Ah yes, small is beautiful

You know what?  The Riverland gets pretty cold in winter.  We have already burnt a tonne of perfectly good dead trees and are on our second load.  This time we got mallee which is a harder wood (I know, I tried and failed to get an axe through it) and so should burn longer and hotter than the previous tasmanian oak.  As you will see from the photos, it is beautifully ugly wood.  A pile of it resembles some horrific collection of bones.

  

The love of wine has been returning after a long vintage spent getting a bit sick of it.  The ones that turned it for me were a 2002 Ashton Hills Five Merlot blend (Adelaide Hills, SA - $35) and the 2008 Jasper Hill Georgia's Paddock Nebbiolo (Heathcote, VIC - $65).  The Ashton Hills was perfectly ready and perfectly ripe, a wonderfully balanced tight rope walk a mile away from green and mean and another mile from fat and hot.  I was very pleasantly surprised and it served as a timely reminder that wine should almost always be made in small volumes by someone who cares.  So should most things come to that, but reality bites.  The Jasper Hill took a more ethereal, high toned (VA?  Maybe. Who cares?), light and graceful turn, a wonderful compote of red fruits, florals and proper tannins, the sort you used to be able to buy by the pound at the local shop in the good old days.

By way of contrast, all our wines here at the winery have now finished malo, nearly all have been noisily centrifuged onto bags of oak chips of varying colours, shapes and effects.  Some of it is looking quite reasonable, the Petit Verdot for example.  Some of it; is not.

Happy days in '07

I was pleasantly surprised to come home tonight and find a chicken casserole bubbling gently on the stove.  The open recipe book was of classic French dishes to serve with the wines of the Côtes du Rhône, the recipe was fricassée de poulet au beurre d'herbes.  The book and the aromas brought back happy memories of vintage 2007 in the beautiful little village of Chusclan.  Sunny days of pine needles, white stone and wild thyme under the bald eye of Mont Ventoux.  Smelly caravan, outside toilets and 100km/h mistral headwinds on a supermarket bicycle.  Ah, memories.

The only option was to crack something from that vintage and the '07 Chapoutier Belleruche (Côtes du Rhône, $25) came easily to hand and was only a step below a Côtes du Rhône Villages as recommended by the book.  A well crafted wine with inadequate fruit to carry it's significant alcohol (14.5%), decent ripe Grenache strawberries and caramel but a disappointing absence of garrigue.  A hot nose and a spiky, hollow departure.  The fricassée, however, was delicious.

Faltering indeed

Okay, bad me.  My quest for wine soul in the Riverland was a little half-hearted, as half-hearted as my blogging in fact.  I started out full of gusto and positivity but was then quickly side-tracked like a small child.  There are indeed some nice wines here, Omersown Petit Manseng was proof to me that this variety can do very well here, Mirabella Shiraz has the type of rich fruit and instant appeal of this region backed up with some decent structure and spice.  The Spook Hill Grenache was a pleasant surprise, hiding it's alcohol exceptionally well.  But that was as far as I got, vintage and more exotic fair caught my eye and beckoned me away.  I will re-focus though, as a believer in terroir it would seem counter-intuitive to ignore the product of the lands surrounding me.

Not that I have been doing that in any other category, an endless supply of beautiful peaches, nectarines, strawberries, oranges, mandarins, tangelos, lemons, pumpkins, courgettes and tomatoes has passed across our table having been plucked from as close as our backyard and as far away as down the road.  Add to this wonderfully fruity, green olive oil from Markaranka and local mettwurst, salami, dukkah and you have a pretty well stocked table.  Oh, and the rib eye, the wonderful, sweet rib eye - now I see what the fuss is about, good steak is as far from ordinary steak as great wine from plonk.  Only a decent sized freezer has prevented us from investing in a side of local saltbush lamb - damn you whitegoods phobia.