Smart spending

Expensive or cheap, wine can still be a bargain. It just depends on how it stacks up next to its peers, how hard it is to find and how much you feel like splashing out at the time. But you certainly don’t need a million dollar bank balance to enjoy some of the best of Australian wine. For despite the last four years of unprecedented price increases, there are still some wines which should cost a helluva lot more than they presently do.

Here are eight of the best-kept secrets in Australian wine. Use this knowledge wisely and whatever you do, be sure not to tell your friends.

Barwang

It’s sold under a rather anonymous blue label and its name offers no suggestion of its consistently excellent quality, but the McWilliam’s-owned brand of Barwang is without question one of the most under-sold labels in Australian wine.

There’s little doubt that McWilliam’s chief winemaker Jim Brayne has a soft spot for this vineyard, and why not? Since its first releases in 1990 this vineyard near Young in NSW’s Hilltops region hasn’t skipped a beat, especially with the red varieties and especially with shiraz. With this wine Brayne is cleverly working towards one of Australia’s better Rhone-ish styles, long and lean, with a sweet fleshy interior of highly spiced red and black berry fruit. It’s largely given maturation in French oak and sports the sort of wild brambly flavours typically found in shirazes several times its price.

Barwang’s chardonnay lends itself to a ripe style whose bright citrus and melon fruit typically accompanies a creamy texture bound up by lemony mineral acids. Like its partners in the range, it’s under-valued and under-rated by all those except those who know. The Semillon is juicy, ripe and tropical, with generous flavours and crisp acids, while the Cabernet Sauvignon can on occasions resemble a very classy, but fuller style with wild brambly cassis flavours.

Best’s

The typical reaction of most people who taste Best’s shiraz for the first time is to ask why they haven’t done it before. Best’s is one of the oldest of the Great Western vineyards in western Victoria, dating back to 1868. While the now celebrated Thomson Family Shiraz now takes its place amongst the finest in Australia, it’s the cheaper Bin ‘0’ Shiraz that remains one of the most under-valued of Australia’s red wines.

The Best’s style is diametrically opposed to the popular over-ripe, jammy and over-oaked expression of this grape so common in Australia today. At Great Western there’s no need for grapes to wait overly long on the vines to accumulate flavour, so their style is simple, classical and utterly expressive of the extraordinary fruit from which they’re made.

Bin ‘0’ Shiraz costs just over $30 a bottle, one of the more expensive wines in this listing, but substantially short of its true value. Its cellaring potential is unquestioned, for few vineyards can boast its pedigree in this department. But most importantly, it’s simply one of the finest, most incredibly drinkable and elegant of all Australian red wines, offering near-perfect spicy and often peppery ripe shiraz flavours.

Huntington Estate

Huntington Estate is one of those phenomena that the media should never be allowed to write about. It’s just too good a secret for the public at large. For reasons best known to themselves, the Roberts family has grossly under-sold two decades of excellent red wines made variously from the varieties of cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and merlot.

Bob Roberts began Huntington Estate in the relatively unsung Mudgee region of NSW in 1969 and daughter Susan makes its wine today. Huntington’s reds are so honest, uncomplicated and simply dead easy to drink that it’s a wonder their demand hasn’t prevented the Robertses from releasing them younger. Instead, they’re always sold at around five or more years of age and still look cheap! Furthermore the various Reserve red wines are something truly special, are given extra age and are also under-priced.

My point is clear: if you are not on Huntington Estate’s mailing list, you have absolutely no justification ever to complain about the price of Australian red wine!


Lenton Brae

Lenton Brae enters this listing because it’s an up and coming Margaret River maker imminently awaiting its entry to the big time. Together with Voyager Estate, it’s truly a name to watch. Ed Tomlinson is developing a typical Margaret River selection of very fine, elegant wines, especially from chardonnay and the cabernet varieties. They are certainly at the more affordable end of Margaret River’s pricing spectrum and while they may be tighter and finer than the region’s standard, there’s simply no questioning their flavour and potential. Lenton Brae also releases an excellent Sauvignon Blanc and a lively Semillon Sauvignon Blanc blend.

