The Future Makers by Max Allen

Author:Max Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CKB088000
ISBN: 9781742735436
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2010-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Valhalla Wines

You don’t come across too many true outsiders in the Rutherglen wine community. Most of the winemakers and vineyard owners here are locals, born and bred: third-, fourth-, fifth-generation descendents from the English and Scottish settlers that flocked here after the gold rush in the mid-19th century. That’s why names like Campbell, Morris, Chambers and Buller pepper the region. And that’s how you can be fairly sure, without even asking, that Anton Therkildsen and Antoinette Del Popolo aren’t, as they say, from ’round these parts.

Anton came to Rutherglen in 1997 to work in the winery at Campbells. He met (and married) Antoinette, a Sydney-born local doctor, and they decided to settle in the region. They found a good 25-hectare block next door to All Saints and decided to plant a vineyard. It was when Anton had to clamber into a full body suit before spraying his first block of vines in 2003 – on the advice of the chemical company who’d sold him the spray – that the couple decided there had to be a better way.

Just a few years and less than a handful of vintages later, Valhalla has become a model of eco-conscious sustainable winegrowing in Rutherglen. The vineyard is managed with a minimum of soft chemicals – mainly one or two herbicide sprays a year; the winery was constructed out of rendered straw bales; wine boxes, bags, labels and stationery are all produced from recycled materials; the cellar door and toilet wastewater goes through a worm farm before being used to irrigate a copse of trees nearby; and the winery wastewater is used to irrigate a larger patch of native trees.

The wines are good, too. Anton’s marsanne is a particulary lovely, spicy, creamy expression of the grape, showing leesy complexity and great richness; and the grenache shiraz mourvedre blend captures the spirit of place beautifully in its red soil–dusted bramble fruit aromas and powdery tannic finish.

Warrabilla

One of the recurring themes of this book is the move away from late-picked, massively alcoholic, blockbuster reds to wines with more restraint, poise and refreshment. An increasing number of Australian winemakers are trying very hard to tone down the head-banging brute force and turn up the elegance. And overall I think this is a fantastic development: on the whole, finer, more restrained, moderately alcoholic reds are better with food. But sometimes, when I’m sitting down to a midwinter plate of slow-cooked lamb shanks, say, braised for hours in red wine with bay, juniper and pepper, I lust after the biggest shiraz or durif I can get my hands on. Something that sucks light into its black-purple heart, that floods the mouth with flavour, that grips the back of the tongue and refuses to let go until it has another bite of sweet meat to wrestle with. It’s at moments like these that I reach for a bottle of Warrabilla; because Warrabilla wines are big – very big (16, even 17 per cent alcohol is not uncommon) – but they’re usually also balanced.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.