to me, the top left corner of my upper labia twitches into a an upwards Elvis sneer, and I think I must be coming. To church, of course. But that passes, and the Devil takes control. A bird never flew on the one wing. MAR 09

Langmeil The Freedom 1843 Barossa Valley Shiraz 2005
$100; 15.5% alcohol; cork; 94+++ points
Christian Auricht planted these vines 164 years ago. They looked a bit tired by 1996, when Karl Lindner waved the axe at ’em. But, being an Old Vine Tragic, he gave them a nice new quiff, and his rellies and the Bitters began the rebirth of Langmeil. Much better formed than the modern syrupy Barossans, its svelte and supple style gives no hint of all that alcohol. Yes, it’s intense, but much more like a serious Hermitage from the source of shiraz on the Rhone. It’s astonishing: subtly oaked, gently chocolaty, softly mossy and mushroomy … and determined to live another twenty years, cork willing. Eternal life, anybody? www.langmeilwinery.com.au

Lazy Ballerina McLaren Vale Shiraz Viognier 2007
$20; 14.5% alcohol; Procork; 94+++ points
James Hook, Vales viti guru, sure knows how to viogniate a red. He grows shiraz so sinister it’ll suck all the light out of a room, and adds “a few buckets” of tannic, cool-climate viognier, so we get this black dancer that smells like it’s just been kissed by Nicole Kidman. Stack up your hamper at Smelly Cheese and a good baguettier, buy this at the new Lazy-B tasting room on the big bend opposite Kuitpo forest, take your beloved to the picnic ground, and let this willowy wickedness prance across your palate in the trees. Best shiraz-vio of the year. www.lazyballerina.com - DEC 08

NEW!
Port Phillip Estate Tete de Cuvee Mornington Peninsula Shiraz 2007
$40; 13.5% alcohol; Diam cork; tasted 20-24 OCT 09; 94+++ points
At the time of writing, this was a more elegant and refined wine than all those above, apart, perhaps from the Penfold's St Henri 2004, which is a different kettle of fish, anyway. Not to mention all those below, down to, I dunno, I get tired at around 92 points. It reminds me of the 1978 Domaine de la Thalabert from Jaboulet. It has old chestnutty oak like that wine, and brilliantly slender, sinuous fruit, in spite of it coming from the earliest picking yet at Port Phillip Estate's slurpy Red Hill vineyard. It also brings to mind some of those rusty tin shed Italian wines Roberto loves to stock in Wine Expo in Santa Monica. It has an acrid spicy edge that almost irritates the nostrils, and then quincey fruit, like my favourite quincey dish: grano quinces poached in a mixture of 1/3 sauternes, 2/3 nutty pinot, with cloves, served with the slightest sprinkle of long pepper, Piper longum, and freshly whipped Paris Creek cream. You got me? This is the sort of wild, freckled country wine that the Barossa and McLaren Vale are still years away from understanding. She's riding bareback, raising hell and the summer's first red dust down amongst the birches. Brilliant! Sexy! If Beethoven's Pastorale had a banjo in it, that's what I'd be playing. Copland doesn't quite get there in Appalachian Spring....

S. C. Pannell McLaren Vale Shiraz 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
I've not talked to him since tasting this from bottle - I loved it in barrel - but I reckon this is the best red I can recall Steve Pannell making. Which is saying something. It's almost too young to properly evaluate, but shit it's a beauty. The shiraz from the best Vales vineyards in 06 seems particularly chocolaty - almost like one of those orange-flavoured chocolates that's wrapped so it looks like an orange and when you whack it on your wooden leg it breaks into a whole lot of delicious orange chocolate slices that go perfectly with Kahlua. But forget all that: buy Lindt orange chocolate, or something even more extravagant, and have it with this, three or four days after you've opened it, had an exploratory glass, just so's you know, and then screwed the lid back on. This wine will live for twenty five years, minimum, in the cellar. It's gorgeous. Perfect black Pannell midnight glitter: anthracite; or a schorl six-membered rings cyclosilicate. The hitman's ring. Too dark to photograph. Like the black in the background of the blackest Mapplethorpe. Stuff a platypus with truffles ... FEB 09

Cascabel Fleurieu Shiraz 2005
$30; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Immediately alluring and seductive, this is the best Cascabel shiraz yet, and probably the best one I’ve had from the Fleurieu. It’s from a vineyard at Middleton, which is much, much cooler than McLaren Vale. It’s big, but perfectly harmonious and smooth, with mellow moss, fern, and moist, mushroomy earth hints, like a great Hermitage. The French oak is spicy and supportive without being intrusive. It’s seamless, streamlined wine of huge intensity and depth, and a mighty advertisement, par excellence, for the southern Fleurieu as a shiraz site deserving more attention. Call 8557 4434 for supplies. 19.1.8

Charles Melton Grains of Paradise Barossa Shiraz 2005
$55; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94++
Charlie usually blends. Grains of Paradise, a new idea, will come from the best single Valley floor block he harvests each year. This one’s from Lyndoch. It has moody licorice overtones adding edge to its ultra slick blackberry and blackcurrant essence, and the palate is just such a smooch that it transports you. I know grains is the French term for berries, but the grainy paradise this takes me to is more along the lines of an old French movie, like Lacombe Lucien, where the film stock dots seem to convert to hazy spring pollens on screen. Lamb cutlets. www.charlesmeltonwines.com.au

Gemtree Obsidian McLaren Vale Shiraz 2004
$45; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
This edgy brute leapt at me from a long row of masked McLaren Vale glasses three months back. Its maker was obvious: Mike Brown has a certain touch, fortified by his wife, Melissa, who drives the increasingly organic and biodynamic Gemtree vineyards. It wasn’t bottled then, but sure is now, already twitching to get out of there and into one. It has more vibrant balancing vegetal tone than your average moody Vales smoothy, meaning it’ll grow more interesting the longer it’s imprisoned. It’s a glorious opulent wonderchild, eager for its crown, or veal liver and morels. www.gemtreevineyards.com.au

Greenock Creek Roennfeldt Road Shiraz 2003
($192; 18.5% alcohol; cork; 94++ points)

Barons of Barossa Shiraz 2005
$25; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 94+ points
Oooh. We’re in trouble here. Smelling this is like sliding into the jelly pit at the local mud wrestling temple. Classic Barossa chocolate and leather shiraz be here, maturing at that sicko sensuo rate that only a miraculous cork permits the swooniest jell-o shiraz from somewhere as stoic and slow and determined to eventually fall into the jelly pit at the local mud wrestling temple as the Barossa. There’s edgy forge oak and coke, then that lascivious wallow of first class Barossa shiraz, just on the turn between puppy fat and pulchritude, then an oozy slimulation of acid and very, very fine tannin: almost finer than particulate. It’s exquisite Barossa shiraz at a dangerously suggestive time of its life, here in the mud wrestling temple. Which is something that’s yet to arrive in the Barossa. Although you can get a red wine bath there at the Novotel. But that wouldn’t be like this. This is a wine that bathes in YOU. FEB 09

Good Catholic Girl The James Brazill Clare Shiraz 2005
$30; 16.2% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
Julie Ann Barry, daughter of James Brazill Barry, winemaker, (dec.), grew these grapes on land her dad selected for her at Limerick, across the road from his Armagh vineyard in Clare, South Australia. Jules used cuttings from Armagh to plant 1ha at the front of her big comfy house. Rather than worry about pip ripeness, tannin ripeness, fruit ripeness, stalk ripeness, pH, acid or sugar, she picked these grapes on the day Pope John Paul II went up to see whether Jesus is real. Four weeks on skins; eighteen munce in dad’s old port barrels; couple years in bottle ... all very Irish. The friggin thing’s like a movie. What was the one with Richard Harris and all the cows running over the cliff? The Field? Remember the smell of that movie? The field full of cowshit and rotting seaweed? What I mean is earthy here, with the distinctive lignin/peat/moss/swampy decay that typifies Armagh here by the drayload. Then comes a whole retaining wall of fruit, and spice which cannot possibly have come from port barrels, unless our sweet GCG had em shaved. The damn thing’s all over your palate the minute you let her in, lolling dangerously tward the black leather chaise, cigarette holder bent at right angles where she hit the wall. Slick, and sensuous, like the black panther that Natassa Kinsky turns into in Cat People, but not yet quite sure of her cat slink, she eventually straightens up, gets real cat stuff going, leads you out into the bayou then rips your bloody arm off. But oooh Jesus, don’t you just love that? Beautiful, slick, highly entertaining wine which has true balance and elegance in spite of all those numbers up at the top. Sorry about mexing my mitaphors, but a bayou IS a swamp. Impossible? A catholic swamp? Naaah! It's a catholic cat! Rip away, puddy tat! JAN 09

Rudderless McLaren Vale Grenache Shiraz Mataro 2005
$??; 14.6% alcohol; screw cap; drunk APR 09; 94+ points
The hull is full of blood and gunpowder. Oh no. They’ve shot the blackcurrants. And the blackberries: they were in them damn pickle barrels. Oak splinters everywhere! I dunno why Doug has to be so dramatic. His pub’s not dramatic. He’s not dramatic. But his vineyard? Where it is, and who he is? Sure! - pick that poor blighter’s leg up would you Stringer? – Dramatic? Like that bloke with the rastalox is? Sure! This wine is, in fact, a perfect example of how a human can be a very specifically determining aspect of a site’s terroir. Take a bow, Captain Govan. This is rich wine, but lean. It has the breath a whales in it. It has willowy, lithe, essence of red berries of hedge and field, as if pickled in kirsch, and yet not overwhelmingly alcoholic. It has balance. It has sinuous um ... shit here comes another one! It leaves a juicy lozenge of jellied fruits in the gutter of one’s tongue, and the sides and eaves and rubbing strakes of the old mouth dribbling with anticipation ... Good Lord Moriarty, we’ve discovered addiction! Lookout!

Woodstock The Stocks McLaren Vale Shiraz 2004
($50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points)
Lush and complex, with mulberry and prune, seasoned by lovely spicy oak, this fresh, lively black wine comes from old vines grown in the southern edge of the awesome Blewett Springs Sands, which have given it their distinctive peaty vegetal decay flavours. Woodstock's best red yet, it's a huge, complex wine for the cellar, but it's scrumptious now with mutton shanks with shiitake, porcini, oyster and ordinary field mushrooms. www.woodstockwine.com.au

Lazy Ballerina McLaren Vale Shiraz Viognier 2005
($16.60; 14.9% alcohol; cork; 94 points)
I don’t know a better version of this blend. With viognier for “extra kick”, instead of the gooey canned peach too many makers go for, it turns its rivals to silly lollies. Lovely fruit aside, it smells of mushrooms and damp, healthy earth – it’s dense, luscious, and smooth, and chockers with savoury dry tannins and live grapes. I panned mushrooms in butter and olive oil with black olives, chilli, onions and garlic and had ’em on toast with my bottle. All of it. Do it. Heavenly. And don't miss a chance to visit James Hook, the maker, at his family's stunning new cellar sales outlet on the big bend in Kuitpo Forest in the Adelaide Hills. I've tasted all the new releases (and a few yet to appear), and they're equally good. James has the touch. (6.1.7)

Barons of Barossa Shiraz 2007
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
I’m pushing my own Baron here, but this one’s VERY special. The great Colin Glaetzer did the assemblage, selecting barrels from the cellars of Lehmann, Elderton, St Hallett, Bethany, Burge, Melton, Glaetzer, Haan, and Irvine. Et cetera. I chair the Barons’ Foundation committee which chooses the beneficiaries of the profits – we make tax-free grants to projects which preserve and maintain the Barossa’s heritage, lifestyle, tradition, winemaking and viticulture. It’s like the Flood Relief Red, still drinking beautifully, cork willing, that Schubert, Blass and Lehmann made after the floods that followed the blitzkreig bushfires of 1983. It’s priceless, slippery, blacksmithed Barossa magnificence for drinking or dungeon, at a silly price. It has vivid fruit, as lithe and lively as the fruits rouge counter at the old Fouchon. There’s just a little spice, from exemplary oak, and a little mint, which probably comes from eucalypt intrusion, and a little lavendar, which comes from Bacchus knows where, and then a sinuous willow of a palate that’s intense yet sublimely lithe and elegant. There is nothing else like it. In another year, I’d probably be pointing it 94+++: thus far, it only really begins to sing after two or three days of air. Exclusively from The Wine Society: www.winesociety.com.au FEB 09

Coates Consonance Syrah Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
There’s really dark walnut shell oak lurking about the backdrops of this heavy velvet curtain. It’s a highly evocative, moody performance from the Dark Ages. Aged soy sauce and disarmingly fresh and lively black, mull, straw and blue berries are only just coming to the boil in the conserve cauldron. It’s not hot or jammy, though. Its syrupy texture is in balance with that dry oak and much slender acid, leaving you feeling like your mouth is the b-and-b in which Langhorne Creek once again married McLaren Vale, the shiraz using her French name, perhaps for reasons of discretion. www.coates-wines.com

Giaconda Warner Vineyard Beechworth Shiraz 2006
$???; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Rick Kinzibrunner was a rather awkward intense fellow fucking around with the Brown Brothers’ shiny new kindergarten winery when I first met him in the early ’eighties. Now he’s a great steaming genius: Victoria’s answer to Chris Ringland. This is highly intense wine, full of milk chocolate and moss, as thick and velvety as a carpet. The palate intensity falls away faster than that bouquet would have you expect, but then, it’s what they call elegant, and it’s nothing a decade of dungeon won’t fix. Tasting it again after four days open, that finish has filled out nicely. Hearty, moody, evocative, provocative wine.

Giant Steps Miller Vineyard Yarra Valley Shiraz 2006
$30; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++
Phil Sexton’s Giant Steps are quickly taking his Yarra vineyards into full biodynamic management, and if this wine’s any indicator of how well he’ll do, we should all start saving up and ensuring our place on the mailing list. Shiraz of this pious philosophy has mainly been Castagna country til now. While there’s a peppercorn or two in the nose, it’s mainly swimmingly alive with fresh red fruits and juicy black olives, and the flavours are incredibly intense, as if these cells had walls twice as thick as normal fruits. Confit of duck, please, or goose. www.giant-steps.com.au (2.2.8)

Greenock Creek Alice’s Shiraz 2006
($38;17% alcohol; cork; 93+++ points)
Aroma: aniseed, licorice, cocoa, milk chocolate, tea tin, stewed prunes, blanched almonds, stewed quince, cloves, mulberries, dried apple, blackberry leaf. Flavour: mint, nettle tea, prune syrup, chocolate bullets, marshmallow, framboise, tea tin tannins, borscht. Texture: supple, nicely viscous, syrupy, fluffy, very dry dolomite tannins. Aftertaste: rich, syrupy, drying, thick, split schist/mudstone/dolomite tannin. Summary: And I can remember when Alice’s was destined to be the “commercial” block, with slightly higher yields than the others, to present a more “drink now” wine which wouldn’t require quite so much cellar! Pull the other one. This monster is a magnificent blacksmithed essence of shiraz from the ancient Yudnamuntana, which contains deposits dropped from floating glacial ice floes which were carried inland, far beyond the edge of deep ocean and our current shorelines. A rock fruit salad, in other words. Which may explain the confounding depth of this wine, which can be “drunk now”, but not without risk. Its aromas, depending when you look, will contain all the above, and Bacchus only knows what else. The flavours are similarly astonishing and complex. The finish is as tannic as Yudnamutana dolomite, which is generally used for road metal, so should not wear out with undue haste. Ideally, I’d wait at least ten years

Jardim do Bomfim McLaren Vale Langhorne Creek Shiraz 2007
$30; 14.8% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
While it’s unfair to appraise this wine at such an infant state, it’s already showing its noble breeding and intelligent, sensitive choice of vineyards. The alcohol’s intrusive – it’s obviously very recently bottled – but there’s plenty of stuff going on in here to ensure the fruit will eventually climb outa its sulks to wrap its gooey glory around that beautiful steely acidity and long, drawing, extremely fine tannin. It has lovely syrupy – yet slender and athletic – texture at this early stage, and a gradually tapering finish that will ring all your bells in a year or two; maybe a month or two. The wine would benefit greatly from a decade of deep, cool dungeon, but can be drunk now, if you’re brave enough, or leave it in a decanter for a few hours. Or a day. Its grand promise lies in that beautiful cool climate acidity. Try and wait for it. Or savour it now with classic pepper steak, spud wedges with rock salt, and roast capsicum.

Lazy Ballerina Single Vineyard Tatachilla McLaren Vale Shiraz 2007
$??; 15% alcohol; cork; tasted 24-27 APR 09; 93+++ points
This mindblowing fruit came from the California Road vineyard of Dudley Brown and Karen Wotherspoon, near Tatachilla. It is seamless, luxurious, smugly sensuous McLaren Vale shiraz at its thickly-perfumed, slick-and-silky best. Fresh blackberry and mulberry tart, mint, musk, confectioner's sugar and old cedar spice box all twist teasingly through its bouquet. Maybe a rememberance of white pepper. The palate's fudgy at first, then syrupy, then slides out into a long acidulous taper. Its tannins are velvety and persistent. It teases without moving. But it WILL move. I want to drink this immediately, but that's frustrating because I keep thinking of how much more fun it will become. Slow, dimly lit fun. Friggin gorgeous wine: the work of the emergent James Hook. Each wine he releases has this amazing quiet confidence about it. Get on his list! If he'd held this back another year it would have emerged a full point higher.

Lazy Ballerina McLaren Vale Shiraz 2007
$26; 15.5% alcohol; cork(!); 93+++ points
I can feel a theory brewing about the best new McLaren Vale shiraz wines bearing strange resemblances to our dear friends in the serpent world. Read on. Captain James Hook, viti king, threw everything sensible at these vines: they were pampered beyond belief. Fair dinkum kissed and cuddled. But instead of giving him a fat little puppy -- it’s not fat, and never jammy -- the result is a stunning hyper intense McLaren Vale shiraz: the sort of thing that makes everybody round the table go very quiet and thoughtful while they realise they’ve just drunk a snake: it’s slinky and serpentine in its lithe muscly blackness, with a neat little tease of chicory-like tannin in its tail, maybe fennel or licorice, where the rattle should be. It’s very good wine, and like the Marius 2006 I review nearby, it kept bringing snakes to mind, such was its lithe slither. After all the blackberry and whatever -- think alien fruits and flowers so black they’ve just gotta be poisonous -- that finish is near perfection in its focus and silent, smug sass. I’d be turning a big field mushroom on its back, filling its gills with amontillado sherry and chopped herbs and garlic, frying it like that, on its back, in butter and Coriole’s best new olive oil, finishing it off beneath the grill, and setting back to devour it with this bottle and a slice of very simple buttered toast. And I wouldn’t want anybody else there. I wouldn’t want to listen to anybody talk about it. Then I’d put a case away for ten years and over that decade plan twelve more nights of perfectly silent aloneness. With the snake. Aw, maybe some Little Feat ... it might need some of that socket wrench slide of Lowell’s. That’s snaky too, know what I mean? Rocket In My Pocket ... finger in the socket ... JAN 09

Marius Simpatico Single Vineyard McLaren Vale Shiraz 2006
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Like the vineyards halfway up the Hermitage hill in the south Rhone, this one has round river stones, but it’s halfway up the piedmont of the Willunga escarpment near McLaren Vale. It smells just plain friggin gorgeous. It’s rude and sassy with whole messes of fresh, vibrant, black and blue fruits; really neat fired oak, and an acrid, nose-itching edge that can only come from the country in which it grew, and the plethora of yeasts and microbial troops that live there. It has a British Racing Green aroma: crows in the pines; a worn-out E-type decaying in the tractor shed, wondering whether it’ll go to the chooks or a restaurateur. It’s slender and tight at first sip, with a sharp carbon base. But given the chance to properly slither in and unwind, it teases like that serpent that suckered Eve. And as my aboriginal friends say, bugger the apple -- they woulda eaten the snake every time. The finish is all the Bible black things mentioned above and more, with wicked juice and deadly nightshade tannins and really stony, slithery acidity. Twenty years, please. Or grainy pecorino. With a snake. JAN 09

Marius Symposium McLaren Vale Shiraz Mourvèdre 2006
$30; 14.7% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
This wine was impenetrable on its release. A few extra months have made a small crack in that iron visage, and now we can see some of the fragrant, sweet, healthy prune and mulberry of the shiraz peering through the cast armour of the mourvèdre, which has traditionally been called mataro in Australia. Because of its capacity to handle heat and drought, this latter grape should be much more widely planted, but its tough, dense nature makes it easy for sceptics to miss the wondrous florals and spices it has to offer if properly matured and aired. This one’s delicious. www.mariuswines.com.au

Mountadam Patriarch High Eden Shiraz 2006
$??; 14% alcohol; cork(!); 93+++ points
Since the eminently sensible David Brown bought Mountadam from the ham-fisted LVMH, he and winemaker Con Moschos have worked hard to get the jewel of the high Barossa back on the track the late great David Wynn envisaged. And here we have a stunning shiraz that would make dear David chuckle that inimitable half-suppressed chuckle of his. It’s opulent, rich and immediately engaging, whilst calming in its powerful and confident presence: take one sniff and you know you’re in for the full body massage. Perfectly formed and harmonious, the bouquet reminds me of some of the best of David’s beloved Ovens Valley “Burgundies” from the late ’sixties. (These were made to compete with Penfolds’ St Henri,a brand and recipe which John Davouren pinched from Edmund Mazure, the ingenius French trainer of Wynn’s original winemaker Hurtle Walker at Romalo, opposite Penfolds’ Magill Estate.) This wine has more oak than those wines, but it’s utterly appropriate to the fruit, adding very sultry spices and cedar without intruding upon the bouquet. It’s more evident in the palate, however, where its firm sap tweaks the finish upward, a direction opposite the calm patting-down reassurance the bouquet offers. So there’s a tease of finer, saucier titillations to come. It’ll bloom for twenty years, cork willing. It’s precisely the style Adam Wynn and me dreamed of when he naughtily planted these vines on the toughest schist outcrop on the property, facing the rising sun at 500 metres, fourteen short years ago. An Australian hermitage, rather than a burgundy! Gerard Jaboulet would love it! The wine is smooth, velvety and luxurious, and makes me dream of the steak-sized field mushrooms that will emerge in the horse paddock when the first rains of autumn fall. Welcome back, Mountadam! JAN 09

Ngeringa Adelaide Hills Syrah 2006
$50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Lightning on the blackberry bushes. Ozone. Fig, prune, quince. The same nostril-frotting, snufflike edge - from the country round this vineyard - that the 07 viognier reeks of. It’s in the incredible Ngeringa olive oil, too. It’s like putting down the window of the car there in the spring. Absolutely leaping with life. Gentle, refined, slenderly syrupy, the same sort of stuff you just inhaled slithers round the palate like a snake. It’s a bit tetchy so early in its confinement, but it’ll eventually chill out and drape itself across you real Breathless Mahoney-ish. And I mean the one in the comic, not the one Madonna made up. Nope; wrong both ways: it's Carmen Miranda. But that wouldn’t be a drape. Mmm. The tannins are teasing and velvety, and persistent. The exhalation is wicked. Makes me want to smoke a Sobranie Black Russian and rub blue cheese on my chest. But there’s a good argument to wait fifteen years and have it before you go to the Twilight Farm. Biodynamic. www.ngeringa.com

Paxton Jones Block McLaren Vale Shiraz 2004
$37; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 93+++ points
Lush, luxurious, voluptuous and oozing good health, this cream of McLaren Vale comes from a rejuvenated vineyard which has been deservedly famous for a long time. I first encountered its wonder in cleanskins in the ’seventies when it was owned by Doug and Dee Jones. The Paxtons wisely bought it, and eventually began pointing some biodynamics at it – Julian Castagna, the leading biodynamicist, took some of his original shiraz cuttings from here over a dozen years back. This plump baby smells of doughy mudcake and blackberry conserve, dusted with confectioner’s sugar, and I swear there’s a cup of Arabic coffee complete with a caraway seed somewhere in the background. Pleasing dusty soil topnotes, too. After all that, the palate’s a lot more slender and supple than you’d expect, with beautiful sinuous acidity and the sort of drawn-out, tapering finish that becomes an insufferable tease. You just can’t get enough. The longer it gets air, the more the palate plumps, but its lovely furry tannins keep the balance humming, and the acidity keeps the whole thing dancing despite the gradual increase in weight. Very good wine for five years’ cellar. JAN 09

Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2003
$180?; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 93+++ points
In the classic style set down by Edmund Mazure in the 1800s, and rekindled by John Davouren in the 1950s, this absolutely hellishly cute Henri shows the best results of its age-old recipe. Big old oak lets the wine mellow with minimal oxidation - Mazure used to let them sit on oak for five years - so it projects this unusual aged-yet-fresh countenance, showing only the earliest signs of mellowing, a process which will continue to progress for many more autumns, without appearing to progress much at all. What a delicious conundrum! www.penfoldswines.com.au

S. C. Pannell McLaren Vale Shiraz Grenache 2006
$50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
There's a lot more dark cooking chocolate in this wine than the 05 ever dreamed of. It reliably has the same fruits: blackberry, mulberry, even cassis, and it also has a little whiff of tomato leaf or hemp about it after a couple of days' air, and while it shares the intense density of the 05, I think this is more so. There is no room for turkish delight or raspberry in here. I know Steve worked for Hardy's Tintara, where as chief redman he set a cracking style in wines like this, but I think this is more of a Penfolds sort of a drink in way: a bit bigger all round than anything previously seen in Pannell's Hardy's suite. Replace the raspberry of the 05 with carbon and you'll get this black hole. The wine has amazing potential for life in the cellar: in another ten years, it might get 94+++, and so on, until the number sticks and wine's unavoidable decay gradually eats up the pluses, and then the numbers begin, tragically, to fall. In twenty years maybe? Forty? Sckrumzhell! FEB 09

S. C. Pannell McLaren Vale Shiraz Grenache 2005
$50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Having tasted the components of this wine from both tank and barrel, I feel a bit like its grandfather, seeing it now borne in bottle. All the embryonic bits and pieces were intense, deep and mysterious; just how they've conjoined and mingled is a miracle of the blender's art. The shiraz gives dense blackberry and blackcurrant, even mulberry tones; the grenache a lovely rosy sheen, somewhere between very fine turkish delight and ripe raspberry jujubes. The palate's slippery to begin, then builds gradually to a mighty tannic crescendo noir that hollers for the current crop of delicious field mushrooms. sc@pannell.com.au

God’s Hill Menzel Barossa Valley Shiraz 2005
$38; 15.5% alcohol; cork; 93++ points
“Where did I study winemaking? You’ve gotta be joking! I learned it from my DAD!” says Charlie Scalzi. Which is not the sort of name you get too much of in the Barossa. Quite appropriately, this has all the character of a grand family wine, with the sort of musk and marshmallow mixed with marshy, swampy notes you’ll find in some Greenock Creeks. But that’s my mad hooter; yours will more likely spot coconutty oak over a chocolatey wallow of red and black berries, with allspice and cream. Grown in the tasty clay on the hill the Menzel’s called God’s when they settled in 1847, it’s sinuous, lithe, lovely intense dry red. Dark game. www.godshillwines.com

Cape Jaffa La Lune Mount Benson Shiraz 2006
$45; 14% alcohol; Diam cork; 93++ points
From the Hooper family’s recently-certified bioD vineyard on the Limestone Coast – where there are NO MOUNTAINS – we get this spicy, hearty, lively Hermitage-style shiraz with its volume jigger on full blast. It’s almost intolerably wholesome and fruity in the old xmess pud manner: I can see Mum with it all up to her elbows in the mixing dish in late November when I get off the school bus. The unbleached cotton twill labels are too small to wrap puddings, but you can iron ’em onto your shirts if the rats get ’em. Luny? Nope. Eminently sensible; utterly delicious. www.capejaffawines.com.au

NEW!
Margan Limited Release Shiraz Mourvedre 2007
$30; 14% alcohol; screw cap; drunk 22-24 OCT 09; 93++ points
Slumbering, this baby. The pungent meatiness of mourvedre, somewhere between blood pudding, blood'n'bone, and Iberian ham, add their primitive carnal sin to the mushroomy, fungal earth of the best Hunter shiraz. If there's fruit, it's baked apple as much as red berries. There's the politest insinuation of gently spicy wood adding to the gustatory mood. And mood is the word: this is a moody bastard, almost forlorn in its deep sulk. It's been open for two days, and hasn't bothered to look at me. It'll probably live for twenty years and stalk in here, demanding to know why I slighted it in such a weak moment, but I'm not sweating over that.

