Wine Spectator Wine of the Day

Sep. 22, 2009: KILIKANOON Shiraz Clare Valley Covenant 2006 (92 points, $40)

This firm red shows fascinating cola and coffee overtones to its cherry and raspberry flavors, picking up a mineral note as the finish rolls on and on. Offers depth and transparency. Best from 2012 through 2020. 1,500 cases imported. —Harvey Steiman

Shoofly joins Movember!

Shoofly is proud to be a sponsor of this years Movember campaign to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer.

For more information please check out:

Harvey Steiman at large: All Aussie Chardonnays Are Not Alike

Contrast between Devil's Lair and Giant Steps couldn't be more obvious
Posted: Sep 3, 2009 7:17am ET

Phil Sexton, one of Australia's Chardonnay pioneers, stopped by to show me a vertical tasting of two wines from vineyards that he planted. The wines could not be more different, and that was the point.

“I am taking these wines to London. The trade and press there have been bashing Australian Chardonnay, saying that they all taste the same,” he said. “I want to show them a couple of single vineyard wines that prove otherwise.”

“So ... I’m the guinea pig?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he laughed.

Sexton planted the Devil’s Lair vineyard in Margaret River, in Western Australia, in the 1980s. Devil’s Lair consistently rates among the best Chardonnays in Margaret River, which makes it one of the best in Australia. In 1996 he sold it to Southcorp (which became Foster’s) and moved to Yarra Valley, near Melbourne. He started a winery, Giant Steps, and planted a vineyard, called Sexton.

“The only thing these vineyards have in common is that I planted them,” he noted, “and most of the clonal material is the same. It’s what we call the Jin-Jin clone, which some people know as Mendoza.”

Jin-Jin is well known in Australia. It is one of the key elements in several of the top Chardonnays, including the renowned Leeuwin Estate Art Series, made in a vineyard about a mile from Devil’s Lair. In Margaret River, it makes a wine of full tropical fruit and supple texture. It gets its natural acidity from the green grapes that always remain in Jin-Jin bunches, which is affected by a phenomenon called “hen and chicken” (large ripe grapes and tiny pea-sized unripe ones mixed with lots of perfect, golden berries).

In Yarra, which is cooler, the chickens outnumber the hens, and the little green grapes contribute a big zing of acidity. In tasting through the Giant Steps wines, the electricity of acidity that runs through is the most distinguishing feature. It takes several years for the wines to develop some flesh and start showing the depth of flavor they really possess.

That was the first thing that jumped out at me as we tasted the wines. We started with the youngest vintage, 2008, and worked back to 2002. The Giant Steps wines came off as tart and crisp, with flavors of green apple, citrus and mineral. The 2005 started to show some lanolin, and by 2002 the complexity and flavor lurking under the racy surface was coming through.

The Devil’s Lairs were all creamy, spicy and giving from the get-go. They showed supple textures and pretty nectarine and peach and tropical fruit character. The older wines maintained their freshness (except for one 2003 that was oxidized by the cork), harmony and the depth they gained with age.

I told Sexton the wines should underline a message that says Australia has different terroirs that produce highly distinct and excellent wines. You would have to be deaf to their obviously different songs to miss it.

Innocent Bystander: Pinot Noir by Yarra Valley

September 2nd, 2009 | Laura Leigh Semon

These days, beer knowledge is also common knowledge; “good” beer and just “plain” beer are fairly easy to differentiate. Good beer is more expensive and the cheap canned stuff will do when we need a lot of booze and have little money. The same does not go for wine, however. Some pretty incredible wines are actually being overlooked because of their affordable prices. Finally some winemakers are noticing that there is a younger group of wine drinkers out here; a group with the same degree of taste, slightly less knowledge, and far less money than the wine aficionados’ of yesteryear. Just because I cannot elaborate on the tannins, pinpoint the exact acidity or tell you just how “oaky” your selection is does not mean I cannot tell a delicious glass of wine from a jug of Carlo Rossi. I know, we’ve all had the jugs, stayed fully stocked in college, but now I want something I can really enjoy, not just chug, or use for endless pitchers of Sangria. While I don’t need fifteen servings for ten dollars these days, I still can’t shell out $50 a bottle all the time.

I come from a long line of wine drinkers. My parents have three children, and following each of our births my father researched which grape that year had produced a wine worth aging. He saved each of these bottles for the next twenty-one years, and once we each came of legal drinking age, after the kegs were empty and the hangovers had passed, it was time to drink our wine with mom and dad. I heard my brother’s was pretty good. My sister, hers was corked. Mine was magnificent. I didn’t need to know much about wine to know that my bottle had aged with perfect grace. It was the first time I had ever sipped wine that truly danced on my tongue. The problem is I simply cannot wait another twenty-one years to experience that again.

Enter Yarra Valley, a region of Australia growing in popularity for producing some stellar wines, most notably Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. My favorite? My absolute, top of the list, number one choice is Innocent Bystander Pinot Noir. The wine experts will tell you that this wine is well balanced, goes great with food, and has strong hints of dark chocolate and ripe berries. All of this is true. It’s one of those wines that you want to let linger in your mouth a few moments before you swallow and let it really caress your tongue.

