One of the most exciting and challenging aspects of making wine from a single vineyard is vintage variation. Most winemakers worth their salt will decide not to make a single vineyard wine if the vintage is deemed not to be superb.
The widely acclaimed Bannockburn Serré Pinot Noir is an excellent example of a top notch winemaker’s respect for the integrity of this approach. As winemaker Michael Glover explained to the Wine Advocate’s Lisa Perrotti-Brown, “Our winemaking is reactive. You’re constantly reacting to what the season is.” (2008 Bannockburn Serré Pinot Noir by Lisa Perrotti-Brown, eRobertParker.com #195 June 2011)
The Bannockburn Serré Pinot Noir is made from a dry-grown, organically cultivated 1.2 hectare vineyard planted at Bannockburn in 1986. The vineyard was deliberately designed to match the tough conditions of the great grand crus vineyards of Burgundy. Closely planted vines (9,000-10,000 per hectare), narrow rows and low trellising force the roots to dig deep for moisture and nutrients, and limit crop yields. Apparently, in 2006 yields were so low that fruit from four vines were required to make just one bottle of wine!
Garry Farr of By Farr established Bannockburn’s reputation as one of the finest makers of pinot noir in Australia. But Glover, who took over in 2005, is taking the Serré to even greater heights. The Wine Front’s Campbell Mattinson describes Glover as “an idealist, a passionate man who’s done his time and made his mistakes and learnt the ropes – and has now been handed the keys to a set of Ferrarri-like vineyards, open licence to drive them really fast, and really well.” (From Evan to Earth, From Hands to Glover: Bannockburn by Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front 13 November 2006)
For Glover great wine is definitely made in the vineyard, and one of the first decisions he made upon joining Bannockburn was to turn off the irrigation. Glover’s reasoning was that a dry-farm approach would not only halve the vineyard’s tonnage (putting it more in line with typical yields for grand crus Burgundy), but it would force the vines to discover and express their own personality. As he told Mattinson, “To ask this vineyard to go without water is asking a lot of it. It is tough out here. It’s dry, it’s windy, it’s hot, it’s hard. …This vineyard is itself. It’s got its own personality – no other bastard has got this particular patch of dirt, and it’s our job to make sure that the wine are allowed to express that.”
Complex, highly perfumed, finely textured, pure flavours and terrific length are the typical hallmarks of the best vintages of one of Australia’s finest expressions of pinot noir.
Merrill Witt, Editor
The reasons for America’s fading love affair with Australian wines in recent years have been much discussed. At the bottom end, the predominance of the so-called ‘critter’ brands unfairly created an image of Australian wine as cheap and cheerful. And at the high end, influential wine critic’s Robert Parker’s trumpeting of a big, rich, full bodied style of South Australian shiraz possibly inflated expectations to a point that it was hard for the wines to live up the glowing praise. As American wine critic and blogger Alder Yarrow observed, “after several years of hype over huge, extracted, high-alcohol wines from the Barossa (Mollydooker was named as a poster child for this excess), collectors were tasting these wines with five or eight years on them and realising that they were falling apart.” (Some Thoughts on Australian Wine by Alder Yarrow, Vinography, 21 May 2010)
I remembered Yarrow’s comments when I was at a dinner party on Saturday night and our friend opened a bottle of Mollydooker Carnival of Love Shiraz 2005. I should note that our friend is a very astute collector with catholic tastes, so we worked our way through a bottle of Herzog Marlborough Pinot Gris 2006, an Au Bon Climat Pinot Noir 2005 from the Santa Maria Valley in California and a Pintia Tinto de Toro (Tempranillo) 2005, before we approached the 2005 Mollyooker Carnival of Love Shiraz. I guess you could say my palate was warmed up, but as the designated driver, I was very careful to have no more than a couple of mouthfuls of any of the wines. So for the record, no, I wasn’t drunk when we eventually imbibed the Mollydooker!
And the Carnival of Love wasn’t just good, it was great! More than a worthy competitor in a very strong field of superb wines. Opulent in flavours and silky smooth in texture, but not cloying or syrupy like I sort of expected. It was superbly balanced with an incredibly long length. Yes, in the context of Yarrow’s observations, you could say that it’s holding up ‘remarkably’ well for its age.