Marius Symphony McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005
$34; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Bits of the windy Front Hills, from Willunga to Sellick’s, produce more intense complexity than the lower Vales. Winemaker Mark Day selects the best slice of Roger Pike’s four acre Willunga patch for this awesome flavour bomb; the balance goes into the cheaper Simpatico. It’s a veritable compression of sootblack, moody shiraz, made the old way, but with 21 months in very fine French oak. The result is a velvety gastronomic delight that silences drinkers with its depth and might. Big field mushrooms. www.mariuswines.com.au

Maximus Premium McLaren Vale Shiraz 2007
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Pretty. That's how this smells. Like a rude red dessert. Beetroot, blood orange, maraschino cherries ... lemon juice and kirsch over the top, then rich fresh cream and confectioners' sugar. Fairy floss. Jailbait. Then the adult stuff, the macho swarf and the jarrah elders start to stand up at the back of the church and you pull your head in. Very clean, very fresh, iron spine, pulpit valence crushed velvet tannins, whiprod acidity. Needs time. But Jesus, I need time. Good wine! Hock.

Mountain X Hunter Shiraz 2007
$??; 13.2% alcohol; cork; tasted 24-27 APR 09; 93++ points
Murray Tyrrell used to say Hunter wines smelled like sweaty saddles and the coal beneath: TAKE NOTE PETER GOERS. I always thought the sweaty saddle was almost entirely due to the huge amounts of McLaren Vale wine the Hunter traditionally absorbed in bulk tankers. And McLaren Vale specialised in hydrogen sulphide for decades. Sweaty saddle was as polite as replacing cowshit with barnyard. Same thing, given the thick smudges of the spindoctors. I reckon McLaren Vale exported up to 80% of the wine it made in some years, all of which was sold beneath brands from other parts of Australia. Like mostly Hunter. I believed Murray about the coal: lignite is highly volatile, and should easily penetrate the layers of clay above. As it does in parts of McLaren Vale, deep beneath bits of which lies a thin layer of something bituminous. Think of the flavour of peat that survives distillation in the heavens of Scotland and Orkney. I'd say Shetland, too, but we all know there's never been a licensed distillery there, so nobody could possibly know, could they. Of course not. Anyway, twenty more years of experience has me thinking some of that Hunter coal was brettanomycaes yeast. There was plenty of rotten oak around, well into the seventies and eighties. This lovely wine has tiny reflections of many of these emotive factors, but I wouldna be saying it has a fault. Let's just say it seems to very respectfully doff it cap to the best of the old Hunter, which has made in its short antipodean history, some of the world's most revered wines. This one's a juicily fruitish, very gentle syrup to inhale. It smells of aubergine and plum jelly. It has the iciest insinuation of mint, and slops of Marello cherries. It tastes precise, while modest but confident. But very steely in its ambition: it will last a long time on that velvet cushion. Like many great Hunters, it's mystifying in this its youth, but still much fun. It even has the slightest volatile acidity after four days, which is highly encouraging. Jam a case or two away, there's a clever tiger.

Nashwauk McLaren Vale Shiraz 2006
$25; 15.5% alcohol; cork; 93++ points
I’m smitten by two of the first releases Reid Bosward has produced from this Vales vineyard his Barossa employer, Kaesler, bought in 2005. Structurally, this is neat, lean, and Rhonely - think Cornas by August Clape - not syrupy Barossa. Which is not to say mean. Quite the opposite. Perfumed and tight, with a shot of pencil box, it has a swampy/peaty nature like the nearby Blewett Springs sands produce. It’s slender, with no Barossa syrup, in spite of all that alcohol. So. The Bushing Crown goes to Barossa? Quite possible! Goat or venison, on the spit.

Pieri Azzardo 2005
$25; 15.5% alcohol; cork; 93++
Another of the sly, canny wildcats slinking from Redheads Studio down on McLaren Flat, this shiraz is more Coalblack King Panther than your standard guilty alley puss. Made by Andrew Pieri, who's called it "Azzardo" - the game of chance - it could have come from Guiseppe Rizzardi, who makes exemplary dried grape wines like this at Verona. Intense, ultra-slick, polished, and purring like something that's about to devour you with impunity, it never quite looks like fifteen plus on the scales. Until you're in its dark gizzard. Call 8323 7799.

Romney Park Adelaide Hills Shiraz 2006
$35; 14.5% alcohol; Diam cork; 93++ points
Like all the wines of Rod and Rachel Short, this is precise, elegant, perfectly poised drinking of the highest order. Grown on a bony ironstone, podsol and clay ridge between Hahndorf and Balhannah, it has amazing intensity and depth, despite its svelte nature. More Côte-Rôtie than Cornas, for you Rhonely types. More deadly nightshade than blackberry. A sheeny veneer like Chanel # 5, but no jam in sight. Crême de cassis, but no fruit gums. It’s slender but dense, with strapping black Parade Gloss tannins to guarantee great cellaring. Perfect for kalamata; chêvre; Iberian ham; grilled cacciatore. 0439 398 366.

Torzi Matthews Frost Dodger Eden Valley Shiraz 2006
$30; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
This killer smells like a bloke I once stood beside on a train. His spears and leopard skin added to the whole sweet affect. Raisins, tobacco, leather, washed rind: all here in alluring balance. One imagines from his regally arrogant poise that the entire package is ALL in proportion. It’s certainly NOT an English King. Sweet and juicy, but not porty, the flavours reflect the appassimento winemaking method of drying the grapes on racks before they’re crushed. So Dominic Torzi’s combined all the fullness and rich sweetness the Barossa has to offer without overt syrup or simple port character. www.torzimatthews.com.au

Hugo McLaren Vale Reserve Shiraz 2004
$38; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Perhaps because of its maritime humidity, McLaren Vale produces intense, unctuous wines with a moody soulfulness that’s the opposite, say, of the tight, kalamata-like flavours of Clare, where there the air is bone dry during ripening and harvest. This fine example oozes the aromas and flavours of Maranello cherries, prunes and stewed satsuma, super-fine oak adding the sort of spice cloves would contribute to such a compote. Osso bucco.

Mt. Billy Barossa Valley Antiquity Shiraz 2004
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Smoked meats, leather, bitumen, beetroot, and all manner of astonishing black fruits not yet evolved or invented slumber away in this deep delicious mystery. It’s lush and stewed, but like any great conserve, it still has living whole bits of those fruits and beets in its suspension, unlike a jam, where they’re all cooked into comparative sticky oblivion. Maker John Edwards has vineyards at home at Victor Harbor, but he quite sensibly takes prime fruit from other vignobles, and does his appropriate magic on them, as he has done, magnificently, here. Dark mushrooms on toast. www.mtbillywines.com.au

O'Leary Walker Clare Valley/McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005
$22.50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
It makes perfect sense to blend Clare shiraz, which is tight and more kalamata than plum, with the softer, fruitier, plummier stuff from McLaren Vale, where the constant maritime humidity makes the wine more accessible and sensual. O'Leary Walker have been doing this happy transfusion for some years now, but this is their best version yet. It's slick and wholesome, very slippery, and utterly, scarily disarming. Perfect steak and mushroom stuff. www.olearywalkerwines.com

Paradigm Hill Col’s Block Mornington Peninsula Shiraz 2004
($35; 13% alcohol; diam stopper; 93+ points)
Winemaker George Mihaly wisely accompanied this wine with a letter written with his own stylish fountain pen, which always wins points. It’s gorgeous, though reserved; bone dry, though with perfectly juicy, living fruit; intense, though elegant; lovely now, but yearning for cellar. Sultry, with raspberry and cherry, maybe ripe persimmon, it’s perfectly balanced, poised, and seductive. Juicy lamb backstrap, garlic, sage, rosemary, spinach, and wee roast spuds.
www.paradigmhill.com.au

Raw Power Adelaide Plains Shiraz 2006
$14; 14.9% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
The label textulates about some old geezer punk screamer name of Rawley Power, but this wine’s a sheila mate and a lived-in one at that. Still takes care of herself, mindja. Lives in a ricketty wood gypsy caravan that hasn’t moved from the wild oats since her dude fell in love with Bearded Lady, took the old Buick and vamoosed years ago when the circus come through. Sweet and homely, like, but sweetly mysterious. She musta loved him. All those old woody plum jam tweaks, a goat stew simmering on the Kookaburra. Pipe tobacco - she has a quiet puff while she listens to Phillip (sic) Adams on the bakelite wireless. (Why doesn’t he put an extra d in Adams?) Perfectly aged in big ol puncheons (think St. Henri, Campbell’s Bobbie Burns, Wynn’s Oven’s Valley Burgundy, Kanmantoo St George’s Claret ca 1890, anything made by Edmund Mazure) this wine shows that screw caps can protect aged wine as well as they keep baby ones juicy and fresh. Incredible value. Tim Freeland and Dominic Torzi did it. Well. Buy cases of it. oldplains@twpo.com.aU

NEW!
Vidal-Fleury Ventou 2007
$15; 14% alcohol; cork; tasted 14 OCT 09; 93 points
Since Guigal purchased this 1781 mob, and built a shiny new winery, the quality of the wine is now lurching upward. This is remarkable for its price: cheeky yet authoritative, intense yet frivolous, beautfully balanced and poised, and yet threatening to fall from its points at any stage, it's a cracker. (It won't fall for any lack of skill or elegance, but from sheer abandon - it dances on your table in a wicked black tutu). Shiraz, grenache and mourvedre are in the mix, and if this is the French following us into GSM, we should quit immediately. But they're not, of course, we followed them, and when the lazy Rosemount lab attendant's abbreviation became the standard acronym, setting the unwritten rule that all Ocker blends of this trinity should be in that order, with that proportion, Australia lost the plot. We should learn from this wine: its finesse and merry grace, even at 14% alcohol, is something that continues to elude Australian redsmiths. Black fruits, spice and cream abound, and the flavours entertain and titillate more than stonker and smite. A light cassoulet is the go in winter; any cool pork dish in the sunny months, and the vegos will love it with field mushrooms. Very clever; impossibly cheap.

Barons of Barossa Shiraz 2006
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
The second release of the Barons of Barossa fundraiser blend is a more hearty and boisterous shiraz, with a little more of the kitchen fireplace soot you’d find in the homes of the young Schuberts, Lehmanns, and Glaetzers back when there were as many blacksmiths as petrol stations. It’s deep and moody, with the guts of a good Barossadeutscher blood pudding, spiced by many layers of smoked cedary oak. The fruit is ripe blackberry and mulberry, with some fig, and just a tease of frivolous musk in the top note. The palate is more lithe and fine that the bouquet would suggest, with dancing black eyes, modest decolletage and lots of red grosgrain before you look all the way down to the flamenco shoes. And what the hell’s a flamenco dancer doing in the Barossa? Entertaining the people, that’s what. Be entertained! Bless Bacchus for sending a Spaniard! You ever seen a traditional Barossa dance? The vintage festival maypole’s about as sensual as it gets, and they only manage that every second year. FEB 09

Inkwell Rebel Rebel McLaren Vale Shiraz 2006
$25; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Dudley Brown weeds his vineyard by hand. On a windswept rise near the Gulf, beside the clear moors of Bowering Hill, (which the government seems intent on packing with Tupperware Tuscany), it’s a testament to human pig-headedness. Fanatical vineyard husbandry - James Hook helps - leads to obsessive hands-on winemaking, and we get this inkster: dense and compacted, yet still slender, with slinky elegant tendencies. It smells of hard soil, clean living, and a certain gastronomic intelligence. Licorice and fennel lie amongst the lean black fruits, furry tannins dry the finish. It needs a few years, and/or a haunch of bison. inkwell@internode.on.net

Jeanneret Clare Valley Denis Shiraz 2004
$60; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Think cold blackberry jam in the iron pot in a dead morning fireplace. Or the creekful of blackberry vines the day after the bushfire went through and you’ve got six hours to eat what survived before the birds get ’em. No rush here though – this is 04. You’ve got ten years. It has plenty of that rich creamy health that Ben somehow gets in his reds, and it’s alcoholic, and thick, and maybe just a tad old-fashioned in a way, but there’s nothing wrong with that. If you serve it in about five years with roast boar in chocolate and chilli sauce everyone’s pants will fall off.

Langmeil Orphan Bank Barossa Valley Shiraz 2005
$??; 15.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Karl Lindner’s developer’s hat miraculously sits, comfortable, on his old-vine tragic’s head after he pulled this 140 year old vineyard to make way for villa rash, and replanted every single vine on the banks of the Para, beside the Langmeil Freedom vineyard, which is 24 years older. Chocolate crême caramel - classic Barossa fruit - and desiccated coconut, from the American oak, offer both harmony and counterpoint, in a slender, lithe, willowy drink that has just the right amount of viscosity. It tastes a lot better than the bleeding houses. Porchetta alla perugina.

The Willows Vineyard Barossa Valley Shiraz 2005
$26; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Immediately mellow, yet calmly, confidently assertive, this is straight away a top Barossa. It has peaches and cream without needing to be viogniated; it has sweet mellow spice without needing to take it from cheap chips from Missouri. Tip it in, and you know immediately there’s no bullshit going down. It has really whizzer acid. Roll it around the laughing gap, and you’ll quickly realise there’s nothing better to do than to keep that cavity stacked as long as you can. It’s really comforting, sweet, plush shiraz which deserves your most lazy fascinated disinterest. Just lie about and guzzle. Or wait ten years and lie about and guzzle. Argue about the acid with your visitors from California. They’ll tell you JAN 09

Cape Mentelle Margaret River Shiraz 2006
$39; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Very sweet and clean, with mucho intensity and a polished silken sheen, this wine seems almost too bloody polite, which was an advice I once heard David Wynn hiss at his winemaking son, Adam. The oak has contributed a pleasant layer of acrid spice, very fine and slender, which sits neatly atop a basement that reminds me of pure 6B pencil carbon. The palate follows suit, but soon builds up a tidy acid and spice finish that’s more velvet than silk. What I mean to say is that this is exemplary sophistry in winemaking: very, very neat and tidy, a little like the shiraz Martin Shaw makes at Shaw & Smith. Not big, but nerdily intense. JAN 09

Coates Consonance Syrah 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; diam cork; 92++ points
Like her twin with the cabernet in her, this saucy (Worcestershire, almost) shiraz from McLaren Vale and Langhorne Creek takes some time to let the fruitier parts of her breath exude, but on they come, gradually, determinedly rising above that dark, spicy, walnut-shell oak. As far as syrups go, this is a divine syrup. Just stunningly, perfectly viscous, with warm alcohol blowing in like someone’s just tipped the kirsch over the iced berry salad. It’s so juicily, wholesomely fruity that it could be served at dessert, like with mudcake and mulberries poached in pinot and sauternes. www.coates-wines.com

Hollick Limestone Coast Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$21; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
There's slightly more Wrattonbully fruit than Coonawarra in here. The wine's quite cheap for its class, as it's one which would like a nice lie down for five or eight years, and for some reason we have come to expect that good cellaring options should cost more money, which is stupid, really. Probly my fault. The shiraz, which is all black cherry and blackcurrant, with great acidity, has not yet quite got into bed with the cabernet, which is much more austere and pious, sitting over there in the corner. Like its cabernet brother, this wine seems out of sorts: inexpensive, tight, terribly well preserved, and promising quite lovely wickedness of an elegant sort after some years' dungeon, I can't help thinking that it would have liked a little more oxygen before bottling, or in the bottle. I reckon it'll stay as austere as this for years under that screw, sans oxygen. I'll keep it on m,y bench for a few more days, and may well return with a different opinion. FEB 09

Mountain X Hunter Shiraz 2006
$??; 13.5% alcohol; cork; tasted 24-27 APR 09; 92++ points
The Hunter be a moody sort of place, and at its best makes wondrously moody, soulful, almost forlorn sort of wine at lower alcohols than the rest of Australia. But the wines are never simple or weak, which is what many imagine to be the nature of wines with less than far too much alcohol. This gentle, beautifully balanced lovely has coffee and mocha adorning its mellow fruits: beetroot, cherry and mulberry. Its palate is fine and mild, sinuous and lingering, with a minor tone of chocolate amongst its fig and prune. It is earthy, and very good, and may well eventually outshine many of the bigger wines on the list above. It is made by Rhys Eather for a pair of deeply committed and obviously emotional benefactors. I'm on their side. I shall soon discover for you whether they want to be revealed. The blend is the traditional shiraz with pinot noir mix which our earliest settlers pinched from Hermitage and Burgundy. In those days, a wine of this quality would have been highly unlikely.

Petaluma Adelaide Hills Shiraz 2005
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Seven per cent viognier seems a lot; one wonders what this poor old Nairne shiraz did to deserve so much of it. But it’s lovely, quirky wine, opulent, rich, and perfumed as headily as all get out. It has a disarming licorice/star anise/pastis topnote. Then there’s a shallow spread of juicy red liqueur, lean and dry with vio tannins spread over it like the gravel on which you park the Bimmer. The viognier makes it savoury, as in savory, the herb, and it needs food like goat cheese seasoned with savory. This is a promising example of the potential of the tapanappa group schist soils to grow splendid Rhone flavours. I’d like more feral billygoat in it, but I’m Pan. Petal’s best red? Maybe. Quirky, but cute. www.petaluma.com.au

Poonawatta Estate Montie’s Block Eden Valley Shiraz 2004
$29; 15% alcohol; cork; 92++
As its riesling often proves, the wind-dried schist, clay and quartz of High Eden Ridge - from Mountadam to Mengler’s - gives more grainy and austere wine than anything Clare has to offer. While this bush vine shiraz comes from the deeper, damper loam at the bottom of the tiny, lofty 1880 Poonawatta block, it’s still puckery and gravelly with tannin, as much as right royal and mighty. Mastadon, stewed in cast iron with crows and nettles. www.poonawatta.com

The Gimp McLaren Vale/Langhorne Creek Shiraz 2005
$25; 14.5% alcohol; Diam compound cork; 92++ points
When The Gimp slid into Pulp Fiction, S&M aficionados immediately smelt him: slightly sweaty, in a polished black leather sort of way, with a fruitiness foreign to your actual fruit, would be a fair crack of his whip. Like this wicked black wine, which is packaged for San Francisco, but will never get there, its coy US agent having refused its perfectly fitting costume. Home of the brave? Codswallop! Forget food; drink its carrion sinfulness while listening to John Cale's new live Circus version of Venus in Furs. www.coates-wines.com/gimp

d’Arenberg Laughing Magpie Shiraz Viognier 2006
$30; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
While this blend has a pleasantly spicy edge, from seasoned oak and yeast as much as vineyard, its fruit smells like it’s going to be syrupy, thick and dull, like most of its rivals. Not so. That spicy top note builds in the wine’s firm acidity, sappy astringency, and persistent mealy tannins. It could come from the south of France, so neatly is it balanced. Then it would cost you twice this much. Old-fashioned techniques - apart from the waders on the grape-treaders - have made it soulful and wholesome. It’d complement mild pork curry, and offer contrast to venison cassoulet. www.darenberg.com.au

Florance Kangaroo Island Shiraz 2005
$15.50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
This moody black cuteness reminds me of the estimable Domaine de Martinelles Crozes Hermitage of the Rhone ... it smells like the hard dirt in which it grew, in this case damp podsol peppered with ironstone. But there’s plenty of plush in there, too: creamy and mushroomy and smugly accomplished. Dark spice from appropriate oak adds distinction. It’s lovely medium-weight wine, with a little alcoholic heat in its tail. 10 OCT 98

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Shiraz 2005
$29; 14.5% alcohol; cork; tasted MAR 09; 92+ points
I doubt that slick, polished, silky shiraz like this would ever have ripened in the freezing weather I recall of Hahndorf when I was a kid. Not only the main street has changed. But this sure has ripened, and it’s packed with smooth, harmonious mulberries, prunes and plums flavours; even maybe a little black fig. It has no more tannin than the furry skin of a ripe fig would impart. It’s luxurious, opulent, self-satisfied wine. I can’t help suspecting it would be more entertaining if it hadn’t got quite so ripe. S&S will do a better job. In the meantime, have this with one of Max’s incredible fillets, blue, with blue cheese sauce and capers. Practice cooking them on your own for a few months, and once you’ve got it nailed, ask that one around that you’ve never been game to ask. Clean sheets please.

Green Point Yarra Valley Reserve Shiraz 2004
$47; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points
Here’s the sort of shiraz I was weaned on: intensely flavoured, and smooth, but with a drinkable level of alcohol. Hot road bitumen; hot tractor in the rain; trailer full of mulberry, blackberry, blueberry and prune: all the stuff usually reserved for shiraz over 14.5% is here in perfect balance and harmony, and yet the palate is elegant, refined and luxurious, and not at all like King Kong teetering around in Manolo Blahnik stilletoes, which is still the predominant local trend. Go pigeons and beets stewed in red.

Mitolo Savitar McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005
$??; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 92 points
While I whinge about getting a free iPod with this bottle, its maker, Ben Glaetzer, was given a new M3 BMW for his efforts. How many points would I have given it had I got the car? Leave that to you. It's classic McLaren shiraz, full of simmering, soulful satsuma and sweet, dark Maranello cherry, with piquant, dried ginger oak. It's a lot more approachable than Miltolo's 05 Serpico Vales Cab, and would sing a perfect Noo Joizy contralto duet with shanks and tart black olives in a rich tomato sauce. www.mitolowines.com.au

K1 by Geoff Hardy Adelaide Hills Shiraz 2005
$28; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 92+ points
Saucy (a microgram of Worcestershire) and audacious, this Bright Young Thing comes from Geoff Hardy’s Kuitpo vineyard, which the label says “was planted more than two decades ago”. Centuries more? It goes on to say Geoff has centuries of vinous heritage. Ripe and plummy, with whiffs of dried figs and dates, and thickly viscous, like something from a Fowler’s preserving jar, it’s weeping for a fine dry pecorino pepato, to match the trendy pepper it got from somewhere. Velvet finish: soft, reassuring. www.k1.com.au

Karra Yerta Barossa Shiraz 2004
$30; 14.3% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points)
Rudely, unabashedly fruity and provocative, this is fresher and redder than the lass who played the accordion when we preached in the street. It reminds me of David Wynn’s lightly-oaked shiraz wines, still alive on my palate after thirty years. Full of coffee, cocoa, blackberry and mulberry, it finishes with the most polite little dash of drying tannin. Nuts. Elegant. Juicy. Vibrant. Not bad with cold roast pig’s cheek and horseradish, either. www.karrayertawine.com.au

Campbells Bobbie Burns Rutherglen Shiraz 2006
$22.50; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 92 points
This must surely be the wee terrups wee Rab, whose name it bears, gulleted before he wrote The Jolly Gauger. Which involves a touch of houghmagandie and a joint a beef. It’s not like Barossa or McLiavelli. Clean, svelte, slimy like pinot grigio, wholesomely comforting and satisfying, with no overt oak or tirliewirlies, it’s a friggin’ relief! It’s the 37th release of the Bonnie Burns, and while Rutherglen’s only marginally cooler than the Barossa, this is the 37th time that the Scots lads from Kelly country have shewn those few tiny degrees make all the diff between drink and drunk. Pink beef.

Cape Mentelle Marmaduke WA Shiraz Grenache 2005
$17; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points
The cool south-west corner of Western Australia makes lighter shiraz grenache blends than the big, muscly, heartier brutes we tend to produce around Adelaide. The Wozzie versions are in fact closer to the more refined offerings from the south of France, from where we pinched the idea. This is a cute, simple wine in a way, but that very lightness of being makes it delectable. More Cotes Rotie than Cornas of Clape, if you're Rhonesome tonight. Pigeon and beetroot. www.capementelle.com.au

Giant Steps Yarra Valley Shiraz 2005
($30; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points)
Polished, intense, cool climate shiraz here, of a style high California and Australia are smoothly, deftly stealing from poor warm old France, which almost forgot shiraz as a premium red thirty years back. There’s a touch of the Yallourn coal train here: “Brett! Brett!” scream the yeasty brats of the judging circuit, hoping for a brettanomycaes taint, but I don’t give a shit. It’s lovely shiraz, with the sort of finish that screams for great cheese, like Blue Wensleydale.