Majella

Majella simply has to be an embarrassment to the more expensive makers of Coonawarra red wine. Brian Prof Lynn’s 55 ha vineyard, two-thirds of which was planted between 1968 and 1974, has long been regarded as one of the best on Coonawarra’s red strip. When Lynn began to have wine made for his own label at nearby Brand’s Laira, people immediately began taking notice. His red trio of shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and the flagship shiraz cabernet blend known as ‘The Malleea’, today offer some of the best drinking and value from this benchmark region.

Majella’s first shiraz was made in 1991, its first cabernet in 1994, while the first ‘The Malleea’ was first made in 1996. Each release is typically plush and creamy, richly flavoured and rather generously proportioned for Coonawarra wine, easily able to soak up as much wood as winemaker Bruce Gregory decides to throw at it.

Tollana

Another closely-kept secret by those in the know, Tollana should definitely be a stand-alone brand. That way it would actually receive some recognition. Instead, it appears destined to fester away beneath a welter of other more marketable brands in the cumbersome Southcorp hierarchy, seemingly never to receive the credit its consistent quality surely demands. That, of course, has its advantages, for even its best customers would have to admit that Tollana’s wine is unjustifiably cheap.

The brand of Tollana dates back to 1888 and its fruit is principally sourced from the cooler Eden Valley segment of the Barossa region. At the head of its wines is the Bin TR222 Cabernet Sauvignon, a rare example in Southcorp of a fine, supple and tight-knit cabernet suited to medium to long-term maturation. Then there is the Bin TR16, a highly spiced, supple and elegant Shiraz, suited to early drinking or cellaring. Just being released, the 1998 is a cracker. Then there’s the Eden Valley Riesling, a typically generous, limey and relatively early-maturing style, perfect for drinking just after release. And it only costs a few bob. There’s also a ripe, generously flavoured Chardonnay plus a deliciously aromatic and luscious Botrytis Riesling.

Voyager Estate

Most Western Australian wine enthusiasts will know of Voyager Estate, even if only for the scale of the investment it represents. This vineyard, whose chequered career commenced as ‘Freycinet Estate’ under the ownership of WA viticulturist Peter Gherardi, has been totally reinvented by Michael Wright who bought it in 1991, gave it a new name, a new identity and a new profile.

Not to mention a very glossy exterior. A white-washed Cape Dutch styled edifice is the public front of Voyager Estate, which is shortly to be joined by one of Australia’s most spectacular new wineries built in the same style. But it’s for its new wines that Voyager will become better known, especially for those made from the mainstream Margaret River varieties of chardonnay, semillon, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon and merlot.

Voyager’s best wine is its Cabernet Merlot blend, a sumptuous, deeply flavoured and stylish modern wine which despite being considerably cheaper than most of the top-drawer Margaret River cabernets, doesn’t look at all out of place alongside them. You can’t do much better for under $40 in Australia today. Its Chardonnay is a de luxe, richly textured style, bursting with ripe citrus and tropical fruit flavours, finishing long and minerally, while its Sauvignon Blanc Semillon is a vibrant, racy blend typical of the region’s best.


Water Wheel

It used to be one of wine’s best-kept secrets, but then it started getting column inches in the press. And while it didn’t often collect the gong for being the best shiraz or cabernet sauvignon at a given event, it usually won for the best value. Water Wheel’s Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon red wines have been one of the very best buys in Australian red wine under $20 and I reckon they’re only getting better and better.

In my tastings they frequently embarrasses wines at least double the $17 retail price of the currently available 1998 vintages, yet their makers have no intentions to do what virtually every other maker of quality Australian red wine has done in recent years by making it less affordable. So, despite imminent increases in production, it will continue to sell out in weeks, if not days. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The present Water Wheel operation is the brainchild of Peter Cumming whose family have long been established as successful growers of tomatoes and cherries around Bridgewater-on-Loddon to the north-west of Bendigo in central Victoria. Please login to post comment