Sarah and Sparky Marquis launched Mollydooker in 2005, and in lightening speed achieved phenomenal success with the brand, especially in the US. Robert Parker scored the 2005 Carnival of Love, the debut vintage, an astonishing 99 points. Harvey Steiman of the Wine Spectator gave the same wine 94 points, and both the 2007 and 2008 vintages made Wine Spectator’s Top Ten Best Wines of the Year List, coming in #8 and #9 respectively.
But it is a definitely a style of shiraz that can polarise opinion. Of the 2005 Carnival of Love, James Halliday, wrote: “Absurd alcohol completely dominates the flavour and texture of the wine rather like an Amarone gone off the rails; in the midst of all of this, a curious touch of bitterness on the finish. 87 points.” (James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion, 7 March 2007)
I did a scan of recent reviews on CellarTracker and drinkers’ opinions of the 2005 were equally as diverse, ranging from “Excellent wine. The nose was a little subdued. However the taste was extremely smooth. Vanilla, and fruit. Finish was long and smooth” to “Beautiful wine, but way over the top for my taste. Syrup-like consistency. Drank at a holiday tasting for about 30 people. A tough environment for such an intense wine.”
For the record, the Carnival of Love is made from McLaren Vale fruit. The 2005 vintage was made from contract fruit, but in 2007 the Classic McLaren winery and vineyard became Mollydooker’s new home.
Don’t be fooled by Sarah and Sparky Marquis’ wry sense of humour when it comes to promoting their brand. Before lauching Mollydooker in 2005, the pair had some serious runs on the board. As Campbell Mattinson of the Wine Front notes, “They teamed up at Sarah’s parents’ winery – Fox Creek in McLaren Vale, run by Jim Watt – in the mid-1990s and turned its on its head, winning awards and setting the newfound brand alight.” (The Whacky World of Sarah and Sparky: the Mollydooker Duo, The Wine Front, 20 December 2006)
Merrill Witt, Editor
When a fine winemaker decides to designate a wine as ‘single vineyard,’ the vineyard typically has at least one attribute that makes it truly exceptional. For Elderton Winery in the Barossa Valley, an eight acre parcel of shiraz, planted in 1894 by Samuel Elderton Tolley, is their jewel in the crown. Since 1984 fruit from this low yielding block has been used to make the highly acclaimed Elderton Command Shiraz.
To have such a large tract of 100+ year old wines on one estate is quite remarkable, as very old vines are, in fact, quite a rare commodity. South Australia was one of the few areas in the world to be spared the full force of the Pylloxera louse, which wiped out a significant portion of the world’s grapes at the turn of the last century. But while South Australia’s old vines were spared the Phylloxera wrath, most unfortunately didn’t survive the onslaught of bulldozers in the 1960s and 1970s, which ripped up most of these undervalued crops.
The Ashmead Family acquired the 72 acre Elderton estate in the late 1970s, and set about bringing the old vines back to health. They joined pioneers like Robert O’Callaghan at Rockford and Dave Powell at Torbreck, who recognised that old vines have the potential to make rich, complex wines of exceptional quality. (See Australia’s Old Vine Wines by Merrill Witt, Cellarit Wine Blog 29 December 2010)
Fruit on old vines tend to ripen more consistently than their younger counterparts and also fare better when dry-farmed. Their mature roots have learned how to dig deep for the necessary moisture and nutrients, a characteristic that also helps to imbue a sense of place or what the French call ‘terroir” in the wine.
“Tremendously aromatic”, “expressive with uncommon depth”, and “seductively rich in texture” are just a few of the descriptors critics have assigned to the Elderton Command Shiraz. Both the 1992 and 2000 vintage were included in the Wine Spectator’s prestigious Top 100 list, and the wine consistently scores 95 points or more in Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate.
Aged for 34 months in new American and French oak, The Wine Spectator’s Harvey Steiman described the 2005 vintage as the best Command yet:
It has sensational depth, warmth and spice over layers of ripe plum fruit, great breadth without weight, and tremendous freshness and purity of fruit. I can’t wait to see what this one becomes in the bottle. I consider it a potential classic. (Command Performance at Elderton by Harvey Steiman, Wine Spectator 14 May 2007)
Merrill Witt, Editor
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