Frankland Estate Isolation Ridge Shiraz 2003
($27; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points)
This is a great wine from a fairly dim vintage in the vineyard which was first to use the name of what has now become an appellation: the Frankland River Region, in the vast wilds of south-western Western Australia, between Albany and the Point d’Entrecasteaux. Stacked with dried prune, date, fig, and blackberry, it’s a syrupy unction, opulent and fluffy, with perfectly apt lingering tannins and no sophistication at all. Steak with cream and cracked black peppers, please. www.franklandestate.com.au (23.12.6))

Gomersal Barossa Valley Shiraz 2005
($22; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points)
Intense and juicy, with a bouquet that jumps across the table, this underpriced juvenile is wholesome, perky and disarming. Over a faint morning hearth of slightly sooty oak there’s a heap of rich, fat fruit, supported by lovely dry medium-grained tannins. As the wine ever-so-gradually recedes, its firm acidity and tannin sets the salivatories gushing, driving the drinker to tucker. And another glass. It’ll last fifteen years, growing smoother for the first ten. (4.11.6)

Sevenhill Clare Valley Br. John May SJ Reserve Release Shiraz 2004
$60 at the cellar; 14% alcohol; cork; drunk APR 09; 92 points
Clare is somehow overlooked in red, which many will immediately disagree with. Its wines are fortunately finer than the gobstoppers which have become popular; so much so that some Clare winemakers have attempted Parkerillas and come out looking a little silly. If you want fine check any of the new Sevenhill reds. If you want finer in the brooding brute mode, check this older model. Two days ago it was all black velvet. Then it went a sort of crimson. In flavour, I mean. Now the fruit’s put back its muscly neck and it’s singing a deep crimson aria in the key of silk. It’s got a tad porty – I preferred it yesterday – but it’s still a breathtaker. In a sense, the Jesuits have made a more sacramental Sevenilla than a Parkerilla, and succeeded. So while it’s not quite as lithe as Liz Heidenreich’s new baby angels, this old cheese is best had with red. No. I mean this old fatso priest smells of port, which is an allegation I could never level at Brother John, because he’s not fat. This wine was made by Tim Gneil from thirsty forty year old vines, and selected by Brother John as the cream of the cellar. Open slate fermenters, basket press, old oak for two years, two rack’n’returns, no humans buggering around with it. Liz bottled it, but she doesn’t bugger around. So now. Open it, decant it, have it with pecorino grano and figs. Ooooh Jesus. “Power and grace”, Brother John calls it. More grace than finesse, I say. Amen. Hallelujah! LESSON: So what I mean about Clare reds is not that they’re finer. It’s that they have more power and grace.

Torzi Matthews Schist Rock Eden Valley Shiraz 2006
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92
The intense, maybe obsessive, TM outfit has wrung itself out with this year’s releases, with nearly all their Barossa and Adelaide Plains wines squeezing recommendations from me. Not to mention their stunning, beautifully acidic, olive oil. This wine smells like a cream and chocolate sauce, with an ooze of blackberry liqueur. It’s syrupy, but not gooey, and it slides seductively about the palate before leaving a meniscus of sheer, unadulterated satisfaction. There’s not much tannin, but lotsa liqueur. It’s almost dessert wine. You could drink it with Mississippi mud cake. dominic.torzi@bigpond.com.au

Torzi Matthews Schist Rock Eden Valley Shiraz 2007
$17; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 91+++ points
This drought red’s a dead honest expression of the High Barossa in the driest vintage Dominic Torzi can remember. Make that could remember – he wrote these notes before vintage 2008. There’s as much old black pepper and austere micaceous stone in it as red and black berries. The middle’s all plush and caramelly before those dusty finishing tannins move in. It’ll live for a very long time, but sang a hearty duet with pepper and game sausages, pasted with Krondorf Road Trading Company Fig and Chilli Chutney and a little Matchett’s Chilli Fire from Currency Creek. It’s a bargain! dominic.torzi@bigpond.com.au

Bay of Shoals Kangaroo Island Shiraz 2006
$20; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 91++ points
August Clape makes shiraz like this at Cornas on the Rhone. Rich, juicy, plump and smooth, like a syrupy compote of prune, fig, and blackberries – even the elusive blueberry – and then an ozone-like lift, as if the blackberries have just been hit by lightning. It finishes slender, grippy and clean, with lovely balance and elegance. Very pleasing; obviously made with uncommon sensitivity and gastronomic intelligence. 10 OCT 98

The Hedonist McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005
($17; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 91+ points)
Walter Clappis conducted this lush naughtiness in his own biodynamically-run vineyard. Typical of the fresh new styles the more rad Vales makers are tending towards, it’s mellow, spicy wine, with vibrant plummy fruit and hints of dark cherry conserve, mulberry, musk sticks and pickled walnut. It’s juicy and alive, with quite some viscosity, and very fine velvet tannin. It blooms with thirty minutes in the decanter, indicating good cellaring. Steak and mushrooms. (13.1.7)

Saint Cosme Cotes-du-Rhone 2007
$18; 14% alcohol; cork; 91 points
Unusual for a Cotes, in that it's 100% shiraz, this is a little honey of a drink, especially at this little honey of a price. It has the dark aroma of Iberian ham, with briary hedgerow berries and reduced spinach whiffs, hinting at tannins to come in the palate. It's also juicy and almost sweet to sniff, like fat Greek olives with sage. The palate's just what you'd expect after all that, elegant and easy, ,juicy and slick, but instead of the tannins the bouquet signalled, it just slides out into a long easy taper, leaving the palate refreshed and smacking. I could happily chug-a-lug away at this all afternoon, just as she stands, but it also cries out for honest Provence-style tucker, like baby rabbit cooked in viognier lees with little onions and fresh herbs. Vintage celllars and 1st Choice exclusively. 08 MAR 09

Ben Glaetzer Wallace Barossa Shiraz Grenache 20
$20; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 90+++ points
About as dour and surly as its namesake – the Scotsman, I mean, not the Glaetzer – this wine has all the sense of humour of a swordsmith’s anvil. Blackberry, aniseed, licorice and forge aromas fill its dense, gloomy mass. It’s alive, but tight and ungiving, unlike the much more expensive Glaetzers with corks for the dumb Americans. A dusting of floral bathpowder and marshmallow sugar emerges eventually, but the palate remains dense and black, with impenetrable low-yield grenache putting its unctuous gun oil where tannin would normally be. This is mighty wine. Wait a decade and have it with blood pudding. www.glaetzer.com

NEW!
Saint Cosme Cotes-du-Rhone 2008
$20; 14% alcohol; cork; tasted 14 OCT 09; 90++ points
Tight and dark as the dregs of the black tea in a rusty old tea tin, with marello cherries, baby beetroot, and prune flavours, this juicy little wickedness reminds me of the shiraz of the Canberra district, from a warmer year. Which tends to be two or three times this price. It's slender and racy, with a touch of the old railway station - epolished wood; mopped floors; coal dust; hot iron; women emerging freshly lipsticked and perfumed from the tall tiled toilets to settle for a hurried scone, with blackberry jam and cream - but beaneath there's a dark slick of the sort of grease that made the iron horse run so swift across the country. Pity about the cork.

Inkwell McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005
$30; 16% alcohol; screw cap; 90+ points
Inkwell? Well-inked! Dudley and Karen Brown fled Tech Valley, California, to grow this with the deft aid of intense vintillectual James Hook, on California Road in the Vales. When the contracting refinery needed a mighty essence to boost its watery tanks, Browns reluctantly let these grapes hang. So power replaced elegance, but ancient, sweaty, hands-on recipes saved enough fruit for this teetering King Kong: a hot, demanding tincture that sears the exhalations but renders a great drink, decanted, well-aired, and schlucked with stuff like ox tindaloo, plenty of yoghurt and cucumber on the side.

Lodestar Heathcote Shiraz 2006
$20; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 90+ points
People who live in South Australia, with all its ancient shiraz vignoble, are regarded as suspicious boxheads by the vignerons of Heathcote, and much of the Victorian Alps. So I declare my residency of the boxhead state, and cross the border to enter this glass hoping to see my worst suspicions allayed. And they are. This could have come from the high Barossa, from, say, a veteran winemaker of the calibre of Colin Forbes, or men fresh to the press like Bob McLean, who now makes his own lovely wine at McLean’s Farm on Mengler Hill, after decades with his nose to the PR winestone at Orlando, Petaluma, and St Hallett. But they’re rare. Back to the Alps. This has a slightly stewed, sunburnt edge, but it smells more elegant, much more alive, and less forced than most boxhead shiraz. It’s strapping, in fact, and zippy, and entertains rather than preaches like a warty old Lutheran. It has lovely lithe brightness and appetising tannins, and it’s a sublime wine when compared to Barossa-envy Parkerilla Heathcotes like the dreaded, but perfectly named, Duck Muck. This was made by Sandro Mosele, the sensitive hero of Mornington, exclusively for Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice. It’s really lovely appetising wine.

Yalumba Barossa Shiraz Viognier 2005
$18; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; cork; 90+ points
Australia’s shiraz viognier blends are tending towards this intensely syrupy style more than the paler, more austere north Rhone blends that are the origins of the idea. Rich with typical Barossa cooking chocolate and blackberry and mulberry reductions, with the vio’s peachy syrup filling all the gaps, it’s slick, thick, and warming stuff indeed. The tannins of the viognier don’t take long to poke their grainy heads through the wine’s texture: the finish is very dry and adult, working the mouth and setting the juices a-flow. It likes the decanter; pity about the cork. It needs really hearty dark meat, like mutton shanks or venison. And it’s CHEAP! www.yalumba.com

Gemtree Tadpole McLaren Vale Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$15; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 90 points
Apart from making the wine which should have won the Bushing King (The Obsidian), Big Mike Brown’s beginning to kick very serious arse at Gemtree, where his tiny wife, Melissa, runs the family vineyards. This one’s named after the taddies that are breeding like, well, frogs, in the extravagant frog resort she’s built along their rejuvenated Terraces creek on the Willunga scarp. One of the Vales’ beast cheapies, this is all licorice, anise, black tea, and chocolate in the nose, and lipsmacking berries and tannins slurping in the swallowing division. Cheese, meat, lovers – have it with anything. Anyone. www.gemtreevineyards.com.au

Lloyd Brothers Mclaren Vale Shiraz 2006
$22; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 89+++ points
Aniseed balls and licorice rings ding the big gong in this piquant glass: all that and then the acrid whoof of the Willunga slate quarry after a blast ... only after all that’s moved into your hooter and settled there does the red and black fruit begin to emerge. This is edgy, lean, hand-hammered, Samurai sword sorta wine, with the forge and the carbon gradually becoming more and more predominant. After that macho intro, the palate’s a bit fluffy for a moment. And then the edge returns to shave the tongue of its ancient sins, and the finish is alternating waves of blackfruit syrup, quarry dust, and the swordsmith’s soot. Pretty good wine: needs eight years. It’s good to see the old syrup and jam of the human interventionist aspects of Mclaren Vale gradually falling away while the Earth takes over.JAN 09

Fox Gordon Eight Uncles Barossa Valley Shiraz 2005
$28; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 89+ points
Rich soupy Barossa, with beetroot, turnip, figs and dates in the old cast iron pot, hanging over the woodfire in a mud-floored cottage like Esther’s, which I rented from Norty Schluter in the late ’eighties. Roses climbing through the six-pane windows; an old leather armchair by the stove, horsehair stuffing busting out. Butts in the ashtray. Mettwurst on the table. The palate’s more elegant and slender than most Barossa gobstoppers, with lovely turnip greens, almost tending toward the methoxypyrazine tomato leaf of high-yield cabernet. That adds some balancing edge. But you can’t convince me that this wine was made to their recipe for Vintage Cellars in 2005 by Tash Mooney. This is unsold wine blended and freshened for a purpose. There’s even some indecision about the number of uncles, with the back label suggesting that in fact the real number’s sixteen. This is not unusual in the Barossa, where schisms occur nearly every time a Pastor dies and a new one draws up. But Fox? Gordon? These are not Barossadeutscher names. These are Inglitsch. Or Scottish already. Which is not to say there’s anything doubtful about the wine’s quality. Unique to Vintage Cellars. NOTE: Having just had a quiet one with Tash Mooney, the maker, eighteen months later, I am assured this was made explicitly for the Coles/Vintage Cellars chain, and is not a mixture made for expedient cash.

Peter Lehmann Barossa Shiraz 2005
$18; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 89 points
Everybody thought Doug Lehmann’s palate would fall to bits when he gave up smoking his beloved Escorts, but if this wine’s any indicator, it’s still on fire. Doug, Andrew Wigan and the regular team have churned out another Barossa bargain, and one that’s settling down nicely after a rather brash start. We forget how time improves Barossa reds. The usual Barossa chocolate’s here, with prunes and poached cashew and rich stewed plum. It’s neat and tidy, and will grow more so with a year or two more cellar. In the meantime, pepper steak. www.peterlehmannwines.com (19.1.8)

Bay of Shoals Island Blend Kangaroo Island Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2007
$20; 15.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88++ points
Slurpy, cheeky and delicious in a brash and bibulant sort of a way, this has those bootpolish and licorice characters I keep talking about, but a bucket of oak which reminds me of A. P. John, the Barossan cooper. So somewhere in all that oaky spice and sap and alcohol you do find fruit but it tastes kinda Spanish. Weird. This is good value. 10 OCT 98

Tulloch Pokolbin Dry Red Shiraz 2006
$25; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88++ points
In 1982 I spent a perfect day with Jay Tulloch, tasting fifty vintages of his mob’s precious Hunter shiraz. It was a revelation, learning the sub-tropical wonder of the valley where it rains at vintage, so people pick early – sometimes before new year, meaning the vintage before - and get sensible, approachable alcohol levels like 13.5%. This is exquisitely shaped wine: lean, genteel, and nicely tannic. It’d be great now with smoked rabbit or hung hare, but will be much better in six or ten years, with a big ol’ juicy sheep on a spit. Shanks, thanks. Then cheeks. www.tulloch.com.au

False Cape Ship’s Graveyard Kangaroo Island Shiraz 2005
$18; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88+ points
Trademark Greg Follett oak wraps this baby up: with more of the bootpolish/tempranillo characters a lot of the Island’s shiraz displays. The palate shows a lot more pure fruit than the bouquet would suggest, with mulberry and blackberry in abundance. Then comes that dark, acrid tea tin tannin that a lot of the Dudley Peninsula wines have. Another one that would benefit from a few years in the dungeon. 10 OCT 98

Rookery Kangaroo Island Shiraz 2004
$30.75; 14.8% alcohol; screw cap; 88+ points
A bit rude and stewed, this shiraz is of the Chamberlain tractor sump school, stacked with dark iron as much as the dark green hints of deadly nightshade and blackberry vines in the summer ... it has doughy/malty characters, too, as if the ferment didn’t go all that swimmingly. Still, it’s a hearty country drink, and would go very nicely with the American plains turkeys that abound on the Island, or a wild boar from Porky Flat. 10 OCT 98

Commissioner’s Block Shiraz 2005
$14; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 88 points;
Roberts Estate is a big deal refinery amongst the vast grapeyards of Merbein, in the Victorian side of the Murray Valley. They divert some of the best of their 10,000 plus tonnes to the Commish, which is usually a step above most of the dry old River’s red. Like this: saucy and alive, with outright honest goodness in place of sawdust and cordial. It’s barely oaked, but nicely, with just a little edgy sap adding sharps to its almost natural-looking acidity. Since we taught them, there are now wines like this in France’s hot south, but not this cheap. Roast pork, mit crackling.

Sunset Kangaroo Island Shiraz 2006
$18; 14.3% alcohol; screw cap; 87++ points
My Melbourne granny used to rub a restorative cream into her kid church gloves that made the car smell like this wine. Like the leather in a new Bentley Continental, it’s a most unholy and carnal luxury, but it used to brighten up the smell of the old Buffalo’s Lodge hall where her husband ran the Calvary Gospel Mission. Smooth, slurpy, slippery and slick; clean and polished and, well, it’s like Coonawarra shiraz. And then there’s a spoonful of black tea tannin. Neat. 10 OCT 98

Dudley Porky Flat Kangaroo Island Shiraz 2005
$18; 14.9% alcohol; screw cap; 87+ points
This one reminds me of tempranillo: it has that slightly threatening acetone/black bootpolish whiff about it, like the officer’s mess. Dark Iberian ham, pancetta, tea tin tannins – and a touch thin and hard in the finish. Maybe it simply needs a lot of time. 10 OCT 98

Heartland Directors' Cut Langhorne Creek Limestone Coast Shiraz 2006
$30; 14.5% alcohol; cork (!); 85+ points
A wee wisp of blackberry conserve's trying to seep out of my glass, but it just doesn't seem able to drag itself away from the wine's deep anvil iron and blacksmith's coke, and I don't mean the friggin drink, although there's a whiff of those Coke sort of phenolics here anyway, even if the Coke in Coca Cola was named after cocaine and not the blast furnace fuel made by cooking all the volatiles off bituminous coal in an airless oven to make coke. Both things depend on lignins, in a way: the phenols in Coke and the phenols cooked out of coke. Funny. The wine does increase in fruit volume after an hour or so, but it seems to have little soul and no warmth and lots and lots of harsh phenolics and burnt and decaying lignins. Many of the macho men will love this tough drink, but I want more life. 10 MAR 09

J. Vidal-Fleury Cotes-du-Ventoux 2006
$14; 13% alcohol; cork; 85 points
Since Marcel Guigal bought this old negociant and parked it in a brand new winery the quality hasn't immediately taken the dramatic leap some expected, but this is a fairly good example of how it's headed. It's a simple, earthy shiraz grenache, with a hint of the harness polish, and a nice breeze of meadow flowers coming through the stable door. There's buckets of raspberry and mulberry, too. The palate's slender and furry, without much intensity, but plenty of full-bore slurp. Bangers and mash, Marcel. Jack Hibberd would love this friendly guzzle. 08 MAR 09

Alkoomi Frankland River Shiraz Viognier 2007
$20 at the winery; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 84++ points
Almost alive, with the sort of furry sooty aniseed and licorice whoof you’ll find increasingly in the Languedoc, without too much of the syrupy peach most boofhead Ockers think viogniated shiraz should display, this wine smells attractive in the way some people smell on a train: not quite seductive, but good enough for a second sniff. If this person happens to pash you sappy when all the others have left the carriage, or in that shocking moment when everyone’s got their earbuds buzzing and their heads in the papers, there’s a good chance you’ll never forget it, and occasionally remember it fondly when you feel like wielding a flick of revenge upon your regular squeeze, but you’ll never quite want to do the train thing again. So you do the pash thing, just this once, and put it in the mouth, and yep! That’s pretty much how it feels. Good enough for that risky fling, but not yet sufficiently alluring or reliable to commit to. And the most challenging thing for this writer is I can’t clearly discern the gender. But I reckon, with about six years dungeon, it’ll be a sort of a boy. And I’ll be gone. JAN 09

Neagle’s Rock Clare Valley Shiraz 2006
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 83 points
14.5% alcohol? All Australia’s red cannot possibly be 14.5% alcohol. This has good thick fruit: a bit felty in its thickness: too hammered, not sufficient elegance. Still, there’s a lot of Harley men who’d love a smell like this. It does grow on one. Leather and grease sort of stuff, with jam and Vegemite all over the lingeried lass on the back. Pierced everything. The palate’s more of the same: lacking elegance, but plenty of Harley. I’d like a squeak more Noel Coward in my Harley. Sorry. On my Harley. I’m scared of that kinda girl. At least you know where Noel’s coming from. The back. And he uses his table napkin. JAN 09

Zilzie Bulloak Murray Valley Carbon Neutral Shiraz 2007
$10; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 83 points
Smells a bit like carbon, too, come to fink of it: sorta swarfy. Rude cowshed whoofs and somebody using an angle grinder to cut cousin Clarence outa the milking machine. Don’t ask what he’s doing in there. After all that in yo face jammy ripeness – I can also smell the old fuel oil engine next door now – the drink’s sweet and chubby, like Ribena, maybe a bit raw, but sweet and chubby and as open-hearted as the boy next door. Bubba be his name. Puts his oily rag in his hip pocket, takes your hand, Spams it, then gets the rag out and wipes his hand sorta guy. We met him last year in a coupla them Chester Osborne bottles of d’Arenberg. Carbon aftertaste, too. Australian outback drought wine dressed up as a dairy farm? Can’t be right? Carbon neutral? At Karadoc? Do they count the friction all the river water makes as it rubs along inside the irrigation pipes? JAN 09

Kalleske Moppa Barossa Valley Shiraz 2007
$29; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 82 points
14.5% alcohol? All Australia’s red cannot possibly be 14.5% alcohol. These Kalleskes are heavily into bio-dynamics, which is very, very good. They were the first big Barossa growers to go Steiner. “Sourced entirely from our Kalleske Moppa vineyard, a trace of viognier and petit verdot has been added to this shiraz, giving it a contemporary edge”. Aw ma goodness. I can’t help thinking that all those ancient Barossa grapeyards need for a contemporary edge is to be picked one or two degrees Beaumé earlier, and then they’d be more like a drink, and less like a feed, no? The acid would be more natural; the tannins a little greener. Maybe then you wouldn’t need the vio and the PV, which have tweaked the finishing tannins a little, making the wine more savoury. But it still smells thick and waxy, like that black candle I got from the high Barossa lass who left my heart hanging on a No Parking sign in the Nuri co-op car-park out the back of The Bank wine bar last time I gathered the pluck to go Barossa. Jeez. Wines with character breed characterful memories. Nice sweet little wine, but; with the added focus of those tannins. JAN 09

Gipsie Jack Langhorne Creek Shiraz 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 81 points
Smells tarry, a bit like real merlot. Like all those lignin smells that come from the stiffening in plant cell walls, whether they come from grapes or oak. Lignin has a very strong bouquet. When it’s really old and rotten and squashed it becomes lignite, or brown coal. This shiraz gives us some lignin, the oak gives us the rest. Then the grape sugars and glycerols swoop in over your tongue and the smell suddenly doesn’t matter nearly so much. Not that there was anything wrong with it in the first place. This is slick, simple, easy-tipping plonko lango that makes me twitch for juicy pink lamb cutlets.

Fairbank Sutton Grange Victoria Syrah 2004
$25; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 80 points
Gilles Lapalus has kept my attention over the years, making wine closer in spirit to the sweaty Mediterranean than, say, perfumed Paris, but with better insinuations of science than your average Tournon pastisserie. Not too much science evident in this hearty country brewage however, with its barny wood, buttery – diacetyl? Butyric? – leathery bouquet, and worn-out, harness-and-mule south-of-France muckiness. “Classical dishes such as lamb or duck” suggests the spinsheet. I say chuck ’em both in the iron pot with a bottle of this, the haunch of the mule, and the guts of a cassoulet and wallow in your classical merde. www.suttongrangewinery.com (16.2.8)

Thorne Clarke Sandpiper Barossa Shiraz 2007
$??; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 79 points
Sophisticated and juicy, with plenty of fruitgums, jujubes and sugared blackcurrant and blackberry fruit gels, this wine tastes nothing like the poor, awkward, skinny, long-legged stint on the label. (What’s that doing there? It lands in the vineyard? Oh. It’s not appetising.) There’s some sappy, dusty oak, too: just enough to take the sugary gum off that bouquet, and enough to take most of the fruit outa the palate. Damn. The stunning suite of vineyards these dudes own deserve better than this. JAN 09

Fox Creek Red Baron McLaren Vale Shiraz 2007
$14; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 76 points
As my deeply respectful grandfather A. J. solemnly fired his .303 rifle over the lowering coffin of Baron Manfred von Richthoven, being in the official guard of honour, having watched the dismemberment of his Fokker by souvenir hunters, and knowing the digger who brought him down with one neat squeeze of the trigger, I feel rather prickly about this wine failing completely to reflect the Red Baron’s aristocratic breeding and incredible steely discipline as a combat pilot. This is fat, dull, jammy glug. It could have been grown at Mildura, or Berri. Von Richthoven’s Fokker had better wood. And its pilot certainly had better blood. This is ordinary plonk for ordinary plonksters, and it does the reputation of Fox Creek no good at all. Who do they think they’re competing with? Woolworths? JAN 09

Possums Willunga McLaren Vale Shiraz 2007
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 74+ points
Acrid and coarse, like the middle-range products of d’Arenberg have sometimes been, perhaps to please the brett-sympathisers of Britain, this is not the best red Possums has made, but it is certainly wine of a style. It’s just that it looks half out of date, like a dude with Brylcreem in his hair and too much Gaultier after-shave. The wood’s abrasive. JAN 09

Yalumba South Australia Shiraz Viognier 2007
$13; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 73 points
The lower alcohol immediately drew to me to open this before other bottles. But as if shy about making something obviously way below the Parkerilla attention span in strength, it’s as if the makers, like Taylors of Clare occasionally do, deliberately induce a few bretty coaldust barrels to make it more interesting for the English, who are tiring of what they call “Aussie fruit bombs”. For this is more like many average south-of-France average wines: the whiff of the average old steamtrain whoofing through the average railway stations of my very average youth makes it seem like many wines from that stony Rhone delta and its cellars filled with musty old wood. Average. The wine is shorter because of this: drier, with less of said fruitbomb. The finish is almost bitter. Nice drink for a wild boar on the spit, but no finesse in sight. You’d think a mob like Yalumba could have saved a little more live fruit for us. Still, they obviously know what they’re doing, and this is what they’ve done. Send it all to England. But hang on - maybe that tight bitter bit is the viognier? JAN 09

McWilliams Mount Pleasant Philip Hunter Valley Shiraz 2003
($17; 14%alcohol; cork; 75 points)
Pity about the cork. This wine tickles the ego of traditional heritage Caucasian artefact republicans like me. It’s good wine, given the reactionary poddy-dodging sycophancy of the Hunter wine kings, who named it after our beloved German Queen’s devoted Greek husband, Phil le Duc. It’s lovely slender light-bodied “burgundy” style Hunter, which was forgotten here after we logicians moved wisely to the screw cap. Have it with a broiled map of New South Wales. (9.12.06)

Commissioner’s Block Shiraz 2006
$12; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 68 points
Gaze at this label long enough, and you’ll see somebody enter stage right with a cement mixer and a Drizabone, take up the shovel and build the Coonawarra railway station. But we’re at the other end of the irrigated Murraylands, at Irymple, near Mildura. This is a sweet, plummy red, with noticeable residual sugar and bugger all acidity. They’ve bunged in a dash of viognier, which adds to the syrupy nature of the whole adventure, and some carpentry, but neither delivers length or finesse. I might imagine having it with a ham and pineapple pizza after I’d added the chilli. www.neqtarwines.com.au

Were Estate Margaret River Shiraz Cabernet 2006
$??; 13.8% alcohol; screw cap; 67 points
Mmmm. I reckon this smalls like coal dust and Band-aids. Zar Brooks knows what that means. Then, I reckon it also smells like quite a lot of the better Chateau-neuf-du-papes I have drunked over the last firty yiz. It has a whiff of eau-de-cologne mint, too, which is not to say anyone from Köln would agree. It’s quite pleasant to sniff, really. Up comes some grapes. And the flavour’s grapey in a thin, what some would call savoury sort of way. Some would call it a food wine. For me, it’s not a drinking wine. Maybe an old hard cheese full of caraway seeds would help make it a drinking wine.

