Halliday Destination

Appreciating wine is not about ticking off lists of famous or expensive wines just to say you've tried them. In the same way, going on holiday shouldn't be about ticking off the places you've been just to say you've been there. Both are as much about the journey as they are about the destination...

I was at The World Gourmet Summit in Sentosa last week for a tutored Shiraz tasting with James Halliday and guests Lisa Perotti-Brown MW and Dr N K Yong. My destination wine was going to be Penfolds Grange (and boy, was it good). But along the way I was treated to some wine discoveries that made the journey just as sweet.

Shiraz has become an icon of modern winemaking, grown in all 62 of Australia's wine making regions. Although relatively low-yielding, it is an adaptable grape that survives in many different vine growing environments.

Hunter Valley, or “the umbilical cord of Sydney”, as  Halliday likes to call it, is at the hot end of the scale for a fine wine producing area. For a long time the shiraz from this area was “undiscovered and undervalued”, he says , but the “recent awakening of Tyrrell's to the age of their vines” has lead fellow winemakers to follow suit, and collectively “take the game by the throat”. The 2007 Tyrrell's Vat 9 Hunter Shiraz  is a great example of old vine Shiraz, made from vines with an average age of 80 years.

Hunter Valley, like the other winemaking areas represented today, has never been affected by the  phylloxera louse. It is an important point to note as these vines are ungrafted, and grown on their own roots. This is extremely rare in the world of winemaking; only a few countires and viticultural areas can lay claim to this. All others have vines that are grafted on to American root stock to protect them from the louse. Ungrafted vines have a longer lifespan and can lead to deep concentrated flavours in the grapes due to naturally lowering yields.

It maybe surprising, but this, and many of the other top wines here, are sealed with a screw cap. Halliday is a proponent of screw cap technology and would choose screw cap over cork for all wines, whether they are meant for drinking young, or for ageing.  It is a controversial subject, he says; an ongoing 'topic of discussion' within the wine industry. By way of example he refers to  two of the Penfolds wines tasting today.


Penfolds Grange uses cork whereas Penfolds RWT has a screw cap: is this just because of consumer image and the “perception of quality” a cork brings to a wine? Halliday remarks that he would be willing to pay more for a Grange with a screw cap closure!
However, the 2005 Henschke Hill of Grace is an example of a super-premium wine that uses screw cap as a closure: a rare sight indeed at it's price point. Halliday hopes this is the way forward for all wines, and indeed it doesn't seem to have affected  it's popularity.

The Hill of Grace comes from Eden Valley, just next to Barossa. It is second in line to the Shiraz throne, behind 2004 Penfolds Grange. Comparisons cannot really be made between the two as they are made in two very distinct styles.

Hill of Grace was one of the first single vineyard sites to be made famous in Australia. Halliday states that it's a single vineyard wine using “a whole mosaic of different blocks”. Halliday has tasted the grapes, juice and fermented grape juice of the different blocks within Hill of Grace and can report that the characters are “significantly different”.The individual blocks are selected for the wine depending on the character of the vintage.

Penfolds Grange is a much more intense style of wine, but according to Halliday, it “shows class through it's back palate and finish”.It is not a single vineyard wine, but a multi-region wine. However the complex blending involved is not dissimilar to the assembly of Hill of Grace's vineyard blocks of grapes.

They use a method that is unique to Penfolds to maximise fruit flavour and give longevity to the wine. They add tannins derived from powdered grape tannin for balance and structure and so exercise complete control of the ageing potential. Sounds strange, but then again, Penfolds are always at the forefront of the field when it comes to experimentation.
Max Shubert, the innovator behind Grange, came up with the idea of pressing the grapes and taking them to barrel while they were still actively fermenting at 2-3 baume. This too was unique to Grange for a while; it is now widely adopted.

The wine that has the room buzzing, however, is 2006 Yarra Yering Dry Red No.2. The company was recently acquired by Singapore's own Ed Peters, but it is the quality and style that is the talk of the table. Maintaining consistently low yields on unirrigated soils has lead to a wine that is, in Halliday's words, “most complex” and has a “unique style”. Lisa adds that she likes the “earthy” character and flavours of “dried Mediterranean herbs”. The only downside for Halliday is the cork stopper!

There is also a stalky character to the wine that Halliday say is a result of  “whole bunch pressing” of grapes. This method is one of the on-going trends that he has identified in the production of  quality Shiraz. It is a method used by Syrah producers in the Rhone.

The Barossa Valley 2008 Kaesler, Alte Reben Shiraz is another acquisition  of Singapore-based Ed Peters, this time in conjunction with flying wine makers Reid & Bindy Bosward. The “whole bunch pressing” is evident here too, as Halliday points out it's crucial role in this wine's tannin structure. There are less than 1000 bottles of this made each vintage so it is a particularly rare wine. The fruit comes from vines planted in 1899 with the resulting wine benefiting from subtle use of French oak, and an absence of fining and filtration to give the wine it's full expression.

This is just a snapshot of the wonderful wines sampled on the journey to Grange. It is a perfect destination, just as impressive as I have imagined all these years, but the journey itself has been First Class.


Thanks to Peter Knipp Holdings Pte Ltd and all at The World Gourmet Summit.
http://www.worldgourmetsummit.com/wgs2011/english/