Voyager in WA’s Margaret River held an outstanding world styles tasting across all Australian states this year.

And their visit to Queensland was an eye opener for quite a few young sommeliers as the wines were served scrambled.

But Aussies are trained to become quite special at recognising style without obvious bias, and no doubt this accounts for the ongoing wine pre-eminence in the country, irrespective of origin.

Voyager Estate’s wines showed up very well; from my humble scores, equal top in chardonnay, equal fourth in shiraz, third in cabernet merlot, pointing the way for such outstanding wine examples grown in Margaret River, irrespective of variety.

The six chardonnays from the 2007 vintage went:

Bonneau du Martray (it is grand cru from Corton Charlemagne, Burgundy); pale, linear nose, closed, taut, lees, tight, very, very, restrained, 95 (USD 259),13.5%; Voyager Estate Margaret River; pale, linear, lot of oak, barrel-ferment, fruit weight, taut, good solids funk, 95 (USD 74 ),13.2%; Leeuwin Art Series Margaret River; pale, linear, sweet lemon oak nose, lemon curd fruit, linear, powerful, taut, 95 (USD 106) 14.5%; Craggy Range Les Beaux Cailloux Hawkes Bay NZ; pale, linear, lot of oak, lemon, barrel ferment, aromatic, agro acidity says NZ, 95 (USD 72),14.5%; Giaconda Estate and Nantua Vineyards Beechworth; straw, bacony, clumsy, lot of funk, lot of flavour, some botrytis, complex, 91, (USD 72),13.9%; Kistler Vine Hill Vineyard, Sonoma, straw, advanced age, bacony, forward, clumsy, plenty of everything, 89, (USD 110),14.1%. The latter was clearly not in sync, and was from a much warmer growing region.

There were six shiraz from 2008 vintage, and one Rhone 2007, were:

Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier Canberra; light purple, red fruits, cedary-sweet oak, brute flavour, fine soft tannin, 95, (USD 72), 14%; Dalwhinnie Moonambel, Pyrenees, cherry, red fruits, aromatic oak, spicy red fruits, juicy, 94 (USD 67), 13.5%; Craggy Range Le Sol Syrah, Gimblett Gravels, NZ, purple, smells of extract, cold soak, power and pepper, lot of spice, fine, 93, (USD 120), 14.5%; Cote Rotie (Rene Rostaing) La Cuvee Classique, Rhone, pale, dull, whole berry ferment, plump and ripe, pepper, funk, tannic and chewy, black fruits, warmer area, 92, (USD 120), 13%; Shaw and Smith Adelaide Hills; deep purple, shavings, aromatic fruit, sweet and juicy, lot of tannin, some of it hard, 92, (USD 36), 14%; Voyager Estate, Margaret River, deep purple, funky fruit, brambles, juicy, oyster shell oak, very fine and soft, 92, (AUD 33) 14%.The Voyager has made using 40% new oak, 80/20 French to American, has lots of anise oak and blueberry fruit.

The seven cabernet and merlot blends from 2005 were:

Tenuta dell’Ornellaia, Bolgheri, Tuscany; great colour, ripe and juicy, tannic/dry, a rush of plush fruit and lasting red flavours, 95, (USD 250), 14.5%; Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon Napa; medium colour, aging purples, earth, brett, bonox, juicy, very dry, power, 94, (USD 63),13.9%; Voyager Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot; medium purple red, smells tannic, brett, drying tannins, currants, could have more flesh, 92, (USD 58), 14%; Balnaves The Tally, Coonawarra, good purple-red, Italianesque, feral, earthy/aged, mint, sweet oak, quite tannic, greener fruit and acids, 91, (USD 95),14.5%; Cullen Diana Madeline Cabernet Merlot, Margaret River, light cherry, cedar, leafy, cool region, good backbone, powdery tannin, 90 (USD 115), 14%; Te Mata Estate Coleraine cabernet, merlot, franc, Hawkes Bay, NZ, medium red, earth, plums, spice, restrained nose, cedar, very powerful, tannins, a bit square, needs time, 90, (USD 92), 13.5%; Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, Pauillac, Bordeaux; cherry, red, mint, leaf, fruity, very high acid, bonox fruit development, only fair, 90, (USD 337), 13%; Mount Mary Quintet, Yarra, cabernet, merlot, franc, malbec, verdot, browning and fading, spicy, ripe, old and aged, angular now, dried out to oak, 87, (USD 154), 13%.Voyager is made from 32 year-old cabernet and 17 year-old merlot, is 79% cabernet, 15% merlot, 5% malbec and 1% verdot.