GREENOCK CREEK RELEASE 2009

GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS NEW RELEASES TASTING AT THE WAUGH'S HOMESTEAD, AUGUST 2009: MICHAEL WAUGH MAKES A POINT TO RIESLING LEGEND, JOHN VICKERY, CENTRE, AND PHILIP WHITE photo LEO DAVIS


Whew! Where’d that year go? As Charlie Bukowski wrote, “the days run away like wild horses over the hills...”

Michael and Annabelle Waugh may of course think the year went very slowly: the exemplary work they’ve put into the purchase of the chookfarm over the creek, their consequent removal of those enormous sheds, and the earthworks, removal of concrete slabs, and rejuvenating landscaping in preparation for another beautiful vineyard have in one giant stroke improved the look and amenity of the entire Seppeltsfield precinct, which adjoins the Waugh's home blocks. Just as Warren Randall, the new managing director and major shareholder of Seppeltsfield, moves in, the whole landscape’s looking sharper and more in tune with its history than it has for many decades.

Last year I wrote a summary of recent geological discoveries that begin to make sense of the distinct differences in the flavours of these wildly beautiful Greenock Creek wines. Since then, with the incredible input of great geologists like W. A. Fairburn, Jeff Olliver and Wolfgang Preiss, a little team of former and current Geological Survey rock stars, has almost completed the official PIRSA/Geological Survey map of McLaren Vale. This has been an astounding experience.


GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS: THE NEW RELEASE TASTING LAST YEAr photo LEO DAVIS

While Greenock is, of course, in a different district, some of the deep underlying geology of bits of both places has much in common, and learning about McLaren Vale is teaching me much about the older bits of Barossa geology. It looks like we may be able to barge straight into a more formal map of the Barossa once the McLaren Vale map is published, as the Barossa field work is almost complete. This will assist unveil some of these confounding mysteries, and the great age of the formations underlying the Greenock Creek suite of vineyards – by far the oldest geology on the Barossa floor - will become much more apparent to those interested in the intricate but vital and immediate relationship between rocks and flavour.

But geology, of course, is not the only player. I couldn’t hide my delight to taste the last three years of the shiraz and cabernet releases (Roennfeldt’s excluded). This was a rare chance to see that while these vineyards produce wines of consistent base flavours, they are of course tweaked and influenced to great degree by uncontrollable vintage variations. This made possible endless discussions about the effect of drought and heat on things like alcohol levels, and what these mean to the enthusiastic taster.

Of course these new wines come mainly from 2007. This was the first of the real drought vintages, and while it didn’t bring us a heatwave like the vicious destructive bursts of 08 and 09, it ensured that the Greenock Creek yields were the lowest on record. There is very little wine, compared to a normal year. But this has given wines of breathtaking intensity and potential, and lower alcohols than some of the previous years.

What really astounds me is that the wines of higher alcohol, from previous years, in spite of their power and breathtaking ethanol, are actually more approachable when young than these, which are more modest in the strength of spirit, but much, much more intense and stonewalling in their reluctance to look like vinous drinks. These 07s are mighty wines indeed.

A word about Reonnfeldt’s. A month or two back, I sat with Michael and Annabelle and landlord par excellence, Douglas Govan, at his Victory Hotel on Sellick’s Hill. We drank the 1995 Roennfeldt’s reds. Thanks to the lowlife cutpurse who stole my bag and notebooks later in the city, I have no precise tasting notes to present, but let me assure you both these wines were only vaguely beginning to show signs of life. They could both do with another decade of cellar, at the minimum. So have no fear about the potential lifespan of the wines from this incredible, precious little vineyard. They are mighty, accomplished wines which show no regard whatsoever to those who dare question their provenance.

SWAHILI, CHIEF HOSPITALITY OFFICER AT DOUGLAS GOVAN'S VICTORY HOTEL IN MCLAREN VALE, CONTEMPLATES THE 1995 ROENNFELDT'S FROM GREENOCK CREEK VINEYARDS AND CELLARS, BAROSSA. photo: DOUG GOVAN

But first, the baby of the Roennfeldt Vineyard team, from the first of the vintages with record-breaking heatwaves:

Greenock Creek Cornerstone Grenache 2008
$29: 16% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in August 09; 94+++ points
As grenache generally enjoys a new wave of interest and attention in Australia, and the inevitable accompanying price hike, the general quality of this variety, across the board, is taking a turn for the better: the top end of the South Australian grenache cabinet now contains some very smart wines. And this staunch beauty from the merciless mica, siltstone and quartz of Roennfeldt’s, is foremost among them. One percent stronger than the magnificent 2007, this wine also seems more feminine, and although its form is sinewy and its acidity about as supple and pliable as fifty metres of trainline, it’s more triple-X adults-only lollyshop than the blood, meat, and old steamtrains that marked the 07. This smells immediately like panforte and nougat, with perfectly subtle oak hovering quietly in the background. Its persistent tannins and acidity draw the mouth to dribbling point, as does a shot of Cherry Heering liqueur. But this is sublimely finer, with incredible composure and determined direction. Over a day or two, the fruity bits of this bouquet – raspberry, maraschino cherry, and prune – seem to grow fresher and more dominant, until the blanched almond and cooked fruits of the nougat and panforte return on day three. So while you can wait years for it to mellow, like ten, if you must get it into your blood now, it’s best after a good slosh in the decanter and an hour or two of fresh air.

PUMPING OVER IN THE GREENOCK CREEK WINERY ... FOR THOSE, LIKE ROBERT PARKER AND DAN PHILLIPS, WHO CONTINUOUSLY CLAIM THESE WINES ARE MADE BY CHRIS RINGLAND: BE INFORMED; RINGERS HAS NEVER EVER SET FOOT IN THIS WINERY photo LEO DAVIS

Greenock Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2007
$38; 13.5% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in August 09; 94++ points
A full three per cent lower in alcohol than the 2006, which was nevertheless reminiscent of a Bordeaux from the record heat of 03, this tight and elegant wine looks set to become one of the Barossa’s best pure cabernets since perhaps one or two of the great Seppelts’ Dorrien wines of the 70s and 80s, or the incredible Roennfeldt’s of 2001, which weighed in at 12.5%. Interestingly, the recent alluvium of this Creek vineyard immediately opposite Michael and Annabelle’s front veranda is similar to the Dorrien stuff. The wine has a classic cabernet bouquet: beneath the mischievous frivolity of its top notes (musk, nougat and confectioner’s sugar), there’s a textbook lesson in the aromas of the dark green leaves of the hemp family, with hints of tomato leaf, deadly nightshade, capsicum, and fresh jute. (These plants are all stacked, of course, with preserving tannins, and methoxypyrazine, the natural anti-insecticide of hemp, sauvignon blanc, and the cabernet family.) The berries are mainly the tannic juniper, with just the slightest insinuation of blueberry. I think we’ll see the fresh fruits truck arrive in a few years, while the staunch natural preservatives of all those tannins begin to polymerise as their work is progressively done and they gradually release their charges. But the basement is where the soul lives: roast peeled capsicum, mossy earth and porcini mushroom mysteriously glower down there, easily absorbing the oak, which seems more like the juicy dark heart of fresh-hewn blackwood. Like the grenache, this wine has a demanding astringency which draws at the mouth, setting the lubricators gushing, and drawing the blood so close to the skin that there’s a wicked intimacy about it. Stunning. Perfect in 2020.

LAUNCH OF THE 2009 RELEASE: LEGENDARY GREENOCK CREEK TAVERN PUBLICAN, NORTY SCHLUTER, LEFT, THEN ADELAIDE PUBLICAN GREG FAHEY, MICHAEL WAUGH, CHEONG LIEW AND STEVEN CHAN photo LEO DAVIS

Greenock Creek Alice’s Shiraz 2007
$30; 16% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in August 09; 92++ points
Down one per cent on the 2006 alcohol, the Alice is slightly less complex this year, if quite a lot more approachable in its infancy. It has the mint and the quince paste aromas the 06 showed, but the overt aniseed and fennel of the previous wine seem to have been partly replaced by lovely fresh lemon, which is less acrid, less sinister, and simpler. The framboise and cassis of the 06 are still here, too, as is the dark chocolate: it’s like a creamy chocolate nougat, and then, with air, it smells convincingly of pistachio pie. So while there are quite obvious similarities with the 06, and this alcohol is lower, I suspect the sparse mudstones and slates of the Tapley’s Hill formation and the Yudnamutana basement make the drought tough going for these fairly young vines. These ancient silty stone formations have a fair propensity for moisture retention, so maybe the roots simply haven’t got deeply into them yet. Only time will tell. The wine has a doughy aroma and flavour, like fresh white bread, which I have also seen in 07 McLaren Vale reds from vines of similar youth in similar silt and mudstone basements. It’s a sweet, syrupy, viscous thing, with an ethereal afterbreath which reminds me of Eartha Kitt singing “I want to wake up in the morning with that dark brown taste.” It’s really sumptuous drinking now, and it’ll bloom for at least a decade.

Greenock Creek Apricot Block Shiraz 2007
$38; 15.5% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in August 09; 95+++ points
With three whole per cent less alcohol than the 06, this astonishing beast is more closed, remote, and unapproachable. Which, considering the intensity of its predecessor, is really saying something. It took three days before it dared let loose a hint of fruit. While it looks a lot less viogniated than previous years, in the sense that there’s less of the freaky apricot aroma and flavour – there is no viognier, of course – it’s also less willing to show anything like the blackberry, cherry, and framboise liqueur of previous vintages. For about a week! Instead, the initial fruit department is like a Ditter’s dried fruit mix, with solid blocks of dried fig, banana, prune, pear and apple. Then we get lost in the steelworks: gunmetal and lathe swarf, even soldering flux seem to be the note of the day, until about day four, when it begins to show signs of great red wine. It’s syrupy and lithely liqueur-like in texture, but not too fat or unctuous. If you drink it within three days of opening, treat it like vintage port, and have it with hard cheese and walnuts. After three days, it deserves perfect aged steak and big field mushrooms, or morels. Or leave the cork in, and give it twenty years’ bottle age. As I write, this bottle’s been open for week, and it’s starting to look like wine: its grainy velvet’s gradually beginning to take on a perfect silky sheen, and the fruits that were dry and niggardly are beginning to fill with lovely supple juice and freshness; fair dinkum. It’s easily the best Apricot Block yet, and my niggardly points only serve to show how slow the brute will be developing or opening up. This wine will outlive many of us. Confounding and astounding, it’s a life monument, a stone solid, damn near perpetual memorial to Michael Waugh’s stonefaced stonemason stoicism!

Greenock Creek Seven Acre Shiraz 2007
$48; 14% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in August 09; 94+++ points
OK, here’s the record-holder: this dour Easter Island stone-hewn rockface of a wine is four whole percent lower in alcohol than its predecessor. Four. Count ’em. Four. So what’s the difference? It smells more like stone, for a start. It smells like the Flinders Ranges in summer. In fact, it smells like the smithy out the back of a shearing shed in the Flinders ranges in summer. In the first couple of days, I could smell all that, easily. Hot iron, forge coke, old harness: you get the drift. In day three, the blacksmith, or the farrier, or whomsoever they have these days, magically opened up a lunchpail with a huge wobbling jelly of blackcurrant decked with wild cherries preserved by his Missus in her Fowlers’ Vacola, and doshed it up to the dusty lads with fresh whipped cream. But it’s the dust that prevails, even after a week of oxygen: burlap, almond shells, the smell of a freshly-blasted quarry, these hard things predominate. Over the days, there’s a fascinating counterplay between hardrock mining, blacksmiths and Flinders farriers, maybe even the sweet smell of horse, and then the fruits: juniper, then bitter wild black cherry, then prune compote, then warmed black olives, fresh purple figs, quinces poached in burgundy with cloves, and so on. They all gradually emerge, blinking, into the light. Then comes the finish, barging in with stone and steel and acid and black tea tannin from a tin pannier. If I had another week with it, which is impossible because this letter must finally be written, I reckon it might wring more points outa me than that damn Apricot Block did. Jeez. Impossible.

Greenock Creek Roennfeldt Road Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$192; 16.5% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in July 09; 94-5?+?+?+ points
Having recently drunk both the 95 Roennfeldt’s, I feel sublimely confident in saying this wine hasn’t even begun to form yet. It shows such magnificent disdain to the intruder, that it seems it feels the little matter of flowering, growing, vintage, barrel and bottling are but a frivolous bagatelle compared to the long hard work of waiting to grow up in the dark. Musk and candied lemon are the top notes. Working down, as through a perfume from the pit, we see the intense essence of entire blackberry vines, black pepper vines, and the smell of old tea tin. Then comes the slightest insinuation of your actual fruit: roast green capsicum and stewed apple. And all this is in a doughy, pastry-like pudding, perhaps like crêpes suzette. Commit it to your mouth. It has a totally teasing, entertaining, but surprising texture, like cotton wool. (Essence manufacturers market a tannin that gives this feeling, and label it “Fluffy Tannin”, a term they pinched from my wine reviews a decade or two back.) But below that cushion, the chassis is all acid. Given the wine’s sheer might, it’s strange to grasp that its spine is whippy and feminine, but so forceful that it makes the tannins seem to hang there like redundant feathers – the acidity’s so staunch, preserving tannins don’t even seem required at this stage. It’s a surly infant creature fuelled by the blood of great nuns and martyrs. The finish is not yet formed. It’s velvety and supple: a bunny rug speckled with melting chocolate chips. But there’ll be no greenstick fractures unless they’re yourn. This wine needs at least twenty years. It is actually too infant and disjointed to score accurately. After three days of air, the finish began to show gentle tar, moss, earth, and the distinctive reek of mighty swamp myrtles. A couple more days saw the emergence of a dribble of salmonberry and cranberry liqueur, and the pastry seemed to be amalgamating with the chocolate chips. Respect.

PICKERS IN ROENNFELDT'S photo LEO DAVIS

Greenock Creek Roennfeldt’s Road Shiraz 2004
$192; 16.5% alcohol; cork; tasted over a week in August 09; 95+++ points
As with the RR cabernet, scores are practically meaningless with this infant monster. The two percentage points of alcohol it’s dropped relative to its predecessor seem only to make the wine more confounding, impenetrable and contradictory. Plus signs, which usually indicate cellaring potential, are useless unless you regard them like the Xs on the tag of a tee shirt: you can’t have too many, because eventually you’ll need ’em all! This is masculine wine, wild and gamy: a really awkward young duffer but obviously of great breeding. Say a young Henry VIII, lost, wondering, between main course and dessert. It first exudes unlikely dandyish whiffs of musk, butterscotch fudge, and sherbert. Dare to push the nose closer and you hit a beef wellington decked with fresh acidic blackcurrants and a lush mulberry sauce. A touch more air and you’ll see the smells associated with tannins: aniseed balls, piquant, dusty walnuts, and, from the oak, just the slightest hint of furniture polish. Tip some in, and you’ll be amazed to find it fleshy and sensual, like a wicked slippery liqueur: almost a dessert red, but not quite: memories of sabayon with blackcurrants; as borderline but enticing as the Mexican chocolate sauce Cheong occasionally pours on schnapper confit, but here it’s poured on King Henry’s big beef pie. It’s slightly hot, sure, but that’s minor compared to other sins of the flesh going down in there. The whole shock leaves you with a royally indulgent, carnal exhalation, and lips like Marianne Faithful had in 1968.

SANGIOVESE

Castagna La Chiave Beechworth Sangiovese 2006
$75; 13.5% alcohol; Diam cork; tasted 16-20 AUG 09; 95+++ points
Sometimes I think she glimpses at me, over her shoulder, but not often. No white of eye, only mascara and cheekbone. She sits here on my desk with her back to me. Once, I thought I saw lipstick, but so fleeting it may have been a smudge in my brain, a tragic shard of lust. It’s all shiny black leather, disappearing in the dark to a raven muss of hair. She’s been eating morello cherries and Valrhona Cœur de Guanaja 80% chocolate, and she’s wearing Jean Desprez Bal à Versailles to enhance the fact that she hasn’t showered for days. When she moves her legs, I hear stockings. And that scarlet Louboutin clack.

Castagna Un Segreto Beechworth Sangiovese Shiraz 2005
$75; 13.5% alcohol; diam cork; 94++ points
You can wake these honeymooners by letting them breathe in the decanter, or by leaving their cork out for a few hours if you prefer them more bristly than considered. They should be in the dungeon, really. But by Bacchus they’re a smash once they’re up: so perfectly married that they’re like a new variety. Heady, sensual, rudely fruity and meaty, and absolutely seamless, they’ve had the appropriate exposure to some fine spicy oak, whose influence will subside as the fleshy fruit absorbs it over the next decade. Slender and smooth, barely tannic, but beautifully, exquisitely, furrily dry, this is a new benchmark for Castagna and biodynamics. www.castagna.com.au. (Tasted late 2007)

Penfolds Cellar Reserve Barossa Valley Sangiovese 2006
$51.90; 15% alcohol; cork; tasted Feb 09; 94++ points
There’s an old movie in which the ravishing young Sophia Lauren gets stuck between the entry lounge and customs at an airport in New York because she won’t part with the special donkey meat mortadella her friends at her hometown mortadella factory made for her as a farewell gift. US Customs won’t let her though with a smallgood, so she sits in the transit lounge for days until it’s all eaten. By the fourth hot summer’s day, I could smell her coming off the screen. This wine immediately reminded me of day four. It also has the unusual, but surprisingly attractive aroma of feathers, which I see in the best sangioveses. And, as far as drinking goes, I know sangiovese means the blood of Jove, but this one’s pure Sophia blood: as fiery and sultry and black-haired and black-tempered as a sultry dark Latina can be. It’s easily the best Penfolds sanger yet released. All natural yeast, no additions, a year in five year old French barriques ... you get the drift ... stunning complexity and depth, with bone dry, classic Italian tannins, and then the sweet returns of that delicious fruit. The only Australian sangiovese which impressed me more – maybe apart from Castagna’s first effort when it was young – was the barrel sample of 2008 Peter Gago tipped up next: that’s one’s even more brutally Italian and sublime, so be ready for that lass when she comes.

Castagna Beechworth Un Segreto Sangiovese Shiraz 2005
$75; 13.5% alcohol; Diam cork; 93++ points
Tiwi women were singing with jazz musicians at the Sydney Opera House on Radio Nash when I opened this. I was in Australia. Sangiovese and shiraz. Very dark chocolate and leather. When the harness at Tahbilk was still freshly dressed and you could smell the breath of the clydesdales. But it’s railway-station dry with fine coal train tannin, with a fruity garland of mulberry and blackberry, the latter stewing for the Fowler’s Vacola jars, drying there on the tea towels... Next day it’s more vibrant, fresher, more supple and streamlined. It’s confoundingly dense, but the sangiovese is just beginning to appear. It needs three more years. But it’d be stunning with properly larded kangaroo, or venison fillets, in about five minutes. 23 NOV 08

NEW!
Amadio Rosso Quattro Adelaide Hills 2007
$??; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 14 OCT 09; 92++ points
While the companion to this wine, the straight sangiovese 08, is tight and drawn and dry in a most adult savoury manner, this one, at a year's extra age, in bed with merlot, barbera and nebbiolo, jumps with fresh fruity berries and the sort of vivacity that can only come from exceptional vines in an exceptional site, made by a particularly savvy dude of a gastronomic intelligence which is above average. The mossy, mushroomy soil aromas of the merlot work beautifully with the pinot-like black cherries of the barbera, and take a pretty, polished note from the bright raspberry of the nebbiolo. The palate's ungent and chubby, but still lithe and fairly delicate of flavour. This is a merry and jolly wine for laughter and indulgence. If you have neither of those, the wine will assist you.

NEW!
Amadio Adelaide Hills Sangiovese 2008
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 14 OCT 09; 90+++ points
As dusty as the old Tuscan hills in summer, this wine has surly, savoury layers rather than overt, lively fruit. Anise, licorice and soot hints decorate a deep, intense well of beetroot and fig, wild black cherry and hedgerow berries; the bouquet has an acrid edge that prickles the nose like dried spice. So it's a wine for adults. The palate is tight and ungiving, with sufficient viscosity to carry all that dry stuff, and leaves the mouth oozing juices, anticipating food. Like osso bucco with black olives in the sauce, hearty, complex pasta dishes, or even your very basic pasta with oil and parmigiano grano. This wine will look great in about six years; now, it's a slightly awkward teenager for happy afternoon dining, rather than starched linen and chandelier stuff in the night.

Coriole Vineyards McLaren Vale Sangiovese 2007
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 91++ points
Vibrant, bright, marello cherry and raspberry, maybe a squirt of cassis, plush vanilla-and-spice oak, and just a simmering lick of aniseed stack up to make this sanger sing like Pav. “Ooh, but I am just a little songbird”, I heard him say on the news, when asked about the results of an Italian election. Well, folks, here we have a neat little songbird of sangiovese singing away with that perfect tenor tannin, as if the great throat does not function without a taste of cigar. Spaghetti and black olives; osso bucco; saltimbocca; any of the Coriole Lloyds’ great cheeses and olives. www.coriole.com

King River Estate King Valley Sangiovese 2006
$??; 14.7% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 22-23 June 09; 91 points
Lovely glimpses of the memories of lollyshops long demolished deck these licorice and aniseed halls: musk, raspberry, mint leaves, and lemon sherbert aromas tease the old hooteries as much as the toasted oak that lies beneath like a very hot, but cooling, bed. The palate has some severe whip aerial acidity, but the whole thing seems a bit big-boned and disjointed compared to what I suspect it will become. Which is not to say it’s ever gonna be elegant. Imagine a frontier town with a confectioner sharing two storeys with the local fruit conserverie. The building’s on fire. While the jams are burning with the candy, the hookers are leaping off the upstairs verandah, their scented lace shredding as it catches on the fancy iron lacework of the balcony ...

Zonte's Footstep Vine Dried Langhorne Creek Sangiovese Barbera 2005
$18 at the cellar; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 90 points
The vineyard wallahs cut the cordons supporting these grapes, but left the bunches hanging there in the leaf canopy to dry like currants, before they were picked, well into May. This gives the blend a distinctive old Italian feel, doing away with most of the leafy greens such varieties often project when grown on a large commercial scale. This leaves us with a slightly leathery, almost oxidised style of palate, but with great concentration of flavour, after the style called amarone. It's like Christmas pudding, in its pungent earthiness and complexity. Ideal for dark game meats, stewed.

Innocent Bystander Bleeding Heart Sangiovese Merlot 2006
$20; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 89 points
Gracebrook King Valley sangiovese and Sexton Yarra merlot be here. Makes this a super-Tuscan? Blackberry, musk and aniseed/licorice twists about the sensories in a quickly gratifying way. More lap dancer than Fonteyn. It’s clean, vibrant and fresh, but more brusquely intrusive than innocent or bystanding. La Lollo meets Fellini in a bar. I’m struggling. I’m seeing this from a bloke’s perspective. But I reckon it’d be similarly gratifying to many, many women, who can of course enjoy it without lap dancing, if they must. The tannins need protein; the acid needs fat; the fruit needs blood and fungus. Eat! www.innocentbystander.com.au

Neagle’s Rock Clare Valley Sangiovese 2006
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88+ points
Unless/until the drought-driven sand dunes finally get down to Clare, it looks like sangiovese’s there to stay. Mitchell’s and Pikes were the pioneers; the Neagle’s crew planted in their leanest ground just south of the township. This smells like somebody sat on a raspberry tart in the back of an old Jag: there’s all that naughty goo on the leather and a tweak of polished walnut veneer. The viscosity’s a little fluffy, but soon there’s a whip ariel of steely acid apparent, and quite furry tannin to make you yearn for something rustic. Like rabbit stew, or coq au vin. www.neaglesrock.com

Vintage Cellars Sangiovese Toscana 2006
$15; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 88+ points
This is the first Chianti to ever wear a screw cap, thanks to the bright young things – Jeremy Stockman and Grant Ramage - who scour Earth for the bargain imports Coles’ Vintage Cellars has been throwing at us. So it’s also the freshest, brightest, cheekiest young Chianti you could possibly have seen, due simply to the lack of cork or inferior plastic plug. Be afraid, Ockerwogs, be very afraid. This is damned good sanger, at a quality and price no Australian maker can match. Yet. Clean, sizzling sharp, slightly spicy, perfectly tannic… well, perfectly sangiovese. Not profound, but highly entertaining. Saltimbocca.