I first tried Innocent Bystander Pinot Noir at Boa steak house in LA, paired of course with steak. I’d been perusing the menu for an affordable pinot noir and took a stab. To my surprise the bottle had no cork, but a screw cap instead. Once reserved for low-end wine, the screw cap is making a comeback, and rightfully so. That corked bottle my sister drank on her twenty-first birthday could soon be a thing of the past. Technology now allows wine makers to preserve their wine more efficiently, not to mention the bottle fits in more refrigerator doors! I don’t know how many times I’ve tried cutting through a cork so I could stand a bottle up in the fridge. You can’t ever beat convenience.

So Innocent Bystander is not only delicious with meat, but I have paired it with just about everything. Dinner, dessert, nothing at all, Innocent Bystander Pinot Noir is the perfect companion. I know this because I buy it by the case. It makes the perfect gift, although I am always reluctant to give it away, and it’s worth having six bottles on-hand at all times. Have I mentioned that it retails for under $20.00 a bottle? Innocent Bystander will ship directly from the winery. I haven’t found it at a wine retailer in NYC, but have been able to order it from winecheateau.com. The 2006 is, I think, their best Pinot, but my last few searches have led me only to the 2007s, which are still delicious, but if you can find that 2006 then grab it!

If Innocent Bystander ever stops producing this perfect pinot noir, I may give up wine forever, until then, this remains stalwart and steadfast at the top of my list.

Three Takes on One Shiraz

How tastes are seldom unanimous
Harvey Steiman
Wine Spectator Online, August 28, 2009

When we taste wine, our perceptions are likely be different from those of our friends, even those we usually agree with. Opening a few vintages of a favorite Shiraz for a recent dinner party drove home that message for me.

My friend Mark grilled some skirt steaks and I provided several vintages of Kilikanoon’s oustanding Oracle Shiraz. Made from the estate’s best Clare Valley grapes, the Aussie red had consistently done well in my reviews. This was a chance to open a few older bottles to see how they were developing. For our table of nine, I lined up 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2005.

Before the guests arrived, Mark opened the ’01 and ’02. I was busy toasting slices of bread on the grill for bruschetta when I heard his voice. “The ’01 is fabulous, but the curse strikes again,” he called. “The ’02 is corked.”Damn,” I responded. “I really wanted to try that one. Open the ’04 next.”
A pause. “It’s pretty good, but not nearly as good as the ’01.” I finished scorching the bread and came in to try them myself. I poured a slurp of the ’04. I liked it.

Clean and focused, with an understated pulse of blueberry and plum fruit, held firm with finegrained tannins. Then I tried the ’01. Generous, round, plush in texture, it also had a strong gamy character. Brettanomyces, no doubt, and plenty of it.
The great wine divider had struck again. Nothing separates wine partisans quite so fast as Brett, a spoilage organism that won’t hurt you but carries a range of sweaty, leathery aromas and flavors.

You either tolerate it or you don’t. Or you love the complexity it brings to a wine.
I had intended to serve the wines in pairs, the two older wines side by side, then the two younger ones. But the corky ’02 put a damper on that plan. We opened the
’05.

We both liked it. It was was richer than the ’04, no hint of Brett. But I also found it simpler. Mark also opened Alban Syrah Edna Valley Seymour’s Vineyard 2006, which he had just received from the mailing list. What difference. It towered over the Aussie wines, bigger, more alcoholic, more powerful (15.8 percent alcohol on the label, to the Aussies' 14.0-14.5 percent). It thundered,
while the Aussie Shirazes sang. So much for Aussie Shiraz as the big bopper.
Over dinner, we poured all four wines and let everyone express an opinion. The votes divided evenly. Two of us preferred the ’01 for its depth, despite the Brett. Another two liked the ’05 for its freshness and youth. Two agreed with me, loving the relative restraint of the ’04.

And two more were seduced by the power of the Alban. Non-blind, I would have rated the ’04 and the Seymour’s the highest at 94 points, but for differentreasons, the ’05 the next highest at 92 and the ’01 a much lower score of 83 points because of the
Brett. (And that’s another reminder of how to interpret scores. Another taster’s judgments may not reflect your personal preferences.)

With Mark’s marinated and char-grilled steaks, served with a Tuscan bread salad made with heirloom tomatoes, I almost enjoyed drinking the flawed ’01. But I drained my glass of the less opulent ’04. And I ended up not liking the Alban with the steaks. It was impressive on its own, but tasted like brandy with the meat. That was pretty much a universal response at our table.
So, several pieces of conventional wisdom were dashed. Aussie Shiraz is not necessarily the monster in the room. Brett does not kill a wine for everyone, even for excellent tasters. And even a steak likes a more balanced wine.

Kilikanoon 2004 Oracle Shiraz…94 pts
Kilikanoon 2005 Oracle Shiraz…92 pts