Sellicks Hill Wines Dio 2009

I was going to start by telling you about the winery, but instead I am going to start with the nose, because it's overwhelmed me. In fact, the instant I popped the cork out it fairly leapt out of the bottle and gave my olfactories a big how do you do! I've never been to a Moroccan night market before, but I now have aromatically speaking , roasting lamb, olives, dried figs, pistachio, and a waft of Ras El Hanout. If a belly dancer was to jingle her way into the room right now I would not be surprised, but my wife doesn't pander to my fantasies like that.

There's a tiger on the bottle, but I reckon it should be a cobra. Or a belly dancer!

So whilst we are enjoying the aromas and waiting for the lady with the veils, let me try to explain the winery. This wine is made by Paul Petagna, and when he made this wine he called his winery Petagna Wines. Paul started making wines because his father in law, Modestino (Steve) Piombo, wanted to make wines, and with Paul's help had planted a nice block of land at Sellicks Hill with Shiraz vines. So Paul learned to make wines with Steve's grapes, and that Winery was called Sellicks Hill Wines and the Shiraz was called Piombo. Petagna Wines is no more, and all wines are now made under the Sellicks Hill Wines label.

You can read about it more on the Sellicks Hill Wines website, but the main point I wanted to get a across is the wine is made by the same person it always has been. In a burst of enthusiasm and optimism, Paul and his wife have recently opened a cellar door right next to the Sellicks Hill Wines vineyard. It's slightly off the beaten track for McLaren Vale, but since it's pretty close to the famous Victory Hotel where they do a great lunch I reckon it's pretty prime for a visit.

I just went back to top up me glass and the bottle is half gone! Apparently my wife likes it, so I'm tempted to leave the bottle there and see if a belly dance is still out of the question later.

Paul called it Dio after the band formed by Ronnie James Dio, formerly of Black Sabbath. Actually that's not true, but in trying to weave a web of lies to support that wild claim I went looking for lyrics, and discovered something - even when you're reading the lyrics to Iron Man, you still have no idea what Ozzy Osbourne is singing.

There is however, a fair whack of heavy metal guitar on the palate, ie. the intensity is pretty full volume but without being distorted (I think the Black Sabbath link just fell on it's face). What I mean is, some wines have power but no finesse - I was going to say it's more like Bruce Lee than Ronnie, but at the risk of eliciting facepalms from you all, it's more like the tiger on the bottle. Hah, I should be in advertising!

The palate is pretty savoury, but it's also got a richness that blends, like a good Tagine - if Saatchi and Saatchi don't phone me up the minute I post this I will be very surprised. Seriously though, those Moroccans have been making Tagines for a few years now, and they certainly understood the brilliance of blending savoury with a little sweetness long before Paul worked it out. 

Hard to give a good score when it's based on someone else's blend of flavours, and you happened to choose the right wife, and there's been a complete lack of gyrating bellies by bottle's end, so I'm downgrading this. 

Highly Recommended+++

Sellicks Hill Wines

  

Marius Symphony Shiraz 2011

Purity.

I was going to say this wine has incredible purity, but...

pu·ri·ty  (pyr-t)n.

1. The quality or condition of being pure.

2. A quantitative assessment of homogeneity or uniformity.

3. Freedom from sin or guilt; innocence; chastity:

Ok, so #1 yes, #2 no, #3 not a chance. Unless you're comparing this to the Viagra replacement known as 2011 Simpatico. However, if you pour your partner a glass of this and don't get laid, you need bigger glasses.

Where Simpo grabs you buy the ears and makes it bloody clear that all in the vicinity will be enjoying themselves post haste, Symphony does it a little more sensually, like a namesake orchestra doing a bit of Ravel.

It's day 2, and hard to believe I could make the bottle last that long, but the trick was to drink it with Simpatico last night. I drove to work on a high, I even had to breatho myself just to check I hadn't sleep walked a few glassfuls before brekky.

Look, I have to be honest here, I am in a bit of a quandry, I need to save at least 1/4 of the bottle for my wife (see para 3.), so don't expect too many descriptors and just trust me when I say this is exceptional Australian Shiraz.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware I am a fan of big wines, love my Warrabillas, so let me assure everyone that this is no lightweight 2011 suffering from dilution or any such crap like that. Check this out;

It's stained me glass red, and you can't even see through 20ml of the stuff! (It's not Warrabilla big! I just mean I know where the scale ends in bigness and this isn't at the light end.)