Vigna Bottin McLaren Vale Sangiovese 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88 points
Thick and rich with the sort of flavours usually gotten from the biggest sanger berries, this has just a whisper of the strange, unlikely, but alluring whiff of feathers that I usually associate with this variety from a cooler place. But it’s more along the lines of poached beetroot and dried fig, with a hearty meaty plushness about it. Pot au feu at Jo Goldenberg’s sort of thing. The palate’s easy and slick, with more of that big-hearted easiness the bouquet signalled. JAN 09

Vigna Cantina Barossa Valley Sangiovese 2008
$18; 14% alcohol; Diam cork; tasted 4-9 SEP 09; 84 points
10 year old brunello clone in terra rossa over calcrete at 200 metres at Gomersal; 12 year old piccolo clone in ironstone in clay loam at 350 metres in The Moppa, and 10 year old grosso clone in terra rossa with ironstone over limestone at 320 metres at Koonunga Hill should make a stunning blend of sangiovese. But I've had two bottles of this, one drunk lustily with pasta, the other tasted over several days, and both seemed a little doughy and dull. Scorched cedar and old whole nutmegs give some acridity to a well of dried currants, raisins, prunes and figs in the sniffing division; the palate is a little claggy and seems to have a viscosity which struggles against releasing its best attributes. Still, it's a reasonably pleasant soft and mellow wine with pasta, its gentle velvety tannins working the hunger division of the palate gently but persistently. It worked well with my smoked rabbit tom yum stew with okra, garlic sprouts, onion, garlic, cherry tomatoes, diced red capsicum, bird's eye chilliesand long pepper.

Rookery Kangaroo Island Sangiovese 2005
$17; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 75 points
There’s not too much in the way of subtlety going down here. Raw American oak, like A. P. John chips, have not done this wine all that much good. Smoky, sooty wood smothers the promising fruit a little like the 2008 bushfire. It’s like somebody ground up a stack of black leather Bible covers and tipped ’em in the fiery furnace. Then they shovelled in the charcoal. Thin, bitter cherry flavours don’t quite provide balance. Old French barrels, please. The sangiovese deserves it. 10 OCT 98

CABERNET SAUVIGNON

Cullen Diana Madeline Margaret River 2007
$105; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 95+++ points
Just to fully impose her dominance over Australian fine wine making, Vanya Cullen doubles her 2007 king-hell whammy with this astonishing bio-D blend of cabernet sauvignon (84%), merlot (8%); cabernet franc (4%) and petit verdot (4%). It brought to me a vision of a hot gothic/sultry-musky Marianne Faithful sitting with a knife and fork to devour a quivering gelatinous block of arterial blood, blood orange, soot, coffee, ancient oolong tea, and trainline gravel, dusted with gunpowder and the pollen of forests and fields of meadow blooms. It’s an extreme, profoundly beautiful thing. Thirty years in the cellar.

Chateau Latour Pauillac Bordeaux 1982
$??; ??% alcohol; cork(!); 96+++ points
For a lad of 26, this wine looked alarmingly like about five. Sublimely elegant, fragrant, tannic and tight, it simply sat there in the glass like a sultry, sulking little king, changing barely one iota over two hours on the table. While I’m not au fait with the wine’s precise composition, I could see the hard bitumen of great merlot there, with enough of the beautiful violets of cabernet franc, to add power, grace and fascination to the dandelion leaf and chicory methoxypyrazine of the cabernet sauvignon, which would be the primary grape. Having left the wine to sit until there was no food left, and my black gizzards had no room for any, it began to show little flickers of life, and its tiny hint of violet began to stir as if the faintest of zephyrs had arrived, while its flesh began to take on a slight hint of morel. This is right royal drinking indeed, and shall remain so for at least another decade. Having tasted it against its brethren in 1994, Clive Coates MW, in Grand Vins, suggested it would best be drunk before 2025 and “was not quite austere, profound, and aristocratic enough”. Enough for what? An Englishman? If this bottle was anything to go by, Clive could add another decade to his evaluation, and cross out the lines about insufficient austerity, profundity and aristocracy. I reckon this is in the class of the mighty 1961, which is still gorgeous drinking. The flavours hung on my exhalations for hours – it made me feel like a king. Tripping. From the cellar of the highly generous Peter Gago. 19 DEC 08

Cullen Margaret River Diana Madelaine 2005
$95; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 95++ points
LEFT WING WINE: I collapse, boneless, here. The lively berries, the naughty spring meadowflower freshness, the wicked lollyshop musk and bright violets and lavender that you never see in 100% cab are here, thanks to the mad persistence of Vanya Cullen’s hatred of chemicals, full bore plunge to perfect guzzling blended squish, and absolute pursuit of biodynamic hooley dooley holiness. Cab sav, franc, merlot, malbec and verdot be perfumed here, sans sprays and poisons. It friggin rocks. Close table or bedside supping now; real mushy wedding shit in a decade or so. www.cullenwines.com.au

Cullen Diana Madeline Margaret River 2006
$105; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
Cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit verdot, cabernet franc, and malbec are the varieties, in descending order of volume; the vines are thirty-eight years old. 2006 was the coolest Margaret River vintage since Diana and Kevin Cullen planted the first vines there, after the suggestion of St. John Gladstones, in 1966. It’s all biodynamic. Vanya Cullen made this ravishing red. It proves you don’t need monster alcohol to have huge flavour and pleasure, which is what this big baby delivers, thick. It’s cheeky yet plush, elegant yet intense, infant yet incredible. One of our best cabernets ever. Coq au vin or juicy lamb. www.cullenwines.com.au

Moss Wood Vineyard Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
Suspicious that I might have gone a whole point higher if I'd first seen this wine in a couple of years, I proceed nevertheless, in awe of its sheer stubborn, unflinching inertia. This wine is built to live for a very long time. It's has been open now for four days, and is beginning only now to let slip tiny shards of the beauty it will reveal as it matures. Compressed cedar and blackcurrant; wet coffee-rock and shiitake, whole fresh nutmegs and whatever else anybody has the time to watch for ... they must all come out of the hedge eventually, if begrudgingly. One almost has to go undercover. Mint and musk. The palate is similar in attitude: whilst holding all the ingredients for something wickedly sensual, it is neverthless so goddam cabernet in its composure that it has no humour. It is a beautiful, serene, unattainable sort who flicks something invisible from her shooting tweed and continues gazing out the window. It makes me feel like she'll soon hear me breathing in the cupboard. Marveer. Tobacco. Ooooh. Take your time, Ma'am ... 27 APR 09

Sevenhill Inigo Clare Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
Now. Here’s a straight cabernet that exemplifies the east side of the dry old Clare hills, which (given humid Bordeaux, the home of cabernet), is the least likely place on Earth to be growing such a grape. But then, of course, there’s the little matter of Clare also growing stunning riesling, which comes from the freezing northern end of Germany. Very strange. Incredibly aromatic, floral, intense and confounding as much as inspiring, it almost irritates the nostrils with its audacity and promise. Above its deep carbon base tone, older than God, lie stratum after stratum of whole summery forests of eucalypt, blackberry, freshly-hewn blackwood, kalamata, aniseed, juniper berry, orris root and the slightly damp remnants of soot from somebody’s campfire. It’s loaded with the distinctive methoxypyrazine aromas which distinguish the cabernets, with all that edgy green tomato leaf, chicory and rhubarb stalk, but the incredible layers of much more sumptuous and seductive perfumes that ooze out after two days in the decanter sing pretty testament to the wonders this wine will unfold as it matures. Which will take a long, long time: maybe thirty years. Its palate is velvety, grainy, crunchy and simple still: like a great Medoc, it’s a rather insulting notion to trouble it in this, its raw infancy. It is indeed a mighty wine from a great vineyard, a great vintage, a formidable vignoble, and a canny, sensitive, understanding winesmith in Liz Heidenreich. Stunning, sobering, austere wine now; totally disarmingly gorgeous much, much later. Think Latour timeframes. If it was one degree lower in alcohol, it might be sitting at the top of my Aussie cabernet list. Check way down the bottom of the cabernet collection to see what I thought of it last October... JAN 09

d'Arenberg The Coppermine Road McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$65; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Since Chester Osborne walked away from the modern vineyard sophistry of constant cultivation and petrochemical spraying, and returned to his grandfather’s regime of honest simplicity, he says his best vineyards have taken a huge leap in quality and contentment. If this Coppermine’s any indicator, he’s understating it. This is bloody scrumptious, right royal wine from a truly great year. Perfect oak-derived spice, perfect depth of fruit, perfect varietal perfume (the lollyshop beside the fruiterer) and a divinely elegant, supple palate with a gradual rise of velvet tannin. It does the impossible: satisfies completely and deeply with every sip, and yet makes the drinking arm reach involuntarily for more. It’s so good, it’s almost boring. Seamless, polished, utterly slurpy sin in a simper – it does make me simper. Keep it for at least ten years, or surrender completely to that drinking arm, NOW. And simper. Simper all day long.

d’Arenberg Coppermine Road McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
($65; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points)
The author of the microscopic crap on the back of this must be paid by the word, explaining the price of this expensive brute. Golds at Brussels and San Francisco may indicate they’re richer than us, can afford better spectacles, and eat with people so boring they’ve got time to read it all. But it IS magnificent cabernet, from a grand vintage and vineyard. Chicory, cassis, shiitake and cedary lignite deck its aromatic hall; leafy tannins dry off its tight yet opulent palate. Cellar! www.darenberg.com.au (6.1.7)

Casa Freschi Langhorne Creek Profondo 2005
$60; 14% alcohol; cork(!); 93+++ points
It’s profound indeed, this cabernet/shiraz/malbec from 600 kilograms of drought-ridden grapes per acre on the clay, sand and gravelly limestone of our troubled lakeside. It could come only from Australia. Its sharp, acrid edge of carbide and carbon leads to bright, vibrant fruit of great style and presence. Crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) and soft marshmallow flesh simmer away til the droughty sand-and-velvet tannins of cabernet and malbec take over. It’s made without synthetic sprays. While it really needs five or six years of dungeon, it’s very impressive now, with juicy roast lamb, or roast quail with pine nuts and shiitake. www.casafreschi.com.au

Cape Jaffa La Luna Mount Benson Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 13% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
Cape, mount, moon – don’t let the geography confuse you. This is the top red from Derek and Anna Hooper’s biodynamic explosion on the Limestone Coast. Pity their neighbours in the poor old Coonawarra haven’t caught the same moonjuice mania: this wine’s thick with complexity and rare quality. Like the best bioluny adventures, it seems to have twice as many flavour cells per drip when compared to the everyday petrochem/industrial machineworld oozings from the vast monoculture of our south-east. It’s an essence: all the best cabernet bits without any water at all. Dolmades, cassis, dried fig, velvet... Cellar, or order saltbush mutton, now! www.capejaffawines.com.au

Greenock Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
($38; 16.5% alcohol; cork; 93+++ points)
Aromas: pretty herbage – Corsican mint and catnip, musk, marshmallow sugar, blackcurrant, blueberry, dried fruits: apple, fig, date, wet schist. Flavours: Christmas pudding, dry blackcurrant, mint, anthracite, spinach reduction, plenty of lignin. Texture: sinuous, lean, athletic, firm, ungiving, stiff acidity, schist/flagstone tannins. Aftertaste: very dry, very long, savoury, dried fig.

Summary: Immediately after bottling, this wine was as wide open and dippy as a 2003 Bordeaux. That was when the great heatwave ripened everything and killed many French. A month later, it’s a tight, ungiving brute of a different order altogether. Sure, it has some pretty decorations in its bouquet, and there are some live fruits immediate, but the wine’s real power lies in the dried fruits that lie compressed and velvety below. These are flavours which will take many years to unfold. Another step down are the cellar essentials: firm acidity, and tannins of flagstone, reduced spinach and lignin. So while it’s your slightly awkward and tight youth so far, it will grow into something that might not actually kill Frenchmen, but it will certainly frighten many. Fifteen years should see it relax.

Jardim do Bomfim McLaren Vale Adelaide Hills Cabernet 2006
$30; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
It’s a relief to drink a straight cabernet that doesn’t taste simply of nettles and tomato leaves. This is a savoury, appetising claret style of red that has both of those typical cabernet characters, but it has a lot more going for it. It’s slender, elegant and supple, and finishes with the sort of long, palate-teasing taper that certifies a good long cellaring life (fifteen plus years) but serves right now to set the salivaries dribbling for juicy pink lamb, plenty of fresh mint sauce and properly caramelised tails on those roast parsnips. While it’s obviously been bottled very recently – it’s unfair and nearly impossible to properly appraise at this juvenile stage - it is nevertheless a wine of great balance, poise and promise. Already! So go for it now, but promise me you’ll put a case or two in the appropriate dungeon for that special dinner sometime after 2020, when this beauty will no longer appear nearly so anxious.

King River Estate King Valley Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$45; 15% alcohol; Diam cork; 93+++ points
The confectioner has collided with the greengrocer. Mustard cabbage, turnip greens, beetroot leaves and chicory are squashed into the starched white coat of the lolly man, who is redolent with icing sugar, musk dust, crystallised violets and raspberry gels. The palate’s prettier than both men, and their wives: dancing that fenceline between the extremes, it will eventually break down the separating class formalities, put on a uniform and we’ll have an even more royal cabernet than this rather juvenile Prince Harry pretender. Give it at least five years, maybe ten. Or have it with really characterful saucy meats now, juice dribbling. Like Tony Bilson’s venison fillet in sauce of chocolate, blood, juniper and foie gras. Tally ho! 20 NOV 08.

Moss Wood Amy’s Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon Petit Verdot Malbec 2007
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Yellingup and Cowaramup are the sites; the varieties lie above. The wine smells of malbec. Malbec adds the smell of gunblue. It seems to make the already black smell bluer. It adds more essential swarf than either the cabernet or the petit verdot ever have to offer – both these varieties tend to the vegetal. Think deadly nightshade. Good malbec can also add blessed intensities that range from beetroot to the flavour of the rare black pineapple, which may exist solely in my dreams. But then, grown too greedily and ripely, malbec also smells a lot like water you just used to boil a red cabbage to bits. And none of these smell anything like any of the above, other than gunblue, which I find quite alluring when it’s mixed in such intense fruits as we have here: almost blackcurrant spirit it seems, so concentrated and all. Oh yes, and the scary black pineapple. And lightning on the blackberries. Ozone. Spanish leather. All a bit martial, really. “But Signor, sometimes ze bull wins!” Beautiful wine, and cursed with extreme longevity, due to the record cool of 2006 in Maggie R balanced by the critical 45 total hours above 32 degrees centigrade the coast got to take all the greens from the berries. Well, all the extraneous greens. This is a wine from the chrome rim of heaven. Stirred with the blood of the rare black pineapple. With a few very dark greens. Hemp. Dark green chillis with no heat. Just beautifully roast green chilli pepper. In a few years, jeez.... I have drunk this very bottle carefully over five days and it still holds fresh and alert. It’s another movie. Write your own. Buy some. DEC 08

Pichon Baron 2eme cru Pauillac Bordeaux Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Cabernet Franc 2005
$268; 13.6% alcohol; 93+++ points
A glowering moody brute of a wine, this masterly blend has a pleasing acrid whiff which serendipitously reflects the calcareous stone lying below the much more recent alluvial gravels and sands of Pauillac. There’s a dusting of pretty meadow pollens, too. Descending into the bouquet, we get very ripe raspberry fruit – a little like great nebbiolo – and then that lovely toasted richness of slowly-roasted, peeled capsicum. The flavours are dry and streamlined and of a very high gastronomic complexity and harmony. Then comes a rise of lovely drawing tannins and an acid chassis that will ever so gradually elevate the wine into heavenly realms indeed. Fifteen years minimum. The winemakers voted this top of its bracket. Royalty. 23 OCT 08

Taltarni Pyrenees Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$31; 14% alcohol; cork(!); 93+++ points
Founded by Dominique Portet in 1969, Taltarni’s in the scrub north east of Ararat. Having grown up at Lafite, Portet’s Oz adventure was all about cabernet. Since Leigh Clarnette and his team took over, Taltarni’s dangerously resurgent. Coffee, mocha, chicory, crême de cassis, shiitake, all the opulent sophistries a great cellar can afford to spill over a great vineyard abound in this velvety, magnificent vintage. While it tends to severe, humourless austerity in this its infancy, the wine should profoundly reward most of those willing to risk that cork for about fifteen years. www.taltarni.com.au

Giant Steps Yarra Valley Harry’s Monster 2005
$45; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Phil Sexton grew it; Steve Flamsteed made it; young Harry Sexton drew the monster. Grown carefully in the right cool, and judiciously blended, cabernet, merlot, petit verdot and cabernet franc should play a merry symphony indeed. And so they do. All manner of healthy red berries and fruits swim about this glass; classic oaking and proper bottle maturation see the wine almost ready to drink, although five to ten more years will ensure its fine dry tannins assimilate and soften – the macho monster will mature into a voluptuous, sensual Brunnhilde.

Old Mill Estate Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$??; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Not complex, but precisely the sort of sweet, sensual, dense slipperiness that makes the occasional Larncrk cabernet get right up and win the Jimmy Watson Trophy as a one year old - which one winemaker, John Glaetzer, did four times for Wolf Blass - this is really lovely honest wine, the blackberry entwined with the briar; straggles of deadly nightshade along the wee roadside, over the hedge for a pretty spot a hurdies fyke in the bonnie sward ... it's honest, and lovely. Because Old Mill Estate is further from the heart of the ancient Larncrk redgums, and is in fact as close to the troubled drying Lake Alexandrina as any vineyard, it lacks the minty eucalyptols that most of the district's best wines display. But you know something? Without that very Australian intrusion, the fruit is more openly expressed, and seems more Bordelaise; more like something from Pauillac, on the flat side of the river, in all those round river stones and alluviums. So you wait til you see the wines from 06 on, which were made by John Glaetzer...

d'Arenberg Coppermine Road McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2002
($65; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points)
This rich, maturing wine, while still a tad raw, reminded me, in a big blind tasting, of cabernet from the St Julien sub-region of Bordeaux. It seemed as elegant and saucy as those quite distinctive wines can be, with the same shot of leafy tannins that make them more audacious when young, but much more satisfying at maturity. The La Grange 1961 comes to mind. It's cleansing, beautifully balanced drinking for pink lamb rack. www.darenberg.com.au

Grosset Clare Valley Gaia 2004
$53; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Many Bordeaux reds smell of healthy damp earth with fungi tendrils through it. It can be mistaken for sodden cork. Bordeaux’s high humidity triggers vineyard moulds which may explain this. But you wouldn’t expect it in the parched Gaia vineyard, high up Mount Horrocks, nor in the brand which was the first premium Aussie red under screwcap. Amongst the supremely elegant berries in this cab/franc/merlot blend you’ll find that earthy, fungus-like whiff, adding to its allure. It’d be exquisite with veal in a sauce of white wine, lemon, capers and sage. It’ll cellar, too. www.grosset.com

Langmeil Jackaman’s Barossa Valley Cabernet 2005
$50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Barossa cabernet sauvignon is often similar to the McLaren Vale sort: softer and less leafy than stuff from more austere, cooler areas. The Barossa offering is most easily recognised blind because of its consistent whoof of the best dark cooking chocolate. This has some distinctive leaf, sure, but it’s more like black tea mixed with that chocolate, and syrupy, mulberry and blackberry liqueur. A wisp of sooty oak adds extra edge. The palate is slender but still syrupy, with tannins that simply counterbalance all that juicy black loveliness. Perfect with crackling pork, parsnip. www.langmeilwinery.com.au

Olssen Six Clare Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenere 2004
$??; 15% alcohol; 93+ points
In spite of showing just one splinter of excess oak, this wine’s a beauty. It’s a streamlined, seamless, pacifying drink reflecting rare winemaking intelligence and delicate gastronomic sensitivity. It’s elegant, clean, perfectly poised, and cute. The palate’s seamlessly integrated, intense, silky and juicy, and gradually, sensuously builds to a long finish of velvet tannin. This is not blending for blending’s sake: it’s brilliant, inspired architecture to tantalise and satisfy the tongue. Send in the pink lamb and the mint sauce. 21 OCT 08

Paulett Wines Clare Cabernet Merlot 2006
$??; ??% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
One of the only wines in this tasting that approached felicity, this juicy, sweet, elegant beauty has a really lovely scent, with fresh wet mint, tea tin, musk, lavendar and violet decked all over its fleshy marshmallow middle. It’s full, balanced, graceful and elegant, with just the right amount of squish, and some very clever sophistry in the carpentry department. Nice go, Darky! 21 OCT 08

Lenton Brae Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2003
($40; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points)
2003 was not ideal weatherwise, but that serious young insect, Edward Tomlinson, made a dead serious cabernet, devoid of humour, enhanced by additions of merlot, petit verdot, and, cab franc, the latter being my Mary Magdalene. (If only she knew what a fisherman I am!) Tight, aromatic, dry, velvety, elegant, aniseed balls, violets, lavender - all the buzzwords apply, especially to those who let the wine awake over a decade in their dungeons. Pink rack of lamb. www.lentonbrae.com (16.12.6)

Mt. Bera 4.19 Adelaide Hills Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
($20.50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points)
Cabernet’s really easy to prune and cheap to grow, the main reasons for us drinking it neat. Ask Coonawarra. But it is possible that a canny winesmith with a freaky patch of dirt will conjure a rarity that rings the sensory gongs so sweetly that you don’t crave merlot, malbec, petit verdot and the heavenly franc in there to dilute the cursed stuff. Like this hyper-neat starlet: aromatic, fit and svelte, with the muscles of a pole-vaulter. Pink rack of lamb with rosemary.

Constellation Gladstone Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$72; 15% alcohol; 92+++ points
While this was an unlabelled sample, we agreed that it was most likely to be released under the Houghton brand. The winemakers voted this the top wine of its bracket. It’s an accomplished, rich, fleshy, creamy drink, easily identified as Margaret River – I thought it may have been Moss Wood. Perfectly balanced, harmonious and smooth, it’s packed with Ribena, cassis, roast capsicum, blueberry yoghurt, and violets. It shows beautiful malo and lees depth, and finishes long and polished, with extremely fine sweet tannins. It’s very fine drinking now, but will be more pleasing in six or seven years, perhaps a lot longer. 23 OCT 08

Hollick Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2005
$24; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points.
Merlot has given this blend its rich lignin and bitumen complexity, adding to the tomato leaf methoxypyrazine of the fine Coonawarra cab, of which the Hollick family is a prime producer, as they should be. I suspect this wine will perform much better than its current state indicates: the screw cap is keeping it remarkably fresh and tight. The wine is not terribly complex, as Coonawarra rarely is, but it's lean and intense and very tightly packed for a long future in the cellar. It's more phenolics and lignins than outright fruits at this stage, which is not to say there aren't black cherries and blackcurrants stewing away there beneath the chalky tannins, which are also in sufficient abundance to promise at least ten years' rewarding dungeon. It must be annoying to the Hollicks that they know this will last beautifully, but few people seem to regard a wine so inexpensive as this to be a great cellaring prospect. It reminds me of some of the very early Wynns' cabernets. I wonder what it would be like if they'd let a little more oxygen in before bottling ... I reckon it'd be much more easily explained and recommended by this early stage of its life. But I'm not complaining about great fruit so prefectly preserved. You'll simply have to wait longer. FEB 09

Mt Bera 4.19 Adelaide Hills Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$??; 15.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Bitumen and aniseed balls beat the blackberry bushes up these ancient mudshale slopes above Cudlee Creek. But keep your hooter in the chute, and you’ll begin to see the tight hills fruits unwind through the sooty woods: deadly nightshade; blackcurrant; black fig; morel; juniper; black cherry; kalamata. It’s humourless now, but it’ll brood away in the cellar for a decade or so, gradually letting those dangerous sensualities sneak through the tannins and acids that will preserve them ’til they’re ready. If you open it now, give it three hours in a flat-bottomed ship’s decanter. Then sacrifice a lamb. www.mtberavineyards.com.au

Protero Gumeracha Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$???; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Vinified by Paracombe’s masterly Paul Drogemuller, for Frank and Rosemary Baldasso, whose high, stony vineyard is earning a formidable reputation, this is one of the cheekiest, brightest young cabernets around. It’s full of vibrant cabernet stuff, jumping black and blueberry, tea tin, cedar, lavendar: pretty much like an enthusiastic infant Bordeaux before blending. All the tannins and acids required for a long (10-15 years) stretch of cellaring are here. Try to give it time. Meantime, juicy lamb rack with mash and parsnip will zing. www.proterowines.com.au (2.2.8)

The Willows Vineyard Barossa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$26; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
The Scholz’s have grown cabernet along the red-gummed banks of the North Para at Light’s Pass for yonks – their ancestor, Johann Gottfried Scholz, built a hospital there in 1845. The gums and the fast-draining red alluvium give the reds a unique eucalypt and mint twang that neatly offsets the regular dark chocolate of the Barossa. It takes well to a dash of American oak, too, giving wine that’s angular in its youth but sumptuous and succulent when it’s properly aged, which may take ages. This one’s cool and crunchy now, but will really bloom in a decade. www.thewillowsvineyard.com.au

Wendouree Clare Cabernet Malbec 2005
$??; 13.3% alcohol; cork; 92+++ points
Almost impenetrable, and determinedly, confoundingly intense, this glowering brute had only just begun to show some of its authority when the tasting was over. It opened with the typical malbec aroma of red cabbage in the wok, even a strange Islay malt whisky peat lug reek. Gradually, ever so, tiny insinuations of red soil, blueberries and intense mulberry conserve began to grow, with some very pleasant kalamata darkness. It needs twenty-plus years in the cellar, or at least a day’s air in the decanter. Wait for it. Majestic. 21 OCT 08

Florance Kangaroo Island Cabernet Merlot 2005
$14.50; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
The inclusion of merlot makes this wine much more of an early-drinking proposition than the austere straight cabernets. It smells like a modest Bordeaux appellation, along the lines of the bright young things Michel Dietrich makes at Haut-Rian in the Premiers Cotes. It has beautiful perfume and flesh, from the first sniff on. Mulberry, blackcurrant, musk sticks, meadow florals ... the palate follows neatly and seamlessly, with smooth, fresh berry flesh, then enough firm acidity and astringent tannins to ensure that a good decade more dungeon wouldn’t hurt at all. It’s very much in the style of the previous Florance wines, which appeared under the Kangaroo Island Trading Company brand, and always made it into my annual Top 100, out of many hundreds of Australian cabernet and cabernet-based blends. Accomplished; elegant; highly promising wine. 10 OCT 98

Knappstein Enterprise Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$??; ??% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Meadow florals, like lavendar and violets and everlasting flowers, add ravishing allure to this musky perfume. And then there’s the tomato leaf methoxypyrazine, balancing, not dominating. Flesh grows in the glass as it airs. It’s a beautifully stylised wine at once clean and delicate, yet almost crunchy, with that lovely balancing green hint reappearing in the finish, like bay leaf. Stephen Hickinbotham could have made this wine at Anakie.

