Mount Horrocks

Stephanie Toole is on a mission. She’s taken the promising Clare Valley brand of Mount Horrocks, which made its debut back in 1982, and is giving it a very good shake. Now based at Auburn’s old railway station, Mount Horrocks is today emerging as a quality brand whose wines are steadily becoming more serious and more interesting as time progresses.

Although Mount Horrocks’ range is quite extensive, it’s for its two wines from the riesling variety that the brand is best known. There’s an air of inevitability about that given that Stephanie Toole’s partner in life Forrie – I’m not sure I like this, but can’t think of a better way of putting it is riesling maestro Jeffrey Grosset, with whose wines hers are frequently compared. Grosset has been consultant winemaker to Mount Horrocks for much of its history, but Toole has placed herself in control of winemaking procedures for the last five years.

Like so many from the Clare Valley today, Mount Horrocks’ dry Riesling is a fragrant, musky and aromatic wine of pristine varietal fruit character, but one whose almost thick, chewy palate is crammed with punchy flavours of crisp apples and pears before a lemon-lime finish. It shares some of the tropical fruit expression of Grosset’s own Watervale Riesling, but is typically a rounder and richer wine by comparison.

But it’s for its point of difference with riesling that Mount Horrocks most fires my interest. Its flagship wine, simply labelled as ‘Cordon Cut’, is a very luscious but simultaneously very drinkable dessert wine made from riesling grapes. Its flavours are concentrated by a technique deployed by several Australian vineyards during the brief heyday of the riesling dessert wine in the early 1980s – the cutting of non fruit-bearing canes cordons to artificially create a flow of moisture back out from the grapes themselves, through the vine’s vascular system and out onto the ground through the actual wound or ‘cut’ itself. I’ll never forget the first time I saw this at Lindemans’ Padthaway vineyard in the early 1980s, for it appeared to the world like the drip irrigation had been turned on, until I realised it was coming from the vines themselves. You’ll never see a better example of this technique than from the 2000 vintage, whose wine simply explodes with piercing and almost essential riesling fruit with a very light, enticing background of botrytis influence.

Mount Horrocks also makes a Cabernet Merlot blend of increasing fineness and elegance, a spicy, meaty Shiraz, a peachy Chardonnay with pleasing savoury and nutty qualities of which the 1999 vintage is clearly the best yet, plus a lightly grassy and sensistively oaked Semillon whose bright length of lemony fruit finishes with a tingling mineral finish.

Stephanie Toole attributes the most significant recent development at Mount Horrocks to the securing of a ‘really good’ vineyard in Watervale for a long-term contract. This site has been responsible for much of the best fruit for Mount Horrocks for the past three years. ‘It’s an immaculate dry-grown vineyard responsible for our riesling, chardonnay and semillon. Now that they’re single vineyard wines they become more of a challenge’, she says. ‘It’s harder because there’s less to work with and because if you get it wrong there’s nothing to replace it with.’

She’s not a formally trained winemaker, but to her credit Toole is certainly making her stamp with wines that ‘don’t jump out as being from Clare’, with considerably more going for them than the drinkabilty at time of release that she’s always striven for.

‘Today I like to think they will last, and most do’, she says. ‘The one I wouldn’t be more confident in is the Chardonnay,’ a delicious but distinctly early-maturing style, ‘but the Semillon and Riesling both have a good future in the bottle. I’m looking to harness the natural generosity of the Riesling’s fruit and want to keep it fine, otherwise people could mistake the fruit quality for sweetness, but these wines are as bone dry as I can get.’

Bookmark Mount Horrocks as a wine to consider when you’re looking for generosity, flavour and those rather more indefinable aspects known as individuality and character. And you won’t be disappointed with what you have to pay for them. Please login to post comment