Walsh and Whitey (not sure if that sounds more like a cop show or a comedy one) have covered the details if you really need to know more, but truth be told this is a polarising wine - you'll either love it or you're a Savvy Blanc drinker.

Outstanding+++ and probably +.

A side note on this, it went better with blue cheese than the Simpatico, who'd have guessed that? Certainly not Roger.

Marius Simpatico Shiraz 2011

Vintages are not Vineyards.

Not sure how that slogan popped into my head, but I've been saying it for a while. I've always found it highly amusing to read lines like "Parker rates the 2009 Bordeaux vintage on of the greatest of his lifetime". There's clearly a missing asterisk there, as there should not be a wine writer in the world who would seriously claim the vintage more important than who made it, and with what grapes from what vineyard.

As I said in my review of the Cradle of Hills Cab Shiraz, terroir and micro-climates are far more important than most people realise. If 100 wineries have a great year and 10 have a bad year the vintage is a success! The opposite says it's a bad year, but it can be that the minority that year may make truly exceptional wines due to their micro-climates.

If I was buying wine unknown to me in a restaurant, I'd also avoid 2011 from much of SA. But hand on my heart I will tell you my true and honest opinion on this wine;

This 2011 Simpatico to me is better than the 2010 - and will not surprise me if it's better than the 2012. Then again that Roger fellow may in fact be getting even better with age himself, so we will see.

It's not a competition of course, the point I am trying to make is, this is simply brilliant wine and the vintage is largely irrelevant.

It's mulberry and blueberry on the nose but then morphs with incredible complexity in waves, with licorice, mocha, black olives, nutmeg, and the aroma of your lover's left earlobe. That's a decent start, and really it's worth buying this just to sniff it, but you'll not be able to avoid taking a sip, and when you do the thrill up your spine is like your lover decided your own earlobe was worth a nibble. There's witches on the palate, youngish witches too, no warts but garters and stockings (or warlocks if that's to your taste, probably not with stockings, unless Rocky Horror is also your thing), all black and wicked, with dirt, and spices. Wicked, dirty, spicy. Naughty Zoot, you know what she needs. The length is excellent and the balance exquisite. I need a cold shower.

Rating Outstanding++ (oh it will go longer but why wait?)

Marius Matarius Mataro 2010

I admit did think of adding Mouvedre and Monastrell to the title, but I was worried it's making fun of what is probably my favourite wine name. The new baby was named as part of a competition, and is so bloody clever because it's seemingly obvious, and yet only one person thought of it.

This child of Roger's is not only the first straight Mataro he's added to his vinous family, it's also the only one you'll see for many years. That is to say it wasn't made in 2011 to 2013, but that was purely for personal circumstances of it's Dad. It's unique, and straight Mataro is already a very rare breed in the Aussie wine world.

Which is silly really. It's a flamin good grape for our climate and has many of the characters that Shiraz lovers would appreciate.

I first tasted this at the 2011 Harvest as a barrel sample, and at that time the tannins were too much for me to deal with, not to mention the beers and heaps of more developed wines my glass had seen that arvo.

Moving on nearly 3 years and it's much more refined. As I've said before, there's blood and gunpowder in this. Leather too, and something very sexy (and no Mr. Walsh, it isn't you). I do however feel the need to kill a werewolf, preferably a very small one. I may just settle for telling the dog not to dig holes in the lawn. Then again, when you drink wine this good, life just seems to transcend mundane matters. 

Roger reckons good Mataro needs a decade, at least, to come around. I think he might be right, but I also reckon buy it a steak dinner and enjoy it now too. Raise a glass to Roger's health whilst you're at it, and your own of course.

Excellent+++

PS. there is a small amount left. I'm baffled. Get in touch with Mr. Pike here or have a go at the order form here. You won't see it's like again anytime soon.