Lake Breeze Arthur’s Reserve Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Petit Verdot 2003
$32; 14% alcohol; cork (!); 92++ points
Given the correct attention to detail in the vineyard, and not too much water, the old mudflats of Langhorne Creek can produce the most ravishingly aromatic cabernets. Like this. While its oak’s a little sooty, the fruit’s intense and tight, and ready to bloom in the cellar. Mulberry, blackcurrant, prune, and dried fig fruits simmer away below the classic Larncrk eucalypt/mint/floral edge. The flavours are firm and racy, as you’d expect of this blend – verdot is very late to ripen, and gives enormous natural acidity. Stunning in five years, cork willing. Or now with saltbush lamb and pink peppercorns. www.lakebreeze.com.au

Mondavi Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon Cabernet Franc Petit Verdot 2004
$120; ??% alcohol; 92++ points
Here’s a big’un: all dark Iberian ham and charcuterie meats hang about its slightly sooty oak and dried fig fruit. There’s a pleasant ooze of chocolate cream, too. Considering those apparently extreme references, it’s nevertheless a smoothly assimilated and homogenised wine, and one which will be utterly sinful in about five years. 23 OCT 0*

The Willows Barossa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$26; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Wafts of eucalypt regularly betray the presence of Willow cabernets: this one sent a swish of it right across the front of my computer as I sat down to address this glass. It's a refreshing, very very Australian aroma. The North Para runs through the massive redgums of the Willows vineyard: an occasional river that even less occasionally floods the whole joint with volatile eucalyptis leaves and suddenly the wines smell like they came from Avoca. But there are other good stuffs in this: muchos blackberry sugar gels and licorice, and a good wallop of blackcurrant cordial: not quite the edgy, spiritous cassis aroma, but the more natural and freely expressed Ribena. Other than that, it smells like wine. Like cabernet from the Barossa: chocolate, often as much from A. P. John oak as from the dirt and rock. Not much rock at the Willows, other than what's been used to build the old Scholz family hospital, which Johann Gottfried Scholz, the Bonesetter, did after he arrived in 1845. This one's got a bit more of a gape between its cheeky aromatic opening and the dry, dry, terra rossa tannins of its finish, but I reckon that'll all fill up and smooth out with about eight years in the hospital. FEB 09

Wirra Wirra The Angelus McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$60; 14.5% alcohol; 92++ points
Another smooth Aussie sophisticate in the truest sense of the word, this glorious composition of Sam Connew’s has dry insinuations of dusty oak, tarragon and bay leaf sprinkled upon its deep well of blackcurrant liqueur. These components are pretty well assimilated, however, and the wine leaves the lucky bibulant feeling well addressed and all the merrier for its beautiful juicy palate, balance and intensity. Give it six or seven years. 23 OCT 08

Battle of Bosworth Organic McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
($24; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 92+ points)
Joch Bosworth, Louise Hemsley-Smith and their two baby daughters grow this without poisonous sprays in the soursobs on the scarp north of Willunga. It's highly distinctive, vibrant wine, jumping with as much health and vigour as baby Margaret Rose, whose Mum was up filling export orders seven hours after the birth last week. All juicy, fresh lollypops and spice, it's lovely with your Sunday roast, parsnips obligatory. www.battleofbosworthwines.com.au

Neagle’s Rock Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
This was the biggest, most assertive old Penfold’s style red in its bracket. Its scent is opulent, rich, alcoholic and heavy in a dolorous sort of way, but eventually some more chirpy marshmallow topnotes break through the 40% of the oak which is of the American Quercus alba type. Once you accept the alcohol, it’s a wine of lovely size and weight, crying out for a steak with mushroom and blackpepper cream. 21 OCT 08

Tidswell Wines Heathfield Ridge Limestone Coast Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$22.50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
“The heathen live on the heath” was a mantra I learned in 1957. Nothing heathen about this bright young thing, other than the fact that the blazer boys of Coonawarra refused to have their boundary extend sufficiently to include Tidswells, who are on better red dirt over limestone than half of Coonawarra, and further from your actual Limestone Coast than Coonawarra. Boys spray on corner posts. Vibrant musk, marshmallow sugar and blackcurrant fruit gels fill the aroma; the flavours are more grown-up: dense and succulent, and precisely tannic. It’s delicious. Pink leg of lamb; rosemary; peeled spud wedges; spinach. www.tidswellwines.com.au

Zema Estate Family Selection Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$45; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 92+ points
If any Coonawarra vigneron has stayed cool, sticking to the good old way through wave after wave of rival industrial grape doctors who’ve pursued nothing but tonnes and money, it’d be Black Duck Zema and his family, tough Italian gourmands who shocked their blue-eyed’n’blazered neighbours by daring to buy vineyards in the heart of Coonawarra’s terra rosa some 25 years back. Quite justly, Zema soon won outatown reverence for hearty “family wine” like this soulful, mellow red. It’s the sort of homely cabernet Rockford always wanted to make, and no corporate Coonawarran has matched. Duck. www.zema.com.au

Jennifer Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$29.50; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 92 points
The fine print reveals that this cabernet, whose bottle is prominently devoid of appellation, comes from Bool Lagoon. It's lovely wine, being not too leafy, like many high-yielding cabernets, and not too oily like cassis, which happens when they get too ripe. It's tannin is very fine and savoury; its oak supportive rather than defining; and it's not too salty, which is common now for many south-east vineyards. Good with a pork stock soup with beans and cacciatora. www.tidswellwines.com.au

Annie’s Lane Copper Trail Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$??; ??% alcohol; screw cap; 91+++ points
Leathery, like brown boot polish, but shy, simple and withdrawing, little Annie gradually releases some of her finely fleshed fruits to fill the gaps in all those cabernet greens. It’s elegant wine, intelligently constructed, and ready for a decade of cool cellar. The only problem is there’s too much cabernet in it. Hmm. 21 OCT 08

False Cape Unknown Sailor Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2005
$18; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 91+++ points
Another vibrant blend along the lines of Bordeaux’s Premiers Cotes, this polished, elegant beauty is clean and cool. It smells like a low-alcohol Kahlua, with sliced blackcurrants, blueberries and prunes bobbing about in it, and it has a neat acrid edge of gunpowder and chalk. The tannins are along the methoxypyrazine lines of bay leaf and tomato leaf, adding a very tidy finish to a wine of considerable promise. Five to eight more years, please. 10 OCT 98

Taylor’s Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2007
$??; 14.4% alcohol; screw cap; 91+++ points
Puppyfat. Raw pork. Blackpowder. Infant tannins overwhelming the fruit of what the maker called “a hauntingly difficult drought vintage”. Very fine tannins, but raw and leafy. And yet this is probably one of the best balanced wines in the line! It’s highly promising light to medium weight wine that’s simply too young to be on the market. It’ll be a real humdinger in a decade. 21 OCT 08

O’Leary Walker Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14.4% alcohol; screw cap; 91++ points
At first sweet and cheeky to sniff, with a pretty lollyshop bouquet of mint leaf gels, musk sticks and marshmallow sugar, this soon began to exude that slate quarry after a blast country acridity, and then the methoxypyrazine tomato leaf and deadly nightshade added their typically cabernet complexity. The aroma of the exhalation after swallowing this wine was particularly satisfying and exciting, with all those lollies and leaves. It’s very cute, clean, modern wine that will settle beautifully with five or six years cellar. 21 OCT 08

Penley Estate Phoeniz Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$19; 15% alcohol; 91++ points
This was the first truly masterly cabernet in this tasting, showing more neat, lithe, cool climate character than that rather large alcohol number would insinuate. It’s elegant, yet it seems to glower intensely, with a pretty musky topnote balancing that black tea tin basement, blueberry and roast capsicum filling the middle. It has very fine balance and form, and needs about fifteen years to put some true accessibility into its thoroughbred form. Very impressive for a black dirt Coonawarra. 23 OCT 08

Chalk Hill McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2003
($25; 14.5% alcohol; cork(!); 91+ points)
This classic example of the new generation Chalk Hill wines reflects the reasons for its maker, Jock Harvey, being elected to become the new spokesman for the whole McLaren Vale district. At once intense, yet clean, fresh and vibrant, it's a juicy fruitgum sort of drink that's actually a lot more complex and promising as a cellar prospect than you'd think at first slurp. You'll know when your slurps turn to gurgles, however. Rostbif. www.chalkhill.com.au

Dominique Portet Heathcote Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$??; 15% alcohol; cork(!); 91+ points
Since leaving Taltarni a decade back, Dominique Portet has built acute wines in the Bordeaux shape from the Yarra Valley and Heathcote, in the uplands north of Melbourne. Given the ideally cool, gentle weather of 2005, it’s surprising that he let this cabernet slime its way up to a Parkeresque 15%, but it’s still a lovely bloody wine, with that impossible-to-describe combo of leaf and lush – it could almost be Greenock Creek. The tannins are suitably velvety after all that gooey fruit, leaving a fig/date/fruitmince/suet/xmess pud impression. Osso bucco, acid sauce.

Rusticana Langhorne Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2003
$20; 14.9% alcohol; screw cap; 91 points
After decades producing Newman’s estimable Horseradish from Raphanus rusticanus, Brian and Anne Meakins felt some vines coming on. So you can get top horseradish and juicy glories like this at their new treetop-level tasting room at Larngrik. Intense, inky, powerful and silky, with piquant aniseed, fennel, and the eucalypt mint typical of the Creek, this is big serious cabernet for venison roast with juniper, spuds, beets and horseradish. www.rusticanawines.com

Yalumba FDR 1A Eden Valley Cabernet Shiraz 2000
$34; 13.5% alcohol; cork; 91 points
While the marketing tuggers went nuts with the packaging and mumbo jumbo naming of this Eden Valley cabernet shiraz - it’s even got an aluminium medal attached - some dill then went and banged a cork in it. Said bark plug fell to bits in the neck, and took ten minutes to extract. Nice wine, though: smoky, moody and meaty, with the sort of alcohol that I love most: modest. It’s a nicely balanced, velvety drink to have with roast beef. www.yalumba.com

Ridge Santa Cruz Mountains Estate California Cabernet Merlot 2005
$70; 13.7% alcohol; cork; 90+++ points
John Cale, my Elvis, recorded a beautiful song called Mr. Wilson on Island Records, within a few years of leaving the Velvet Underground, which was a shit band without him. It was Cale's paean to Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys. While the Beach Boys - Deni aside - were syrupy singers, all wild honey and seamless, Johnny C always had more of a grainy cinematic delivery, like a Bunuel movie. In Mr. Wilson, the refrain says "California wine tastes fine", which was the first advertisement I ever heard for such a tincture, although I suppose I'd always nursed the possibility of the vintage wine from the year 62 that lovely Lowell George sang of in Allen Toussaint's On Your Way Down on Dixie Chicken may possibly have been Californian, and that was a grainy song, too. I was into strong acid, hallucinogenic mushrooms, hash and Campari in those days, and didn't quite see myself spending the balanced of this unbalanced life soused in wine from anywhere. Which leads me to the fact that this California wine is as grainy as the sound and images of Cale's early work, like the inimitable benchmark Paris 1919, with Lowell's socket wrench Strat slide adding some theatre. ("Doers, not thinkers" Cale told me of Little Feat's contributions to those sessions, but he's friggin' Welsh.) What I mean is the fruit here is macho cabernet, a little like the heavily Amoaked Bin 707's of Penfolds about twenty years back. In case you haven't twigged, I cannot tolerate Quercus alba, the American oak which grows so quick it feels like balsa wood in your mouth and makes bourbon taste of coconut. But if you feel like John Spalvins or Hugh Morgan at any point, you should drink one of these with glee, because you'll be getting one of those old right-wing cabs that those old blokes used to relish in their old wood-panelled clubrooms, and slice $100 from the 707 price. So. Do you understand? Exclusive to Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice. 06 MAR 09

Rookery Peak Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2004
$50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 90+++ points
Dense and polished, and a little towards the kalamata olive nature of Clare Valley cabernets, this staunch cutie reeks also of blueberries and baby beetroot, with glowering carbon and swarf welling menacingly below. It’s clean, elegant, svelte, stylish wine with strapping tannins that give the gums a good pucker now, but will guarantee a healthy future. Five more years, easily. It’s very fine, promising wine which benefits greatly from the shiraz inclusion. 10 OCT 98

False Cape The Captain Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$28; 14,5% alcohol; screw cap; 90++ points
This is a good example of what we used to called claret. It’s austere, dry wine, with aromas of wet chalk and calcerious stuff, spicy toasted oak and tea tin tannin, but there’s enough fruit – dried fig; dates; dried prune – to round all that out and ensure a more comfy mouthfeel, but I wonder how long that will take? We’re thinking Bordeaux-like timeframes here. It’s a finely-structured, elegant wine made with a great deal of thought and sensitivity, but it would be nice with a little addition of a softer variety, like merlot or shiraz. 10 OCT 98

Kilikanoon Blocks Road Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14.4% alcohol; screw cap; 90++ points
A narrow and tight infant, this wine seemed to grow greener, meaner and tighter with air. It had pretty confectionery topnotes of musk and marshmallow over a simmering compote of red fruits, and it’s a as clean as a whistle, but its tannins are nowhere near married to the rest of it, and while it’s long and lingers, it simply needs at least a decade of dungeon. 21 OCT 08

Rookery Halls Road Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$19.50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 90++ points
This wine shows that even when quite ripe, the Island cabernet tends to severe austerity. It has pleasing blackcurrant and prune fruit gel flavours, a hint of beetroot, and some pleasant dried apple pithiness, it’s but amongst a wall of really forceful stewing greens: spinach, coffee and tea tin. It needs six to eight more years. 10 OCT 98

Johnston Oakbank Adelaide Hills Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$20; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 90+ points
As its vineyards age, Oakbank’s becoming a more prominent sub-region of the Hills hotch-potch. This baby’s cheeky with blackberry, briar and fennel hints, and stacks of spicy dry sawn oak. This adds to its bone dry finish, where pronounced tannins counterbalance the little shot of bitter cherry left like a lozenge on the tongue. It’s not a great monument to cabernet, but a lean, lite, racy little red which will be nicer in a decade, but goes well now with juicy lamb cutlets, plenty of rosemary and pink peppercorns. www.johnston-oakbank.com.au

Kilikanoon Blocks Road Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2002
$??; ??% alcohol; 90+ points
Old horse collars with the straw extruding, saddle soap, Brasso, get my drift. This wine’s starting to show old more than age. But it’s hearty and sweet, in a warm, old-fashioned way. Mellow caramel and fudge flavours dribble rudely over its burnished fruit; the finish is long and dry and lit somehow by that golden sideways afternoon light, poking long dusty needles through the holes in the tin stable walls. 21 OCT 08

Sevenhill St Ignatius Clare Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, Cabernet Franc 1998
$??; ??% alcohol; cork; 90 points
Here’s a proper oldy, blessed with a freakishly good cork. It’s probably right at its peak, and when you consider it was carefully blended to become something, one can only wonder how many of the straight cabs will get off the rank in their first decade. Bigger, richer, riper and ruder than any of the other oldies in this line-up, it still manages to show its methoxypyrazine turnip green edge to great crisp advantage. Not too bad at all. 21 OCT 08

Kirrihill Companions Clare Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2006
$??; ??% alcohol; screw cap; 89+++ points
Full, mellow and whole, this comfy comfy blend is wholesome and well-rounded, not great, but confident. Black tea, tomato leaf, fresh crushed mint, and anise – maybe fennel – add cabby edge to the cassis and milk chocolate middle. It’s wholesome, juicy, nicely-balanced wine. 21 OCT 08

Dudley Shearing Shed Red 2005
$16; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 89++ points
From the vineyards of Hog Bay and Porky Flat, named after the local wild pigs that sealers and whalers and the cowboys of the sea left behind in the days of the Island’s earliest white settlement, here’s a cheeky, juicy, impertinent rascal of a drink named after the Dudley partners old shearing shed, where they made their first wines. It’s a blend of cabernet, shiraz and merlot, which give it a perfume of mulberry, blackberry, and prune, and it’s sufficiently creamy to have a hint of borscht or Paris Creek blueberry yoghurt about it. The juicy midpalate soon surrenders to a rise of dry, astringent tannins which will carry it nicely for another three or four years. 10 OCT 98

Tim Adams Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$??; ?? alcohol; screw cap; 89++ points
Like most of these, I reckon this wine would be much better off with some warmer, richer varieties in it, Bordeaux-style. It smells like raw pork and fairy floss. It’s clean, elegant, tight and pretty. It’s pert. It’s cabernet. 21 OCT 08

Tatachilla McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
($23; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 89+ points)
While such accoutrements cannot be eaten, garnishes, like blackberry leaves in the cream atop a fresh blackberry tart, can certainly enhance its aromatic allure. You don't have to eat them in this glass, which smells precisely like that, 'cause you drink it. It has a touch of Irish Moss, too, which makes me think of the Blewett Springs sands. Cellar, or steak and mushroom pie, please. (That's one bottle in the pie, another in the diner.) www.tatachillawines.com.au

Rookery Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon 200?
$19.50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 88+++ points
Polished and beautifully perfumed, this is probably one of the best straight cabernet bouquets on the Island. Pretty topnotes of cosmetics and lipstick lead to a sensual compote of berries: blue, black and mul. Then there’s the almost sinister base tones of black tea and carbon. The palate’s buttery and creamy, elegant and fresh, but soon surrenders to a tannic finish that’s quite vegetal: spinach, rocket, peppery watercress and chicory. These will carry it for a fruitful spell in the dungeon. I’d love to see it in 2020. 10 OCT 98

Sevenhill Cellars Inigo Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88+++ points
This wine is simply too young. It’s intense, taut and nervy. It needs at least a decade to sing in harmony; another one to achieve unison. The bouquet is brilliant youthful cabernet, with all the essentials, although the fruit is still quite shy. There are perky edgy aromas of white pepper and dried ginger, and a slender, hyper-elegant palate which reminded me of the very best of the Kangaroo Island reds which I tasted the week before. The tannins are clean, focused and austere. One for the dungeon. Patience will pay huge dividends here. 21 OCT 08

Jacob’s Creek Reserve Coonawarra McLaren Vale Padthaway Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$14; 14.3% alcohol; 88++ points
Sophisticated spicy oak ties up this smooth, creamy stew of fig, prune, blackcurrant, blackberry and mulberry. There’s a pretty musk topnote, and dark carbon sings the bass. It’s a fairly harmonious, tight, pleasant and supple wine, with long deep green tannins that set the salivaries juicing for food. Truly amazing for a 100,000 case product. 23 OCT 08

Balnaves The Tally Coonawarra Cabernent Sauvignon 2006
$95; 15% alcohol; 88+ points
While this wine seemed a little worked and extracted, its extremely tight frame nevertheless exuded some hopes of flesh in a chocolate crême caramel way. Its oak is very pleasingly spicy, and it approaches harmony, but still displays bright green capsicum and tomato leaf, then finishes with quite angular tannins. It will take many years for all these bits to sing in harmony, let alone unison. 23 OCT 08

Scarpantoni Brothers’ Block McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$30; 15.5% alcohol; 88+ points
Winner of the 2007 Jimmy Watson Trophy, which goes to the best one year old red in the Royal Melbourne Wine Show, this famous Vales slurp is rich, juicy and fruitsweet, a little like an average-to-better 2003 Bordeaux. It’s fleshy and supple to begin, with the flavours and texture of a chocolate crême caramel, but soon those British Racing Green tannins tighten their grip and the finish is quite severe and austere, guaranteeing a long cellar life. The afterbreath is hot and alcoholic. 23 OCT 08

St Hallett Barossa Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$23; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88+ points
“As grape growers and wine makers in the Barossa for over 50 years...” boasts St Hallett on the back label. But Robert O’Callaghan claims to have named St Hallett for its owner Karl Lindner just before Rocky begged Doug Collett’s help for finance in the early ’eighties, left Karl, and went up Krondorf Road to open Rockford and ask Greenock Creek’s Michael Waugh, a master stonemason, to build it for him and help supply his fruit. “It’s not for sale”, the late Doug’s son, Scott Collett (Woodstock), barked when I asked him recently about prolific wine industry rumours that Rockford was on the block. But we’re talking St Hallett now: a saint that never existed. Fashionably bretty, as if it were made for the Poms, this has enough sweet fresh fruit to balance that layer of stifling coaldust, and it has enough of that acrid deadly nightshade/tomato leaf methozypyrazine edge and sweet fresh berries to lift it from the iron, smoke and shellack of the steamtrain station to the fruiterers. Intense, pruney, blackberry and acid stuff, with enough flesh to suggest it’s got a whop of shiraz in it. Not too bad. Unique to Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice.

Cape Jaffa Mount Benson Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$23; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 87++ points
2005 was much warmer than usual along the Limestone Coast, and this wine shows that heat in its full, tough structure. Tarry cedar, coach leather, clean workhorse harness, and dried fig; maybe a hint of oloroso, give it most of its attitude. It’s clean and furry with drying tannin, but all that structure won’t get you everywhere: what the wine needs is fresh vibrant fruit, especially considering the intense efforts that have gone into growing the wine biodynamically. If it’s this constrained at three years of age, I reckon it won’t be softening for another three. Then game. www.capejaffawines.com.au

Sevenhill Cellars Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 1998
$??; ??% alcohol; cork; 87+ points
The cork had done this wine no favours. It wasn’t overt TCA, just that slightly mushroomy/wood fungus wetness that knocks the mellowing tops off old wines. It still showed a tiny hint of tomato leaf methoxypyrazine, though, amongst all that caramel fudge and squashed old mulberry. 21 OCT 08

Chapel Hill McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$30; 14.5% alcohol; 86++ points
Ripe, complex and deep, this svelte cellarer has a shot of blackpowder amongst its blackberry and moody deep greens. Its oak and tannins are a touch on the brash and overt side – it really needs a dozen years of dungeon. It’s tighter and more athletic than most McLaren Vale cabernets, which tend to be less complex and more chubby and syrupy. This wine easily won the winemakers’ vote in its bracket. 23 OCT 08

Geoff Merrill McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2002
$32; 13.8% alcohol; 86 points
These vines grow in a small vineyard around Jebbry’s Mt. Hurtle winery, and are picked at the same time and co-fermented. It’s a simple wine, verdant with tomato leaf methoxypyrazine, but creamed up by that juicy merlot. It’s clean and honest, sweetish and slender, and reminds me of the low alcohol cabernet family blends Jebbry used to make for Chateau Reynella at Coonawarra in the late ’seventies. Those wines aged remarkably well – some at sub 10% alcohol – so this might do the same. It’s not cheap. 23 OCT 08

Pike’s Hill Block Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 13% alcohol; 84++ points
I reckon my glass had a cardboard reek, and being too polite to interrupt a tutored tasting which the Chairman of the Clare Valley Winemakers Association had decided would be out of bounds to me, being a journalist and everything, and then me actually being there and all, I sat through it quietly like a very good boy at this wine’s expense. I couldn’t work out whether it was dusty oak or dusty cardboard from the box, and the wine looked like a leathery old coalgas sort of thing, thinning, perhaps from a little brettanomycaes. Forty minutes after pouring, however, the wine seemed prettier and fresher, and my score went from 78 to 84++. 21 OCT 08

Woolybud Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$20; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 84++ points
This austere little blighter needs a good long spell in the dungeon, too. It’s an intense essence of coffee, chicory, bitter chocolate and Dutch licorice, with tannins and finishing acids that bring thoughts of turnip greens, rhubarb, and spinach to mind. Like many of the Islanders, it’s, well, put it like this: In Champagne, the pinot is lean and acidic, and makes beautiful Champagne. Go south, to warmer Burgundy, and the pinot is fuller, rounder and more fleshily fruity, so it makes beautiful red wine. While they’re very definitely red, the Island cabernets tend to be more like the Champagne fruit than the Burgundian. 10 OCT 98

Fox Gordon By George Barossa Valley Adelaide Hills Cabernet Tempranillo 2005
$23; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 84+ points
Rude boot polish, Marveer, peppery water cress and chicory make this smell a little like the old officers’ mess back in the ration days when coffee was made from chicory, and water cress from any local brook was about the only greens the poor lads could secure. There’s also the much more practical aroma of hot aviation oil, as if a mech, wiping his hands on a rag, just walked in to report to his boss. But this is a drink, so forget all that twilight martial reverie. “Easier said than done, Sir. It does indeed smell like all of the above: silky texture, prickling acidity, tobacco – but good Lord Sir, I believe there’s a lass in the mess!” “She’s the chanteuse” barks the wingco, downing his Laphroaig. Vintage Cellars or 1st Choice.

d’Arenberg The High Trellis McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$20; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 84 points
Don’t bother getting your microscope out to learn about this from the back label. Those really are flyspots. Trust me advice that this is a beautifully perfumed lolly shop to sniff, all musk and mint and magic. If you’re a little kid, when such things are far too expensive. If you’re an adult, they smell pretty good, but it’s the underlying tea tin, fresh leather and leaf that makes the whole package rather attractive. After all that, the palate’s a bit dull and dry. Watery, then tannic. There’s a hole in the middle, begging for fleshy merlot or plump shiraz. If you ask me. Ask Max Mosely, he’d be right up it. www.darenberg.com.au

Florance Kangaroo Island Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$14.50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 83+++ points
Clean, slender, simple and honest, with bone dry tannins and smoky oak, this wine has enough mulberry, prune and dried apple fruit to make it slurpable in an austere, humourless sort of way, but a little addition of softer fruit would see it more approachable a bit sooner than the ten years or so the wine really deserves. 10 OCT 98

