Brokenwood Semillon on View from the Bay

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SCHAEFER ON WINE The Stump Jump: Quality at affordable prices

by Dennis Schaefer

August 27, 2009 7:31 AM

The d'Arenberg Winery in Australia has long had a reputation for making high-quality wines with a focus on Rhone varietals. Established in 1912 by the Osborn family, d'Arenberg is one of the oldest continuously family-owned wineries in Australia. Since they didn't just plant their vineyards and build their winery yesterday, they don't need to charge prices like the latest Johnny-come-cabernet producer in Napa Valley. The winery has consistently received accolades for wines like The Dead Arm shi raz and The Coppermine Road cabernet, with prices ranging from $16 to $65. Most wine critics agree that, given the quality of those wines, d'Arenberg offers good value for the money.

That's the good news. Now here's the even better news: d'Arenberg recently introduced an entire line of value-priced wines that retail for $11. With these wines, bottled under The Stump Jump label, you get the same pedigree and winemaking talent as their d'Arenberg bottlings. Two blended wines, The Stump Jump white and The Stump Jump red, were introduced a couple years ago and were well received. This summer, the winery has expanded The Stump Jump range to focus on premium single varietals that are hand-crafted from estate-grown fruit and made to the same exacting standards that d'Arenberg is known for.

D'Arenberg fourth-generation winemaker Chester Osborn is no stranger to the Central Coast either. He conducted an Australian winemaking tutorial and tasting seminar in the very early days of Paso Robles' Hospice du Rhone event and returned for several years thereafter. With his boisterous personality and long, curly, blond locks, he seems like the Aussie version of our own Jim Clendenen at Au Bon Climat Winery in Santa Maria.



Tasting through The Stump Jump wines, I was impressed by their clean, fresh and bright flavors, their food friendliness, and their amazing value. In my book, every wine is a best buy.

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• The Stump Jump White 2006: While I call this their "white" blend, it's actually labeled with the grapes in the blend: riesling, sauvignon blanc, rousanne and marsanne. For a 3-year-old wine, it still has plenty of pretty florals, new mown grass and lime on the nose. On the palate, riesling contributes key lime chiffon pie while rousanne and marsanne add texture as well as stone fruit and minerality. Nice balance and length with pleasing acidity on the finish.



• The Stump Jump Red 2007: Again, I call it "red" while the label simply says "grenache, shiraz and mourvedre." Aromatics of cranberry, cherry, strawberry and rhubarb offer plenty to muse over. The same red fruit flavors also come through, with a modicum of licorice and eucalyptus plus a certain meaty savoriness. It really invites food to the equation and is a great quaffer for almost anything coming off the grill.



• The Stump Jump Riesling 2008: A very fresh nose of lime, passion fruit and guava jumps out of the glass. It's clean and crisp in the mouth, but also soft and not at all gnarly like many of its German counterparts. Key lime pie, creamy lemon and tropical fruit round out the flavor focus. Brisk, refreshing and tangy on mid palate, it has a scintillating and upbeat citrusy finish.



• The Stump Jump Verdelho 2008: OK, don't tune out if you've never heard of the verdelho grape. It's a Portuguese varietal most closely associated with Madeira but makes a vibrant white wine in Australia. Quite an aromatic grape, it shows fig, white gardenia, quince, apricot and mineral notes. Flavors of green apple and green pear dominate with fig and dried apricot tagging along and then it finishes with bright lemony acidity. It's similar to sauvignon blanc but has a leaner flavor profile and a tangy finish reminiscent of a good albarino or torrontes.



• The Stump Jump Lightly Wooded Chardonnay 2008: A current wine trend is to minimize barrel fermentation and oak aging with chardonnay. Only a quarter of this wine ever sees the inside of a barrel; all the rest is done in stainless steel tanks. The result is a refreshing flavor combo of pineapple, mango, peach and pear, all at good levels of intensity. It's almost like a good fruit cocktail syrup, where all the fruits come together and play nice with each other. However, it picks up weight, substance and a certain creaminess on mid palate, so it's not just another pretty-face chardonnay.



• The Stump Jump Shiraz 2008: Shiraz is the Aussie term for syrah and this version has plenty of aromatics including cherry Kool-Aid and red raspberry, along with black plum and dry, aged beef. In the mouth, it's juicy, spicy and fruit-forward, showing primarily red raspberry but strawberry sneaks in, too, as well as rose petal and red licorice Twizzlers. While it's great to q uaff, it's not as simple as it seems; an underlying earthiness and freshly turned soil make for

some further flavor oomph on mid palate. A delicious red wine.



• The Stump Jump Sticky Chardonnay 2008 (half bottle): Aussies call their dessert wines "stickies" because of their thick viscosity and, well, their stickiness to the touch. Orange marmalade, peach and kumquat are the fascinating aromatics. The flavors parade by on the palate: kumquat, orange, tangerine, peach and butterscotch. Certainly sweet with balanced flavors, it finishes with orange peel and bright acidity. A veritable liquid dessert.