It was quite clear that the Mount Mary was suffering from an exhausted cork, allowing oxidation. Voyager winemaker Travis Lemm said that the Bordeaux had shown awful bottle variation out of the 36 purchased, to the extent that it was difficult to get a fix on what exactly was the wine. There was a high incidence of cork taint where bottles were tipped down the drain, and others either oxidised or cork-modified. On the day in Brisbane Travis indicated the bottle to be quite a typical Pichon-hurrah, but how disappointing for Bordeaux buyers of this Chateau.

As a benchmark tasting Voyager Estate wines figured very well, and no doubt the production team can workshop some ideas towards making their wines more elite to taste. www.voyagerestate.com.au

Margaret River winemaker Watershed Premium Wines announces a joint venture with India’s Mittal Vineyards.

Mittal Vineyards will be launching their brand Silk Route, a range of fine Indian wines with the technical assistance and know-how provided by Watershed Premium Wines.

Geoff Barrett, Managing Director of Watershed Premium Wines said: “Mittal Vineyards will market and distribute Watershed wines throughout India. Our joint venture has acknowledged the excellence of Watershed’s wines and winemaking processes and that contribute towards Mittal’s future products.

“This places Watershed in an ideal position to participate in the ongoing growth of this important international wine market and reinforces Watershed’s commitment to grow its brand throughout the South East Asian market.”

Although the development of vineyards has flattened over the past two years, and production has exceeded sales demand, over the medium term the domestic Indian wine industry is expected to show strong growth.

”We at Mittal Vineyards are really excited about this venture and are looking forward to launching Premium Wines in India along with the Watershed Premium Wines Portfolio. We believe they will complement each other well in India’s dynamic market with the help of the excellent team set in place by Mr Barrett at Watershed which can be seen by the cascade of awards being added to Watershed’s walls” said Ankush Mittal, Director Operations and Marketing.

The vineyards are situated in the hills of Nashik, about 200 kilometres north of Mumbai. The winery is being built in the famous Dindori district. Watershed Premium Wines have entered into a technical collaboration & marketing assistance agreement with Mittal.

Mittal Vineyard’s website is short on detail at present but boasts plenty of high end ideas and claims such as “Premium Quality Wines, Coming Soon from the vineyards of the Mittal Vineyards Estate at Nashik, India, the Vitis vinifera city of South Asia (Also referred to as the Bordeaux or Napa Valley of India)”.

Amit Mittal, Managing Director and Chairman of Mittal Vineyards said: “Margaret River has produced the winner of the prestigious Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy in two of the past three years and has demonstrated that it is a world class producer of cabernet sauvignon and cabernet blends.”

He has hooked up with a suitable producer here. Watershed’s 2008 Awakening Cabernet Sauvignon has recently won three gold medals and three trophies in the space of one month in Australian wine shows, showing how excellently Margaret River grows cabernet.

In early October Australia’s largest maker, Treasury Wine Estates, launched their Wolf Blass range through the Delhi-based builders the Pearls Group. Founded by business man Nirmal Singh, it’s primarily a real estate group expanding into education, hospitals and imports of Australian beer, wine and food products.

Mittal Vineyard are a subsidiary of Dooars Transport http://dooarstransport.com which has been in logistics in South Asia for over 50 years

www.watershedwines.com.au and www.mittalvineyards.com

The drive from Montalcino to visit Rocca di Frassinello was from the heights of Tuscany towards the sea near Grosseto. Grape growing in this part of Italy continues the adventure.

This is an aggregate of properties now reaching 500 hectares with 75 planted, done over the period 1997-1999. There is room for expansion.

It would be imagined that this powerfully thought-through tenuta had a magnificent opening on June 30, 2007. I wished I was there.

But this Domaines Lafite Rothschild (Bordeaux)-Castellare in Castellina (Chianti Classico) joint venture has been cleverly designed; in parts with its conservative Tuscan thinking yet in other ways very much out there-chic, modern, even colour coordinated.

Castellare owner Paulo Panerai had a small dalliance by planting some sangiovese on this coastal strip 20 km north of the Grosseto in the early ’90s, whereas the heavyweights (Ornellaia, Sassicaia and crew) have shone with Bordeaux-origin grapes plus some syrah.

You see the patter went that sangiovese would neither grow well nor produce high end red wine here akin to its cousins in Chianti or Montalcino.