Richard Hamilton Hut Block Mclaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$18; 14% alcohol; 83+++ points
Sooty oak and twists of fennel, deadly nightshade, juniper and wormwood (Artemis absinthium) add interest to this clean, tight cab from the house of Dr. Dick. It’s tannins are tight and quite green with methoxypyrazine. It needs ten years of appropriate cellar to learn love and tenderness. 23 OCT 08

Jim Barry First Eleven Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 14.8% alcohol; screw cap; 81 points
Sue Hodder, the Coonawarra winemaker, said this wine smelled “dry and dusty like a Tom Roberts painting” and suggested it grew in ironstone soil. Precisely. The ferruginous red dirt of Coonawarra! A ring-in! More raw oak and nettles than your actual berry fruits, it could have come from Kangaroo Island. 21 OCT 08

Leasingham Schobers Show Release Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$??; 12.8% alcohol; 81+ points
Raspberry, blueberry, mulberry, blackberry, prune and fig, all dusted with pretty confectioner’s sugar, couldn’t quite hold off the thin greens and raw tannins of this baby wine. It might eventually climb out of the simple hole, but, well ... 21 OCT 08

Jeanneret Clare Curly Red 2005
$??; 14.9% alcohol; screw cap; 80+++
Not fair. Drought year, and far, far, too young. Cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot and malbec are all in here, but all it smells of yet is nettles and jonquill. There are berries, of course, but they’ll take years to let themselves show. It’s clean, juicy and deceptive: nowhere near as simple as it currently looks. 21 OCT 08

Cono Sur Colchagua Valley Chile Caberent Sauvignon 2007
$11, 12.8% alcohol; 80++ points
This was so stewed, ripe, rude and fleshy to inhale that it reminded me of a syrupy Ocker shiraz doused with even more syrupy, peachy viognier. Its palate was much greener than that bouquet indicated, having the sort of fleshy puppyfat middle you’d expect, but a lot more raw, green methoxypyrazine finishing tannin than the bouquet forecast. Disjointed and strange, but fair dinkum cabernet, however you look at it. 23 OCT 08

Majella Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2005
$28; 14.5% alcohol; 80+ points
Guaranteed to win trophies – it has many – in big show judgings, this oozes winemaking sophistry more than beautiful Coonawarra fruit. Totally dominated by expensive oak, it reeks of tarragon and dried ginger as much as sap, and finishes with hard acid, and stacks of tomato leaf methoxypyrazine. It must become more accessible and supple with time, but Bacchus only knows how long that will take and whether it’ll be worth the wait. 23 OCT 08

Reilly’s Dry Land Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
$??; 15(+!)% alcohol; 80+ points
Dry land indeed. I reckon this wine seems to have been pushed too hard: its methoxypyrazine edge is way too dominant, even at this extreme level of ripeness. Unhappy drought-struck vines. It has some pleasant cassis, with the raw spirit inherent there, and some pretty lollyshop sugars, but all that stewed rhubarb, with its oxalis-like cut, and wet nettles and bitter green tea tannins add up to a wine that needs ten years minimum, but even twice that might not help it much at all, poor dear thing. 21 OCT 08

Smith & Hooper Wrattonbully Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2006
$17.95; 14% alcohol; cork(!); 80 points
With a bit more black tea than the straight S&HW merlot, this slender, rather callow youngster is a nicer wine, perhaps because the cabernet component had higher alcohol and the oak provided some A. P. John Barossa chocolate. It’s a bit like the fluffy tannin that comes in a tin. Like the merlot, it reminds me somehow of a lot of commercial wine from Italy. NOV 08

Taylors St Andrew Clare Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$??; ??% alcohol; 79+ points
Made quite deliberately with some brettanomycaes to please the British market, this wine is resultantly thin and simple. It has a shot of the old tabac – Gauloise, if you must – with spicebox and Horlicks. 21 OCT 08

NEW!
Nederberg Winemaster's Reserve Caberent Sauvignon 2007
$12; 14% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 14 OCT 09; 79 points
Oak oak oak. Friggin' oak. If you were a lover of raw Penfolds Bin 707 cabernet back in the days when it was totally dominated by raw American oak, you might love this. I can't. How can you call a wine "product of Australia", or "product of South Africa", if its predominant character is wood from another country? There's a slight hint of cabernet attempting to peek through a whole carpentry here. Jesus was a carpenter, but he used no oak when he made the world's most famous wine at Qana.

Neagles Rock One Black Dog Clare Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2005
$??; ??% alcohol; 78+ points
Assertive oak and swampy greens cover most of the fruits in this bouquet. The flavour’s clean, and quite pretty, if a tad simple, but the wine seemed to have big time sulks. 21 OCT 08

Penley Estate Cabernet Shiraz 2007
$20; 15% alcohol; screw cap; 78 points
While Kym Tolley gets famous doing all that macho stuff, like posing for the snappers at the Coonawarra siding in his oilskin duster, he does seem to have a winemaking touch that reflects the characters of some of the more powerful and notable women which deck the halls of his ancestry in the Penfold and Tolley families. (Pen Ley, see? Brill muckotting!) This is cute wine, with a slightly upturned nose, Chanel Number 5, and a basket of bleeding red berries, prunes, figs and beets in her hand. Svelte and supple, with velvet tannins. Fairly bloody predictable, but. And, dare I ask, is it slightly salty? No? Maybe she’s just had a rough sesh on the ponies. Roast sheep with rosemary, mint sauce, mash and parsnips, but not afternoon-long quaffing.

Mildara Rothwell Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
$50; 14.5% alcohol; sandwich compound cork; 78++ points
So this wine is already five years old, like a Grange. What made them hold it back? Its awkward rude tannins, its bone dry, soulless guts, its empty heart, I reckon. It smells of soot and grandpa's tomato patch after the bushfire of '58; like some of them big ripe oxheart termarters half roasted, but the stakes which held 'em up have charred, and the burnt leaves smell like old burlap sacks. Highly oxidised methoxypyrazine, you call that. The price is about the same as Johnny Wade's 1982 Wynn's John Riddoch cabernet, but this is no John Riddoch 1982. This is what Mildara has come to mean: MEAN. Lean, like a jaundiced ferret, and ratty, like a rat on speed, it's not a comforting thing at all, and I doubt very much that it ever will be. I'd love to be married to the person who designated this price! Think of how much weight I'd lose! This is where Fosters think we're going. Not this little black duck. Even after many hours open, when a hint of sinuous muscle begins to grow where the fruit should be, and tendons appear to tie the yawning gap, uh-huh. I can't afford to wait for this to begin to suggest it'll eventually become a pole-vaulter, let alone a friggin drink. It reminds me of some of the late 80s Bin 707s. Raoul Merton had a men's shoe with a plastic sole and very pointy toe in 1968 that was called a 707, named after the great airliner of the day. I'd rather eat one of those shoes, brand new, than attempt to pretend this was a wholesome gastronomic item. Or even an extremely noisy transport vehicle. Uh-huh. Selah.

Chateau d’Armailhac 5eme cru Pauillac Bordeaux Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Cabernet Franc Petit Verdot 2005
$134; 13.3% alcohol; 75 points
Brettanomycaes has gutted this wine of it fruit, leaving a sparse ribcage that reeks of tea tin, soot, and carbon. It’s all extracted tannin, with the leaves of juniper and deadly nightshade leaving their acrid edge hovering threateningly about the mouth. It may soften a little with the years, but I doubt that it’s worth the wait. Or the expense. 23 OCT 08

CHARDONNAY

NEW!
Cullen Kevin John Margaret River Chardonnay 2007
$70; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; drunk 2 JUN 9, 95+++ points
This is the best Australian chardonnay I’ve had. Numbers nuts might like to know its vital statistics are pH 3; natural acid 10 g/l; harvested on a full moon fruit day and fermented dry as the Valley of Bones at 13.5 per cent. It is unlike any chardonnay I’ve tasted before. Pepper, ginger, lemon and wet coffee-rock aromas sort of slice at you from the glass. It’s as rapier stiff as any riesling, with an authority and weight that are a formidable, confronting delight. Grown and made biodynamically by Vanya Cullen, it manages both force and finesse in transfixing harmony. And it will live for many years.

Cullen Kevin John Margaret River Chardonnay 2006
$70; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 95+ points
Kevin John Cullen was the Dad of Vanya, the winemaker. Margaret is the name of the River. I always do maker, brand name, district, variety, vintage, see. Which has taken up space I should have devoted to this friggin’ stunning chardonnay. I’ve seen stuff like this at assemblage at Krug. The label’s wrong: the alcohol is actually 13%. Biodynamic 20 and 30 year old vines erect this magnificent, dense, towering menhir. A syrup of whiprod springy natural acidity with just enough snazzy oak to remind me of the rabbit I just smoked – I’ll smoke anything – it’s the best chardonnay of the year. Cellar. Smoke rabbits. www.cullenwines.com.au

Moët & Chandon Coteaux Champenois Saran Blancs de Blancs Vin Tranquille Magnum
$???; 11.5% alcohol; tirage cork; 95 points
When the lads in the Dom cellars see a chardonnay that really flexes some muscle, they used sometimes – very rarely, however – to make a still wine: a Coteaux Champenois Vin Tranquille. While this magnum had no vintage date, it did have a modern Saran bar code on the back, with the number 3 185370 004012. (If anybody can help with a vintage, please leave a comment below.) This wine has been utterly stunning. While it seems dull and mushroomy on uncorking, I’ve opened it each day for one whole week, and it’s improved each day ... it’s at it best now that I’m down to the last glass. Thank Bacchus it was a magnum! It’s now reeking of hazelnut and peach, with a certain sabayon egginess, and a trace of wet chalk. The palate is thick and heavy, and I suspect very old, but with incredible natural acidity. I used some, with onions, capers, and fresh herbs, to poach a small wild rabbit, which I finished off in my little smoker, with red gum sticks, but I reckon it’d be better for poaching lobster. As the rabbit had no fat, the acidity of the Saran was a touch stiff, but I’m being stupidly picky. After the light poach, I basted him with Coriole’s exemplary 1st of the Season Koroneki Olive Oil, rock salt and native pepper, sewed him up with a big strap of pork belly fat and chillies where his sweet little gizzards used to be, and put in him a for a quick hot smoke in the eucalypt. Best rabbit of the year! And truly, one of the most intriguing chardonnays of the year. Its apparent great age, generous viscosity and poached-peach-with-sabayon flavours, somehow leant against that amazing acidity sufficiently to ring all my bells louder than I’ve ever heard them peal at Notre-Dam de Reims, and big Charlotte, the bass bugger there, is 10 tonnes! This wine would have woken little Jeanne d’Arc! The wine is unlikely to improve, but would have remained stable in this state for many years if we hadn’t topped it. 26 DEC 08

Stefano Lubiana Collina Tasmania Chardonnay 2003
$60; 13.5% alcohol; cork(!); 95 points
The Murray River would be in much better nick if its growers followed the Lubianas, who sold up and moved to Tassie, to make majestic wines like this. It’s powerful, and incredibly intense, yet finely poised and elegant. Krug sans fizz. The Lubies’ crappy loam, silt, gravel and clay surrenders just a kilogram of grapes per vine, but they add up to the best Australian chardonnay I know. Spicy, nutty, custardy, tight – most words just don’t fit. Try DEVOUR. www.slw.com.au

Ashton Hills Vineyard Chardonnay 2006
$30 at the cellar; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
After twenty five years of intense experimentation in this vineyard, Steve George has finally made the best chardonnay yet from the Piccadilly Valley vignoble. I tasted it after a day bathing in Grand Cru Chablis, which served only to make this look even more gorgeous. While it develops a husky gunsmoke edge, its aroma’s a seductive swirl of daikon, salsify, sorrel, dried apple, honeydew melon, feijoa, gently gingery, spicy oak, and only Bacchus really knows what. Its mild viscosity wraps harmoniously about its firm natural acidity. Sinuous, supple, beautifully structured, it brings dreams of squid, octopus, snails, frog legs... Brilliant! 8390 1243.

Marchand & Burch Great Southern WA Chardonnay 2007
$65; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
Burgundian winemaker Pascal Marchand, and Jeff Burch, grape-growing owner of Howard Park, work together on this salacious white twin to their stunning pinot. From the tres ancien Porongorup, an abrupt granitic extrusion in the flattish land north of Albany, the fruit has that lovely ricotta/pear/peach/sabayon range of fruits and fatty acids, spiced perfectly by some right royal French oak, and a whiff of that granite, freshly chipped. This is what chardonnay’s supposed to be. The syrupy texture’s perfectly balanced with the oak spice and considerable acid; the finish hearty and audacious and reluctant. Mighty white for the red nut: big fruit; big oak; big passion; big future. It makes commercial Barossa/McLaren Vale/Riverland chardonnay look like something that was fermenting under your bin liner. 19 NOV 08

Tarra Warra Estate Yarra Valley Reserve Chardonnay 2005
$50; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
Average age of the vines? 22 years. Add a zero, and you’d be close to the average IQ of those who contributed to it. Add five more, and you’re near the expenditure required to establish something like this grand estate. Add very low yields, very cool climate, exquisite French oaks from the coopers’ equivalent of Ferrari and Aston Martin, nearly a year’s stirring on yeast lees, a dash of malo-lactic fermentation, and you’re getting close to everything a great chardonnay needs. This is a great chardonnay. Smooth, creamy, seamless, harmonious, naturally refined: exquisite. Especially with Tony Bilson’s salmon confit. www.tarrawarra.com.au (9.2.8)

Pegasus Bay New Zealand Chardonnay 2004
($43; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94 points)
While the exquisite south isle’s half covered with snow, the freak plains along the Waipara River - as far south as you can go and reliably ripen chardonnay - can be dusty and baking by day, then frigid at night. This stunner from Matt Donaldson and Lynette Hudson shames most Aussie versions. Its rich creamy fruits and tantalising layers of hazelnut, butterscotch, spice, sublime unction and firm natural acidity make it perfect for veal, like saltimbocca. www.pegasusbay.com

Giant Steps Tarraford Vineyard Yarra Valley Chardonnay 2006
$39.95; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Not quite as cool as the uber-kühlwein from the very cool vintage preceding, this is nevertheless very cool, if pricey for some. That’s how I started. Then dawned the fact that this vineyard gets no poison now, only the bio-D preps, and the reality that Steve Flamsteed chose against malo-lactic fermentation to build a tighter wine that’s more suited to the cellar than instant gratification, and I began to digest the fact that this one’s for the near-deep future, like four or five years’ worth. It’s harmonious, but tight, like a perfectly-oaked Chablis. Try grilled flounder, T-Chow style. Or wait. www.giant-steps.com.au

Romney Park Reserve Chardonnay 2006
$28; 13.5% alcohol; diam cork; 93+++ points
Then there’s the little matter of the Romney Park Reserve Chardonnay 2006. They shoulda called it Chevalier-Montrachel, for there’s more than a little Chevalier-Montrachet about this svelte blonde beauty, with its waft of pineapple cream and dried banana, gradually falling to that amazing swarfy acidity that I presume comes from the ironstone. (The same mighty, almost fierce natural acidity adorns all these wines.) There’s an acrid whoof of phosphate putting an edge on the nose. This was fermented in two and three year old French oak barriques. It underwent full malo, and three-weekly lees stirring with full top-ups for eleven months. The wine has gorgeous Montrachet cream and custard. It started ferment with wild yeast, and was finished with two cultured yeasts. It’s stunning. The palate lingers until you surrender to another glass. Perpetual motion. 15 FEB 08

Fourteen months later, the wine seems to be even more steely and severe. It has incredible natural acidity, and will live on this acid for a decade of cellar. It still has all of the above, but they seem to have closed off if anything, like astronauts preparing for a week on the Shuttle. If I were to change the points, they'd go up. 04 MAR 09

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills White Mischief Chardonnay Sauvignon Blanc Pinot Gris 2008
$19; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; drunk MAR 09; 93++ points
Not to take my name too lightly, this White Mischief’s my territory: intelligent blending: realistic alcohol and a price to match. So we’re off to another good start. That hard ironstone soil makes its presence felt again, with dust, spice, and hessian tweaks at the cutting edge of a perfume that follows with comfy honeydew melon and clingstone peach, and then the isovaleric acid smells that often delude us into imagining we’re receiving a pheremone that makes men drop their voices and become dangerously protective of women while women want to suckle: it smells as fresh and fleshy as a hot scrubbed bubby. As you’d then expect, the texture is fleshy, too, and carries a refined silky polish which gradually becomes velvet as the tannins of the terroir and that steely acid wind up the finish. Stunning. It’s a most intelligent and creative use of three much-abused varieties, with a total that’s better than the sum of its parts. It’s like a really good Alsace gewurztraminer.

Giant Steps Tarraford Vineyard Yarra Chardonnay 2005
$40; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
While there’s a saucy, cheaper model ($30) from the Sexton Vineyard partnering this Tarraford delight, my top points go to this for its extra complexity and cream, as some of it’s undergone malolactic fermentation, and its vines are older. It’s not quite buttery, but begins to show some peach, which is perfectly offset by firm natural acidity, and it’s made more flavoursome by wild yeast and plenty of stirred lees. It’s also a lesson in subtle, supportive oaking, with spicy hints coming from three great French coopers. Nice now, but more delectable in four years. Scallops with hot vinaigrette. www.giant-steps.com.au

Howard Park Western Australia Chardonnay 2005
$38; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
This wine runs down like a junior version of the mighty Leeuwin Estate, which is commonly regarded by those who can afford it to be Australia’s best chardonnay. It’s a similar peachy style, with sophisticated French oak adding nutmeg and ginger spice to the overall creaminess brought on by malo-lactic fermentation, during which the harsh malic acid of the grape is converted by bacteria to the softer fatty lactic acid of milk; i.e. the first flavour we taste after birth. Green chicken curry. www.howardparkwines.com.au

Montalto Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay 2005
$35; 13.1% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
Making three absolute trimmers in a row for Montalto: this exquisite chardonnay neatly fills the trinity, putting a holy spirit beside the previously-reviewed shiraz (father) and pinot (son). Spicy French oak adds its piquant ethereal shimmer to a bone dry wine with everything from struck flint, dried ginger and hazelnuts, to dried banana, peach, and pineapple. It’s a complex, beautiful drink that begs for large food: veal in white wine and capers. www.montalto.com.au

Tallarook Chardonnay 2006
$??; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
Now we’re on a slippery slope. St. Luis Riebl is my man. He keeps doing things like this in his chill eyrie in the Victorian highlands near Seymour. This particular funkmonger’s all wildly ripe lychee, rambutan and jackfruit – it even approaches durian. It’s not what you ever imagined chardonnay to be. Great fruit, yeast from the air, lees in barrel: Luis lets Bacchus have his dirty old way. I don’t mean filth; I mean bad. Chubby – almost waxy – in structure, with a sharp acrid edge, and a gently tapering, natural acid-driven finish that makes me yearn for spatchcock. It’s just too good. Go Buy! www.tallarook.com

Yalumba FDW[7c] Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2006
$23.95; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points
Phil Lehmann – yep, them Lehmanns – made this beauty with grapes from Paracombe, Castambul (in the Torrens Gorge), and Piccadilly. What’s so good? The acrid, earthy guano/phosphate edge of its aroma. Its chestnut and ginger oak. Its pith of limes and lemons. Its poached quince and pear, slight syrup, and strapping natural acidity. Capers, five spice, lemon-scented thyme, enoki and pleurotis mushrooms, feijoa, blood orange, banana chips … the more I roll it around the old sensories the longer the list of provocations. And while it’s okay for vegans and vegetarians, I’d have it with young guinea fowl. Well basted. www.yalumba.com (9.2.8)

Mountadam High Eden Estate Chardonnay 2007
$??; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
Mmmmm. Now we’re talking. This is edgy chardonnay: as dry and austere to sniff as the ancient marine sandstones and schists which somehow sustain it, but with an increasing tide of nutty bacon fat and similarly nutty grapefruit and blood orange gradually washing through, and then a palate that’s syprupy with clingstone peach and crême caramel. As winemaker Con Moschos gradually learns the confounding complexity of the vast Mountadam farm, he does better magic each year. This is fine, stony, understated wine which only very gradually lets you know who’s boss. It’s elegantly slender, but stoically forceful; rich and creamy, yet dry as stone and naturally acidic. It’ll perform some fancy tricks in your cellar, too: good vintages of Mountadam chardonnay can do a neat decade’s dungeon. It makes me dream of perfect saltimbocca. JAN 09

Hahndorf Hill Winery Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2004
$26; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; drunk MAR 09; 92++ points
Crême caramel, clingstone pêche, faintly gingery oak, lovely creamy elegance, this is what chardonnay’s sposed to be like: clean and precise in the palate, with really lovely fine acidity and general finesse. Try it with kassler from Max Noske, cool fresh tomato and basil, sourdough from Bullocks in Mount Barker, and a good swoosh of Blair’s Original Death Feel Alive Chilli Sauce. I await more eagerly the chardonnays that S&S will make from HH fruit.

La Chablisienne Côte de Léchet Chablis 1ER Cru 2007
$50; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
You can smell about 14 trillion and seven microscopic fossilised oyster shells in this smart bracer: it has heaps of the chalky Chablis terroir leaping about in its bouquet. Silly little buggers, really. you'd think that if they escaped being eaten sixty million years ago, they wouldn't entice us to drink them now. But they have no chance of avoiding it when you stick your trunk in this glass, and marvel at the sheer wonder of all this lemon custard cream wrapped about that long-dead oyster-shell chalk. The palate's clean and steely, with a slender, sicko layer of said dessert sliming about on the plate with the chalk. It makes me really hungry for baby lobster, merely blackened on the char, sliced lengthwise, slopped with really acid virgin oil - Coriole 1st Koroneiki Extra Virgin 2008 - lemon juice, a leaf of fresh basil, and immediately passed to the chewin' up and swallerin' department, al dente. Lobster and oysters, sea? 05 MAR 09

J.E Ngeringa Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2007
$35; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Chilled to an unseemly degree, this begrudgingly exuded a sharp whiff of something that smelled like old hessian phosphate sacks. It’s akin to the acrid stone quarry whiff in the Ngeringa viognier and shiraz, and close to an edgy whiff you’ll find in Chablis. I’d wear it as a perfume. It’s as husky as Ann Bancroft in the morning. As it approaches a reasonable drinking temperature, the wine reflects shimmers and shards of hazelnut, ginger, Anjou pear, and honeycomb toffee. It’s very pretty. But complex; serious ... richly textured, and unctuous but then quite mood altering as its tannins charge off toward the type of dried grass character which that whiff of hessian suggested in the beginning. This will smooth out with a little more time; right now it's an added entertainment. White wine for red drinkers. It’d go swimming with almost any of the recipes in Richard Olney’s amazing Provence cookbook. He would have loved this. Compare it, with its deliberately oxidative winemaking, to the Romney Park chardonnay. Similar altitude, about ten kays off as the crow flies, but made with the opposite philosophy: absolutely minimal oxidation. Fascinating. This one's biodynamic.

Battle Of Bosworth McLaren Vale Chardonnay Viognier 2006
$18; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
Mainly from mature, organically-managed vineyards, this unusual blend shows a lot more gastronomic intelligence than 95% of our overly peachy shiraz/vio mixtures. This chardonnay’s been picked when its acid was high, and fermented in steel, while the viognier’s been given the old French oak treatment. So we get a quincy/loquat bouquet with wet chalk undertones, and a bright, engaging palate of fresh, rinsing astringency and appetising tannins, a little like a top Veronese soave. Go prawns with sage in flake pastry, or char-grilled crayfish with squid ink tagliolini.

Deviation Road Adelaide Hills Reserve Chardonnay 2007
$28; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
Neither Ocker chardy nor lower echelon Burgundy, this lovely blushing beauty stands alone. With disarming ripe sweet pear as much as the usual chardonnay peach, and not much of the latter, it has a feminine, beautifully aromatic bouquet with hints of very expensive face unguents as much as lovely fresh-peeled, very slightly poached fruits. There’s a wee hint of fresh sliced baby ginger root from good French oak, and a long, dry, appetising chassis that finishes with a perfectly grainy, calm field of dusty tannin. So it combines the best of the cool, high, hills, with all their juicy fruits, and a gentle breeze of dust from the schisty, glittery lowlands way below. It’s not quite frail, but it’s understated, cute and very easy to schlück, and leaves a quaint tease of honeycomb caramel toffee stroking the palate long after the swallow. I think of slices of pork belly, smoked, then poached with perfectly fresh Anjou pear. JAN 09

Paracombe Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2006
$21; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 92+ points
Jeez I love that thirteen. Thirteen means no jam, no peach syrup. None of the awful things in the nether regions beyond thirteen and a half that have destroyed the chardonnay industry. But this is not an industrial wine. This is lovingly coddled by the Drogemuller family. You can smell it; feel it. Gently spicy French oak, gunsmoky lees and yeast, ever-so-delicate crême caramel, and the lush melony wash of Rocha pear just about add up to it. It’s a husky, dusky, sandy-blonde-in-the-sunset sort of adventure, with really zippy acidity snipping up that finish. Scallops in beurre blanc with shallots and black pepper. www.paracombewines.com

Clonale Mornington Peninsula Chardonnay 2006
$26; 13% alcohol; diam cork; 92 points
It’s been a buzz watching Mornington find its vinous tootsies over the last decade. Enlightened winesmiths like Kooyong’s Sandro Mosele lead the pack. This one’s from fruit which didn’t quite make the cut for the $43 Kooyong Estate model. No malo-lactic, no industrial yeast, and only 10% new barrels brings us a slightly spicy, tight chardonnay with lovely refreshing acidity and just enough viscous body to pat the palate down nicely. It’d be perfect with gnocchi like Ann Oliver recommended recently. www.kooyong.com

Moorilla St. M Tasmania Chardonnay 2005
$35; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points
The eccentric patricians – professional gamblers all – who own Moorilla dare no eccentricity or gambling when it comes to wine quality. This chardonnay is scrumptious: bone dry and mealy, yet with streamlined honeydew melon and star fruit juiciness. It’s modest of structure, yet reveals quite surprising force and persistence as you wallow in it. It’s like the sort of Chablis which would set you back $60 or more. Cool artichoke and bean stew.

