NEW!
Beach Road Langhorne Creek Greco 2011
($25; 13% alcohol; screw cap; tasted September and December 2011; 93+ points)
Jeez it’s good. Imagine a big ripe year Chablis
with all that wet chalk in the part of its bouquet where lesser
gourmands would impose spicy timber. Add the smell of honeydew melon,
and watermelon, but with that edgy, hessiany smell of cantaloupe peel
wrapping their soppy cool flesh. Then the even more prickly green smell
of broad bean shells. I think this adds up to the presence of
methoxypyrazine, which gives the Sauvignons red and white their leafy
bits. Slurp. It’s really steely, with swarfy natural acidity (9 g/l!),
and then lemon and water and I know I’ll get killed for this but in the
guzzler that chalky character seems more like wet cement, like
exceptionally good tequila, which mixed with that austere lemon reminded
me of a friggin margarita! But it’s only 13% alcohol, so go figure.
Then the afterbreath came out, and that was all the above, but decked
with confectioner’s sugar, musk sticks, and those freaky estery banana
lollies. Few
wines are so entertaining as they refresh. It’s acid’s big enough to
demand the greasier weed-munching bottom-feeders of the wet world:
redfin, carp and scallops with beurre blanc. Brrrr. 2011
was blue murder at Larncrk – hardly anybody picked anything, and most
of what they did was puce with various moulds and rots. Somehow this
lot saved half the Greco di Tufo from the plagues, in spite of its thin
skins and hyper-tight bunches – a terrible combo when the moulds are on
the march. No sign of any of that in here. Briony gave it the ancient
treatments: basket press, wild yeast, plenty of lees. Nuts at $25!
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