Cradle of Hills Cabernet Shiraz 2010

The great Aussie blend has drifted off the radar for me over the last five or ten years. I don't seem to find many good ones, and I don't think I'm the only one. It seems to be a blend the big boys continue to do well, probably because they have so much more opportunity to source the right fruit. Some smaller wineries still do the blend, and although there are exceptions like Lake Breeze's Bernoota, it often it wasn't really as good as their straight varietals. The result being the Cab was apparently better off going Bordeaux on us and marrying a Merlot or Malbec.

That's all a shame really, wines such as Bin389 and Limestone Ridge clearly show how well the blend should work. The other sad thing is many people would not be aware that McLaren Vale makes some stunningly good Cab Savs, but there are quite a few mediocre ones too, and I reckon most people wouldn't think of the Vale as a great Cab area.

You should never generalize about wine regions though. There is an enormous variety of micro climates, soil composition and geographical vineyard aspects in a very small area in the Vale. There's the old joke about the experienced wine taster being able to tell which side of the hill the wine grapes were grown on. Thing is, it's not completely a joke. A hill facing south west in the vale may get less sun and more cooling sea breezes, and that will affect the grapes at least as much as the regions air temperature will. These vines actually face north, but due to the Sellicks Hill Ranges wind-tunnel effect they also get strong sea breezes, see why I told you that you can't generalize?

I bought this bottle at 'cellar door', which requires an appointment at this stage. The advantage to me was I was given tastings of some of the barrels about to be blended in the near future, mostly 2011s. The Cradle of Hills vineyard is not all that big, I reckon about two footy fields in size, but the variety in the Shiraz alone was quite amazing. There was the area grown mainly to provide natural acidity, the area called the Project which is lower yielding and thus higher fruit intensity, the mortgage block which produces great fruit every vintage. Each one of those barrels was quite different in style, and whilst they are designed to be blended, they were still quite drinkable on their own. We're talking nano-climates really. They aren't what's in this wine, but my point being that micro terroirs and attention to every detail is actually very important to the final result.

I got curious about which vineyard areas were actually in this wine, and since it was all CoH Estate fruit I asked Paul for a bit more info. So he cracked a bottle and wrote me a huge email. He is clearly, and rightly, very proud of it;

The Cabernet comes form the western end of the Cabernet block; Rows 40 to 42.  In the western end of the vineyard the soil is more austere/stony and free draining and the vines struggle a bit more than the eastern side.  Hence the bunches / berries are smaller, & the flavours are more intense.  The average bunch size was 65 g (which is small as most bunches are generally around 90 - 100g at harvest) and the yield was low 2T / acre. Tracy produced the small bunches during veraison by maintaining a light canopy ( full sunlight for ripening cabernet – no green tannins) and limited irrigation.

The Shiraz for the blend came from the short (southern) rows in the Eastern block ( behind the house). As this is most exposed part of the vineyard (to the SE/SW winds), the vines struggle here also (again a low yield of  2T / acre) and produce great flavour intensity from small bunches/berries.

I've waffled a fair bit, sorry about that, here's the actual review.

Powerful nose, a veritable farmer's market of aromatics, mostly dominated by the earthy herbal Cab and tweaked with a good lick of MV Shiraz plums and chocolate. There's also a very faint hint of that quintessential CoH flower garden, I always thought it was from the Grenache they make, but maybe it's from Tracy's perfume. Or Pauls?

Superb tannins, nutty and chewy, with enough substance for a longer road. Acid judged perfectly with aforementioned attention to detail, it's happily staying in the wings keeping the show running and not stealing the limelight. Length is important here, and nobody will be left disappointed.

Hand picked and sorted, hands on traditional winemaking, a slow two week ferment with ab bruising four-a-day hand plunging, another 2 weeks maceration on skins for more texture, a light basket press then into barrels for two years on lees with periodic stirring, then racked back into those fine grain French and American hogsheads for another year's rest. Bottled in Jan 2013. The devil might be in the details, but so is the delight, so let's call it wickedly good.

Drinking well now, particularly with food at this youthful stage, but squirrel a few away too, you will be rewarded. Oh, and I almost forgot why I waffled at the start; this is exactly the kind of synergistic Cab Shiraz that made the blend a success. Bloody Bonza, a Cracker Claret again, and affordable! Cabernet 80% Shiraz 20%

Excellent+++

http://www.cradle-of-hills.com.au/