Wine expert Dennis Schaefer's column appears every other week in the Food section. E-mail him at life@newspress.com.

Oz Semillon

By Gerald D. Boyd
Aug 11, 2009

Semillon is a puzzling and mysterious wine; a chameleon that takes on different aromas and flavors depending on where the grape is grown, how the wine is made and what grapes are chosen as blending partners. And then there’s the confusion centered round the pronunciation (“Sem-e-yon” or “Sem-a-lon”) of the grape and wine.

The same claim can be made about many other white wines (Chardonnay is one prime example that comes to mind), but Chardonnay without a measure of oak is often bland and simply fruity. Some white wines, like Albariño, don’t need oak and, in fact, would be a different animal coupled with a little oak. In Australia, Semillon continues to hang on, especially in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, though it’s a difficult sale there as it is elsewhere in the world, even in spots where the native French grape is still grown like California’s South Central Coast, South Africa, or the South of France. Australia’s attempt to use up hard-to-sell Semillon took a wrong turn when the Aussies tried to market popular Chardonnay blended with Semillon as the forgettable mongrel called “SemChard.”

The Semillon grape is best known as one of three used to make the sweet and dry white wines of Sauternes and Bordeaux Blanc, but outside these noteworthy French regions, Australia is the best known wine region where Semillon excels. Among the prime spots for Australian Semillon are South Australia’s Barossa Valley and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, where the unoaked style is favored. The intriguing thing about mature Hunter Semillon is that it smells and tastes like it had been aged in oak, though the wine never touched wood. A similar depth and structure are obtained in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia and Western Australia’s Margaret River by blending Semillon with a little Sauvignon Blanc.

Iain Riggs, winemaker for Brokenwood, one of the top Semillon producers in the Hunter Valley had this to say about the mysterious Semillon at a recent Landmark Australia Tutorial in the Barossa Valley: “We still don’t know the secret of great Semillon. But put it this way: The soils in the Lovedale Vineyard are so poor that the rabbits carry lunch boxes.” Sounds like Semillon, at least in the Hunter Valley, proves the old saw that great wine comes from poor soils. Yet soils in the Hunter Valley vary from alluvial to sandy to dark loamy, or a combination of all three like that found in Tyrrell’s Short Flat Vineyard, source of Tyrrell’s Vat 1, one of the Hunter’s legendary Semillons.

With young Semillon you often get crossed signals that can put off the consumer. Aromatics are scant and the wine tends toward fatness, or a ripe oily texture. But with bottle age, Semillon morphs into a complex wine with ample, though not over-ripe fruit and an intriguing combination of roasted nuts and ripe figs. Adding oak presents another layer and is especially popular among those who love their white wines with wood.

With bottle age, Australian Semillon becomes a different animal, often described as “honey and toast.” Mature Semillon’s fruit profile is riper, more mature, leaning away from green apple and more toward figs, bread dough, straw and a toasted component that can easily be confused with the scent of toasted oak barrels. On my first trip to Australia in 1985, I was lucky to sit with Len Evans at Rothbury in the Hunter Valley for a vertical tasting of mature Hunter Semillons. Evans delighted in springing the tasting on unknowing writers and roared when I described the wines as having nicely integrated oak notes. “Not one of these bloody wines ever came close to an oak barrel,” he guffawed.

Still, most consumers opt for young white wines, rather than ones that have developed bottle maturity. Youthful Semillon appeals with hints--though sometimes muted ones--of lemon grass and lemon peel, crisp green apples, lime juice, freshly mown grass, vanilla, and refreshing vibrant acidity. These are just the kind of aromas and flavors that meld nicely with shellfish, grilled fish and other summer dishes with subtle flavors that could be overwhelmed by stronger whites like oaked Chardonnay, aggressive Sauvignon Blanc, or overtly fruity Viognier and Albarino.

Another style that gets some play, especially in California, is blending a small amount of Semillon with Sauvignon Blanc to mute the aggressiveness of Sauvignon Blanc. The complaint is that Sauvignon Blanc is too forceful and in-your-face, so the less aggressive Semillon adds a softer dimension while not cancelling out the character of Sauvignon Blanc. Sauvignon Blanc fans scoff at this cheeky idea, protesting any adulteration of their favorite wine.

Prior to the 1960s, Hunter Semillon was fermented in open-top tanks without the benefit of modern temperature-controlled closed stainless steel tanks. During that period the style of Semillon we enjoy today was created. Pioneers of this fruit-forward unoaked style of Australian Semillon include, but are not limited to, Tyrrells, McWilliams, Rothbury and Brokenwood in the Hunter Valley, as well as Peter Lehmann in South Australia’s Barossa Valley.

In a Chardonnay-centric wine world, it is unfortunate that there is not more room for satisfying white wines like Australian Semillon, especially those from the Hunter Valley. At the recent Landmark Australia Tutorial, veteran Australian wine scribe James Halliday best summed it up for all of us who love Semillon: “If ever we are going to convert our affection for this variety into a successful franchise, now is our chance.”

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