Paxton McLaren Vale Chardonnay 2005
($29; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92 points)
The Packos are fair dinkum kicking bum since they hit the biodynamic trail and opened their new cellars and sales complex at the restored Landcross Farm at the approach to McLaren Vale. This vineyard’s not fully bio yet, but as far as chardonnay goes, it’s already as good as moon juice. Peachy – from the grapes – and custardy – from the malo-lactic fermentation, it’s a comforting, smooth, almost mellow white designed for char-grilled crustaceans and chillis. www.paxtonvineyards.com (28.10.6)

Rookery Kangaroo Island Chardonnay 2008
$16; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 91++ points
Aha! Guano and gunflint. Spice. Acridity that prickles the nostrils. A naughty Chablis. Delicate dried apple, pear and banana fruits like the mighty Ditters sell down the main street. Banana peel. Jackfruit and pineapple ... this one has enough flesh to cover the grassy sauvignon blanc tendencies that tend to dominate many of Kangaroo Island’s chardonnays. It’s clean, vibrant, firm, and accomplished: nice wine. King George Whiting barely flashed in the pan, lemon juice, fresh pepper. Wedges of pan-fried spud. Take the rest of the day off... 10 OCT 98

Battle of Bosworth Chardonnay Viognier 2007
$18; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 91 points
The peachiness of chardonnay and the frequently overt peach syrup of ripe McLaren Vale viognier could be a bilious sort of brew. Not so here. Fastidious attention to the vineyard detail, lower alcohol, organic growing and making, then letting nature take its course in the winery gives us a creamy, neatly tannic white that could be Alsace pinot gris. In fact, in cleanskin, you could probably pass this off to the big chains as pinot gris. They can’t get enough of that, regardless of what it’s made from. Chêvre on dark rye with raw Spanish onion slices and capers.

Blewett Springs Chardonnay 2006
$12.95; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 91 points
On my top ten, the Blewett Springs sands come close after Schubert’s 8th Symphony. Almost devoid of nutrient, they produce fruit of phenomenal intensity. That Gandalf of wine professors, John Possingham, and partner Carol Summers grew this crunchy unoaked delight. It’s almost great riesling in structure, full of lemons and spice, and tight things nice: honeydew; gooseberry; verbena; white plum; furry tannin and firm cleansing acid. Have it with char-grilled prawns. (13.1.7)

Cape Mentelle Margaret River Chardonnay 2007
$42; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 89++ points
There’s a remarkable mixture of acrid edgy oak and exploding quarry amongst the deliciously cheesy, leesy fatty acids that wrap up this smooth chardonnay fruit. But while not really harmonious, yet, the bouquet’s more encouraging than the palate, simply because the wine is far too juvenile to be properly appreciated. It’s balanced, with some highly promising complexity. So it’s safe, but humourless and distant. It doesn’t yet engage me. So. Should I cellar it? Unlikely. Should you? If you have an emotional pull to brash young chardonnays that eventually come good, go for it. 18 NOV 08

Mountadam Vineyards Barossa Chardonnay 2008
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 89 points
Like a neat cheap Chablis, this has no oak, but pleasing feral yeasts and a much wider range of dirts in which to grow, mainly derived from the sandstones and schists which lie beneath the soils, older than god. Chablis grows in Kimmeridgian chalk, which is the same as the Dover cliffs, made from scrillions of almost microscopic oyster shells which were laid there about 140 million years ago. God must have made oysters, but he was only practising then, and made them far too small for humans to eat. He eventually learned to make humans, and then made the oysters a lot bigger, but the rock benath Mountadam is still very, very much older than the Parisienne Basin chalk below Chablis and Dover. The Mountadam beaches were laid down before multi-celled life began. Oh well. This wine goes very well with the larger, modern oyster. It smells a bit like wet flint, and has a pleasing modest creaminess, which will respond perfectly with the sharp brine of your oysters, especially is you enhance them with fresh lemon juice, a teaspoon of Newman's Langhorne Creek horseradish, and a grind of good fresh black pepper, like you can buy in Tony Marino's amazing butchery in the Central Market. If you need an even more intense grrrr, pour some damn near frozen vodka into the oyster, too. Tip the oyster in, praise god, schluck this chardonnay, have a giggle at Chablis, and think about what life was like before multi-cellular life formed. It always makes me thirsty. 10 MAR 09

Bay of Shoals Kangaroo Island Chardonnay 2006
$18; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88++ points
Mmm. Chablis comes to mind. A cheaper model, but with just a little oak. It’s pretty, with insinuations of lychee, custard apple, and dried banana. A scrape of cassia bark betrays the wood: subtle; suitable. It’s a good bouquet. The palate’s not quite so well structured as that aroma suggests, but it’s clean and soft, neat and tidy, and exceptional at this price. 10 OCT 98

Dudley Porky Flat Kangaroo Island Chardonnay 2008
$16; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 87++ points
Calcrete soils, like those of Watervale near Clare, impart neat tidy flavours to this wine. They’re a bit like the flavours which the Kimmeridgian chalks below Chablis impart to the bonnie, racy wines of that very cool joint. So we get a crisp, lemony wine with hints of grass and leaf, and just the right tweak of creamy, vanilla oak. Perfect for scallops in beurre blanc, tommy ruffs – sorry, they’re southern herring now - in Cooper’s Ale batter, or whole garfish, soused in rock salt, dried chilli, tarragon and virgin olive oil, then smoked gently over redgum. 10 OCT 98

Linfield Road Barossa Chardonnay 2003
($12; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 87 points)
After wasting a prayer mat on some $20-$30 French chardonnays from chill Chablis, it was a laugh to open this. It’s not Chablis, and neither is the Barossa, but it’s from the higher, cooler vineyards of Williamstown, made to a price, and it works in a modestly peachy, mercifully unoaked, Chablis sort of way. It even has a cheeky brimstone edge and a dry, chalky finish. It’s cheaper not to over-oak, see? Try Udder Delights chevre on rye, with oil, chilli and pepper. www.linfieldroadwines.com (11.11.06)

Penley Estate Coonawarra Chardonnay 2004
$19; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 87 points
Although David Wynn, who virtually invented modern Coonawarra, decided it was not great chardonnay country and moved on many years ago, there are determined souls who persist, like Kym Tolley, maker of this inexpensive slurper. It’s certainly not Mersault or Chablis, but creamy, slightly peach-syrupy dry wine for those who like a little flesh on their bones. It’s big enough for tender veal; green chook curry should properly set if off.

Hugh Hamilton The Scallywag Unwooded Chardonnay 2006
$17.50; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 86 points
The PR says Hugh was first to make an unoaked Aussie chardonnay. In 1993. Grrrrr. Aptly, Mark Cashmore was into it by ’83; and David Wynn was soon selling his own timber-free modernistic beauties like hot cakes. This wine lacks the forceful density of the nude Possums Blewett Springs $12.95 model pushed here a few weeks back, but it’s a nice blonde sort of a drink for squiddy lunches on the deck with the odd fag. www.hughhamiltonwines.com.au

Two Wheeler Creek Kangaroo Island Chardonnay 2007
$17; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 84++ points
Aha! Here’s more of those dunal vegetative whiffs that dominated the Island’s sauvignons blanc: the verbena, jonquill, onionweed and pigface that I usually associate with higher yielding Mornington Pensinula wines. Oxalis and methoxypyrazine. Lemons. The palate’s the same: grassy, clean and green; too simple. It’s screaming out for some old oak, some lees, some malo, some complexity. But then, like the savvy’s-B, it’ll do good things to a parcel of fish’n’chips. Wrap ’em up in a Philip White column, plenty of salt ... 10 OCT 98

Casa Freschi Altezza Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2007
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 83++ points
Sweet poached peach and sabayon are the main aromas; some flash oak gives a shot of perfectly appropriate nutmeg. It smells like a comely dessert. But the palate’s very thick and intense, while taut and closed. The exhalation is a little hot; the fruit too eager to get out the door and flee. The aftertaste is syrup and alcohol. The acid is not apparent amongst all this organo-nerdy intensity. Then there’s a green petiol-like flavour. This wine doesn’t look like it wants to be drunk. Yet. 23 NOV 08

Yalumba Oxford Landing Chardonnay 2007
$7.95; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 83 points
Yalumba commenced this estate near Waikerie in the ’50s. Like chardonnay, the wine smells like peaches and pears. And it has a husky blonde allure, like a tanned, sandy surfer, well-oiled. Board wax, too. The palate’s viscous and comfy, with quite some complexity and depth, and the finish is fit, crisp and adult. Clever Teresa Heuzenroeder has disguised its lowly origins and drought vintage with wild yeasts, maturation on lees, a touch of malo-lactic fermentation, and an inclusion of the previous vintage’s wine from French hogsheds. Very good wine at a stunning price. White meats on the char. www.oxfordlanding.com (24.1.8)

Two Wheeler Creek Kangaroo Island Chardonnay 2008
$17; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 81++
Wines as fresh and slender and acidulous as this really need some malo, some oak, some work and a lot of time to fill them out a little. Or you end up with drinks like this: more savvy-B than chardonnay, on account of the cool place it’s grown. And viticulture. Like, this would look good in a Champagne blend, but here, like this, it’s, well, savvy-B. Clean fresh Packham pears, gooseberry, rhubarb, oxalis, nettles: more fish’n’chips, please. 10 OCT 98

Deakin Estate Chardonnay 2007
$10; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 80 points
“I like to think that our wines can be used as ‘school night dinner wines’ for those who just want a good wine with dinner on a week night”, says flak Claire Ellen. Great. She coulda come clean and said “working family wine”, but I spose while schoolkids aren’t yet working for your actual filthy lucre, their little pink palates may nevertheless prefer this to alcoholic raspberry. I do. Peachy, chubby, simple, unpretentious, a little ditzy, with nice chips, planks, shavings or whatever oak they use, and nothing insulting, it’s about right for roast chook with homework. www.deakinestate.com.au (17 AUG 8)

Isabel Marlborough NZ Chardonnay 2006
$33; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 81 points
Cream cheese, ricotta, custard apple: there are plenty of the half-turned fatty acids of well-made chardonnay here. The juice of canned pears. The kernels of peach stones. The palate’s pretty and juicy, with all of the above, but it’s a bit short and abrupt, like somebody sawed it off half way down. It’d be good with schnapper poached in seawater and riesling with white onions and fresh fennel feathers, then served dripping in beurre blanc. But. 20 NOV 08

Zilzie Bulloak Carbon Neutral Murray Valley Chardonnay 2008
$10; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 73 points
The aficionado may take great care to appreciate how much effort has gone into making this wine appear to have come from a much more prestigious appellation, with its gentle peach, whiff of a passing oak, and even a neat acrid edge, as if it had some wild yeast, lees contact, and serious terroir. But once tasted, and the oily simplicity of the palate is appraised, even given the slightly acrid, chalky finish, one should be forgiven for suspecting carbon is not the only thing that’s in the neutral category as far as this particular chardonnay goes. JAN 08

Nepenthe Adelaide Hills Unoaked Chardonnay 2007
$19.50; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 70 points
Nepenthe was the registered brand of hospital grade heroin before the USA convinced the rest of the west that hammer was a bad drug. Which most of the doctors of the day insisted it wasn’t. There’s not much nepenthe in this bottle. Johnson’s Baby Powder, banana lollies and peachy soap aromas smooch about the glass; it’s as much a bathroom as a drink. It smells pretty, if not precisely something along the lines of gastrology or hammered. With time, greener petiol-like aromas take over, indicating machine harvesting to me. The palate is light and simple, with weedy finishing acidity. I don’t want to drink it. www.nepenthe.com.au (17 AUG 8)

MacWilliams Hanwood Estate Crisp Chardonnay 2007
$12; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap (imperfect); 60 points
“Australia’s newest white” Mac’s claim; a “new ‘zesty’ style” from the Adelaide Hills and the River, making Hanwood a very big Estate indeed. It smells like the machines picked lots of petiols – vine leaf stalks – with the grapes. It tastes like that, too: bland and cheap, and not my preference, regardless of the dozen bucks and the “top gold” in the Adelaide Wine Show. It has modest texture and weight, and rather tartaric acidity. Mac’s recommend “delicately flavoured meals”. Nope. I’d fry the judges, feed ’em to my dog, and swap the wine for twelve bucks worth of rain.

MERLOT

Cullen Margaret River Mangan 2006
$45; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
Vanya Cullen. What a beauty. Plugging away like some great engine from the age of steam, having taken over from her wondrous mum (Diana, deceased), turning the whole joint bio-D, nose to the winestone. This whack in the head is merlot, petit verdot and malbec, in descending order of volume. I know she regards this a bit like the Cullen Beaujolais, but it’s as tight as a boiler on full speed. It deserves twenty years dungeon. (My plus signs indicate the quality potential with proper cellaring.) You wouldn’t understand my descriptors. www.cullenwines.com.au (2.2.8)

King River Estate King Valley Reserve Merlot 2005
$45; 15% alcohol; Diam cork; 94+++ points
Well-grown, and intelligently made, merlot is much more rounded and accomplished red than neat cabernet sauvignon, even if it lacks some of the confectionery pretties that flash cab boasts. Merlot is more brooding, more thickset, and usually has more decaying moss in its tannins than the simple leafiness usually afforded by the gaunt cabernet. This stunning example has a whole fresh chocolate crême caramel quivering within its encircling earthy greens. It’s elegant, but has great authority and weight; it’s complex, but is already harmonising, if a tad reluctantly. Given a decade of dungeon, it’ll be a truly incredible, opulent, tantalising King among wines. 20 NOV 08

Mt. Bera 4.23 Adelaide Hills Reserve Merlot 2004
($19.50; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94 points)
Since G-Dubya or sumbuddy Stateside decided merlot was mellow - just as Europe’s now Yurp – it’s hardly bin laden with accolades. But this ain’t mellow, this merlot: seductive eau-de-cologne-mint sharply guards beautifully creamy and smooth cassis, Ribena and marshmallow, and then comes a gradual rise of slightly leafy, scrumptiously velvet tannin – an Old Yurpeen mix of opulence and elegance no Bush will ever twig. For $19.50!!! Lot-et-Garonne style veal, au pis.

Mountadam The Red High Eden 2006
$??; 14% alcohol; cork(!); 93+++ points
Made vaguely to the Bordeaux recipe of the 1800s, this is a blend of merlot (55%), cabernet sauvignon (32%), shiraz (10%) and cabernet franc (3%), aged in the best new French barrels. The wine is a triumph. Selected from the very best red parcels of the 40 separate vineyards on this magnificent 1000 ha upland estate, it’s a slender, intense, provocative wickedness. The wood’s still quite obvious, but over the next decade that amazing fruit will crawl all over it, then drown it. By which time it will have completed its preserving, perfuming role. Right now, it’s piquant and acidic, but with incredible silky, sensuous fruit growing over the long athletic bones that stretch all the way from that bouquet to the wine’s firm, tapering finish. It’s a pole vaulter. Give it many years: think St Emilion timeframes. Jeez. JAN 09

Jacques Lurton La Martinette Bordeaux Merlot 2007
$30; 12.5% alcohol; cork; 93++ points
This is not Petrus or Le Pin, but neither does it have quite so many zeroes after the dollar symbol. It's still bright, zappy Bordeaux merlot, swimming with fresh ripe fruits. But merlot has a vegetal soul, and that's here, too: there's a deeper aroma of stewing beets and turnip greens beneath the berries and plums. So it's complex, and not at all mellow. The palate's beautifully silky, with a polished sheen that hangs in until the lovely velvety tannins kick in, leaving the tip of the tongue dry and hungry, with a cloud of lovely fruits hovering in the hallowed halls of one's head. It's really good entertaining wine that'll cellar, but I love it now. Great with a good slow stew, with parsnip and turnip as much as potato; plenty of white pepper. Adelaideans should know it's $26 at The Edinburgh. 08 MAR 09

Jeanneret Clare Valley Hummer Merlot 2005
$40; 14.7% alcohol; glass stopper; 93++ points
Ben Jeanneret just keeps pullin’ em out of his hat! Merlot? In Clare? Riesling’s success in such a freaky, warm, dry place is unlikely enough, but merlot? Impossible. But then Brian Barry did it in the right years at Jud’s Hill. Now Ben’s done it. This wine’s full of suave, creamy fruit. It’s rich, and fleshy. Its mature tannins are just slightly velvety, and while that edge is part briar, part charcoal, it never intrudes, never seems too leafy, which happens easily with cabernet and merlot. It’s so comforting, plush, and sensuous that it accommodated a gentle creamy laksa. www.jeanneretwine.com (19.1.8)

Giant Steps Sexton Vineyard Yarra Valley Merlot 2007
$35; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Cut out a slice of bitumen from the Bvde. St. Germain on a hot day, boil it in a missionary pot full of fresh bull’s blood with dark red roses and licorice root, stir in the contents of the sump of at least one Chamberlain tractor, dress it in a tutu, pour Gerlain’s l’Heure Bleue all over it, buy it a coffee at Deux Magots, light it up a Gauloise and drive past it in a Citroen DS23 and you’ve got this incredible cross-dressing brute of a Turdus merula. Which means blackbird, as the early-ripening merlot is the grape the singing feathered wretches eat first in Bordeaux. Smart. Peking duck. www.giant-steps.com.au

Romney Park Adelaide Hills Merlot 2005
$25; 14.5% alcohol Diam cork; 93++ points
Real merlot’s freaky - it likes to keep its roots wet. So this vineyard’s as happy as a swine in the mire, on the banks of the Onkaparinga at Balhannah. It’s delightful, highly stylish wine, intense but sublimely elegant, with that heady, dark smell of Swamp myrtle, with its waxy leaves. Blackberry vines, too, with ripe fruit. Unless you’re used to Petrus or La Pin, forget everything you’ve heard about merlot: this strapping, highly appetising bargain IS NOT MELLOW. With enough fine tannin to ensure at least a decade’s dungeon, it’s utterly scrumptious now. Juicy cutlets and reduced spinach. Call 0439 398 366

The Wilson Vineyard Clare Valley Merlot 2004
($24.50; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93 points)
Elegant, yet steady and forceful as merlot should be, here’s one from the dry old piedmont soils east of the Clare hills, where the vanished Poles said the Kelly gang hid. Locals refer to Polish River. No river, either. It smells sharp and provocative, with gentle musk, coffee and chocolate, under wild, tight, hedgerow berries and fine oak. It tastes slender and savoury, more balanced leafy salad and virgin oil than fruit salad. Perfect for pink chops, rosemary, and parsnips. www.wilsonvineyard.com.au (28.10.6)

Jardim do Bomfim Adelaide Hills Merlot 2004
$24; 13.8% alcohol; screw cap; 92++ points
Nothing mellow about this rakish dude. The whiff’s all black tea, black cherry, prune, satsuma, dolmades and kalamata, with girlie cosmetic topnotes, but the macho merlot blackness below ensures nobody gives it a whistle. Its palate is saucy, dessert-like, and felicitous at first, yet it’s fearlessly staunch and bone dry at its base, with steely acidity and grainy tannins like Cherry Heering, lite. Grown on the Lloyd brothers’ sandy loam at Oakbank, and made by the inexplicable John Gilbert, it will age and bloom beautifully in the right dungeon. Juicy roast lamb with caramelised parsnips. www.jardindobomfim.com.au

Domain Day Mt. Crawford One Serious Merlot 2005
$??; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 91++ points
This wine smells like a plate of hot bitumen with a great dollop of whipped cream on top. It’s dead serious king hell merlot. Nothing mellow about it. Keep the nose going, and you’ll get fruits: blackberry, mulberry, and prune, and baby beetroot. Turnip greens. Spinach. Irish moss – the seaweed; not the lolly, although either will do. Damp forest earth. Mushroom. Deadly nightshade. The flavours are pretty much along the same line. Surprisingly elegant, with an illusion of sweetness, but it’s not mellow. It’s terrific. Ten years in the cellar. Or baby goat cutlets. www.domainday.com.au

Sevenhill Inigo Clare Valley Merlot 2006
$19; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 90+++ points
Merlot is one of the few wine grape varieties that like to have damp roots, so Clare seems hardly the place for it. Although, of course, Brian Barry's Jud's Hill vineyard occasionally produces fine merlot in the patch at its very bottom, which is damper and muddier than the rest of that sweeping valley. Some kilometres further south, however, there's not much damp ground at all, and that's where the Sevenhill vineyards lie in the schist, sandstone and quartzy podsols which produce that grand brand's lovely rieslings and wonders like this wine's exemplary cabernet brother, which you can read about in the cabernet section. This is good red wine, however. It's full of blackberry and olivine juices, and leafy tannins that remind me somehow of fresh basil. It's certainly not mellow, but it's velvety and smooth and quite satisfying, comforting drinking. The finish is racy and lithe, and makes the tongue whip around the mouth, savouring. It'd be scrorgeous with juicy pink rack of lamb, baked parsnips, and a mash of carrot, sweet potato and desiree potato, with fresh diced Spanish onion stirred in at the last minute, for some al dente crunch. As I totally misunderstood the cabernet when first released - it took four months to awake from its bottling shock - I acknowledge that this wine might well shock me into shaking out a few more points in another year. At this price, you can afford to stack a case away and wait to prove me right or wrong. I suspect I may have been really mean to it, but, you know, it's 45 degrees Centigrade outside, and there's a beautiful vineyard there about to spontaeneously combust. JAN 09

NEW!
Chateau Tour de Mirambeau Rouge 2007
$20; 13.04% alcohol; screw cap; tasted 14-15 OCT 09; 88+++ points
Thibault d'Espagne made this crazily cheap delight using green farming, modern winemaking, a great deal of gastronomic nous, and a hearty disrespect for the stodgy thinking of the rest of Bordeaux. It's merlot (80%), with ten per cent each of cabernet sauvignon and my favourite scented darling, cabernet franc. The merlot supplies its earthy, moss and mushroom comfort; the cabernet gives the tannic spine, and the franc adds its pretty decorative perfume. The wine is sinuous yet plush, in a delicate yet determined manner, with the sort of compaction that deserves some breathing - the wine is much better on its second day with the cap off, so a decent glugging into a decanter will add a point or two to the score and the feeling that the wine should be twice this price. It'll be a true dusie with five years in the dungeon. Exclusive to Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice in Australia.

NEW!
Tandem Ars In Vitro Navarra Merlot Tempranillo 2006
$15; 14% alcohol; cork; tasted 14 OCT 09; 87 points
Savoury, in the sense of chicory, rocket and peppery watercress, this little Spaniard is acrid, lithe, dense and black. It has the acetone reek of bootpolish from the tempranillo, and only a hint of the mossy soulful richness I expect of merlot. It's a racy, firm drink that needs grilled chilli sausage and little black olives. Exclusive to Vintage Cellars in Australia.

King River Estate King Valley Merlot 2006
$??; 14.2%; screw cap; tasted 23-24 Jun 09; 86 points
My dear old friend McScruples, back in the dim, grainy days when he actually admitted to having been married, would sometimes confess that he heard the wedding dress bursting at the seams as he walked down the aisle with his new wife. He reckoned she put on four stone between the altar and the door. Why do all these smart Australian premium winemakers think merlot should be picked at anything above 13 degrees Beaumé? This wine has more cellulite than Elvis.

Dominique Portet Yarra Valley Merlot 2005
$??; 14.5%; screw cap; 78 points
This is a touch coarser and more overweight than what I have come to expect of yon Portet – too many drought vintages in a row? The New Heat? Very ripe squishy botrytis-affected prunes, really. None of the lovely tight lignins I expect of fair dink merlot. Rich, stewed, sorta mellow, like half the USA imagines merlot to be. Not my scene. JAN 09

Smith & Hooper Wrattonbully Merlot 2006
$17.95; 13.5% alcohol; ork(!); 78 points
The modern Wrattonbully grapeyards grew up around the original bush vines of the terra-rossa-and-limestone of the old Koppamurra Vineyard, north east of Coonawarra on the Victoria border. There ensued a battle royal when the newcomers wanted to be known as Koppamurra, too. At least the name they had to eventually accept had BULLY in it. And WRAT, come to mention it, which must be German for something. The TON in the middle is obviously a reference to the importance of hearty yields in such far-flung corners of the empire. Brian Croser calls his bit Tapanappa Whalebone Vineyard, whalebone referring to the bone that lies in the marine sediments below; Tapanappa being a precise group of glittering micaceous schisty rocks hundreds of kilometres away in the Mount Lofty Ranges, which, just personally, I reckon’s a fairly broad-minded notion, like if you were talking geologically. (That’s got LOGIC in the middle.) This Smith & Hooper bit of the battlefield belongs to S. Smith & Son, known colloquially as Hill Smith, Rob, or Yalumba. It’s slender, leafy wine, smelling a bit like cold black tea or the chicory essence they used to make coffee go further after the Second World War. But there are blackcurrant fruit gums, too, and some chocolate topping syrup. The palate’s fairly thin and sinuous; the finish ferny and blithe. It tastes sorta Italian. It’s wine obviously grown and made to a price. Cleverly. 20 NOV 08

Deakin Estate Merlot 2006
$10; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 76 points
“Merlot is renowned for its voluptuous flavours and soft, supple textures…this wine has them in abundance”, says the back. Crap. Merlot smells like tar. Which is made from leaves. Top merlot smells like really expensive tar. This one’s like tar that somebody’s tried to dissolve in water, which is stupid. It’s neither soft nor supple, but it’s green and leafy, in a stewed leafy sort of way, with a layer of summit like glycerol to soften the natural methoxypyrazines. Merlot has them. But it’s never, ever naturally mellow. Some American air hostess invented that. She couldn’t pronounce merlot. Too bad.

Oxford Landing South Australia Merlot 2007
$9; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 67.2 points
This smells better than many commercial/industrial reds that cost more than twice this price. Yet it’s from the poor old Mallee sands. Jeez. But. “Vegetarian & vegan friendly” says the neck tag. Jeez. Me eat buffalo. “Well-drained sites” says the neck tag. Jeez. Merlot’s the only red I know that likes wet feet. It smells pretty good. Neither jammy nor leafy. But the palate? A bit dim. And short. And leafy. Which is about all you could expect from a $9 bottle. Two glasses of vodka neat, bring your own blackcurrant, add a dash of water if you must, and you’re up to $11.00. So do I have this instead? No.