The Tuscan thought is that sangiovese must struggle during growth and that its major natural environment to do this is in its existing homelands.

I am not entirely convinced on this but am firmly of the opinion that the grape variety’s crop load has much to do annually with quality in the bottle. Growth with this variety is hardly backward.

Paulo Panerai proved this generalisation wrong, as his sangiovese test site provided ample ammunition to proceed with a larger planting; also including cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc and petit verdot. A small patch of vermentino has since been added in front of the winery.

Three more farms were purchased for that planting, essentially old olive groves and country with a previous history of minerals and mining, sheep country and marshland not previously taken to viticulture. But that is a similar story for Bolgheri, Scansarno and Montecucco.

That’s where the Bordeaux producer Domaines Rothschild joined in the plans and has since conspired with Panerai to make French sensed Italian-style international wines typical of the coastal terroirs (the sea is 10km away) from this region.

From my visit and tastings the wine reliance is on sangiovese with support from oak-tensed blending parcels of cabernet sauvignon and merlot.

And another wine, Baffonero is conceived along the lines of challenging the supremacy of Ornellaia’s Masseto merlot, with super-charged oak handling and assertive, fleshy tannins as found in a few garargiste style merlots from Pomerol.

Unlike typical left bank Bordeaux or the Bolgheri clans, this tenutas major wine output centres around the highest quality sangiovese that can be grown in this new terroir. Driving past the vineyards post the harvest, it is clearly easy to see how much is left behind when harvest comes, as the reject bunches still litter the vineyard floor.

In the case of the Baffonero vineyard, the bunch selection is sequential, first by removing down to one bunch per shoot (merlot often produces three), and eventually removing all bunches save one for the vine, in pursuit of hyper-concentration of flavour, ripeness and high levels of ripe skin tannin.

Rocca di Frassinello is also a statement about balance; that of colour and harmony as the design skills of young architect Renzo Piano permeate the daily activities of the winery staff.

They drive towards the place of business to see a modern winery on the hill painted orange (earthy) and see the doors and window trim (bright green) as perverse tints of the surrounding landscape.

The winery in its different levels occupies 9000 square metres, with the cellar door section morphing into a huge flat roof top. Part of this is used for the grape preparation, under the cover of umbrellas, the hand harvested grapes are drawn up to the roof top to be berry sorted, then dropped by gravity through the roof into fermenters below.

Piano designed this winery to have few windows, preferring on a central light source originating from the roof and making its focal point the floor of the barrel room. This could be an ampitheatre but each shelf is occupied by barrels.

As winemaker, Florentine-born Massimo Cassegrande, notes “this is the eyes of the wine”. The large cellar is kept partly dark, naturally holding 14-15 oC in winter, stretching to 19-20 oC in summer without any environment control.

The 2007 wines from the property were reviewed last July 16; http://asiancorrespondent.com/uncorked-and-cultivated/great-chianti-castellare-style but I was fortunate to try the 2006 release not previously sold in Australia.

The entry, unwooded wine is Poggio alla Guardia, here tasted was 2008 (90), 14%, a fruity, generous wine, expressive in its main component of merlot (45%), then cabernet (40%), a touch of petit verdot and the rest sangiovese. Though it’s looked down on as a basic wine, it has full personality for accessible drinking and loads of ripe varietal character (leaf and black fruits).

The next level, Le Sughere di Frassinello 2006 (92), 13.5%, is strong on the nose, oak cedar, no traditional fast-aging sangiovese notes, fruit sweet then long and well woven tannins from 50% sangiovese, 25% each of merlot and cabernet. New oak use is 30%.

Rocca di Frassinello 2006 (94), 13.5%, is a wine driven by its concentration, then around that comes the longer 100% new oak aging, so that the plump fruit takes on a chocolate and mocha coffee aroma, stretching to a drying, weighty palate (60% sangiovese, 20% each of merlot and cabernet).

The 2007 has been modified to more sangiovese, 65%, 20% cabernet for backbone, 10% merlot and 5% syrah.

The 2007 Baffonero was retasted: this is very ripe, 13.5%, very deep coloured, supple and fruit sweet.

On ageworthiness Massimo says “my opinion is that Poggio alla Guardia, it’s a bottle that can live at least five years from the release, Le Sughere di Frassinello from ten to twelve years, Rocca di Frassinello and Baffonero, probably, twenty or more years.” So we start the wait.

I came away with a quaint Italian descriptive phrase for wine with obvious elevated volatile acidity caused by extended oak aging. It’s the “balsamic effect”.