The three Wines of the Edition in this issue complete the six for this past twelve months, and each of which are featured as finalists as Wines of the Year in The OnWine Australian Wine Annual. These three wines represent different varieties, regions and philosophies. One is an example of the finest Yarra Valley cabernets. Not only a great wine in its own right, it serves to remind us that there is such a thing as top-drawer Yarra cabernet, an animal rather in short supply over the last five years. Another is a classic old vine shiraz, but this time from the Barossa. The third wine is a remarkable wine and a genuine freak of nature, since genuinely natural trockenbeerenauslesen aren’t made all that often in Australia. Mount Mary Cabernets Quintet 1999 From one of Australia’s greatest cabernet vineyards comes this superbly elegant and complete blend of the five red Bordeaux varieties. With wines of similar style and quality it shares the multi-layered quality that continues to open one set of flavours after another. Its fragrance is classic young cabernet, with intense aromas of violets, cassis and carefully handled cedar and vanilla oak. Arrestingly fresh and lively, its remarkable depth of flavour is delivered in a silky-smooth and supple palate tightly wound around fine kernelly tannins. Absolute benchmark stuff, with a long and secure cellar life. This wine follows in the footsteps of the classic 1998 vintage, and reasserts Mount Mary amongst the best and most elegant of Australian cabernet makers. Pipers Brook Cuvee Clark 2000 After a promising start, Australia has not enjoyed a great relationship with sweet white dessert wines. Too many are simply rather soulless exercises in accumulating as much botrytis infection as possible, almost disregarding their eventual drinkability or lack thereof. This wine is a remarkable effort, made from freakishly but naturally concentrated riesling grapes harvested at the absolute extreme of ripeness. It’s dramatically perfumed and explosively flavoured with pure flavours of pears, apricots, peaches and limes, with a hint of candied orange. Despite its extreme sweetness, this superbly balanced wine is neither cloying nor difficult to drink – quite the opposite in fact! Pipers Brook has an excellent track record with Riesling, the very first grape variety it made wine from in the 1970s. Torbreck RunRig 1998 RunRig is Torbreck’s premier blend of shiraz and viognier (3%). Sourced from mature Barossa vineyards, the 1998 wine was matured in tight-grained Radoux and Troncais oak, 60% of which was new, 40% second use. In its youth, the remarkable thing about the wine is the extraordinary impact of such a small percentage of viognier, whose wild and spicy lemon blossom perfume fully permeates the wine’s aroma of aniseed, small dark red and black berry fruit, plums and cedar/vanilla oak. It’s virtually spotless, but there’s a delightfully rustic element to the wine’s remarkable length of creamy ripe textures of pure dark fruit, charcuterie complexity and savoury finish of superbly fine tannin. Torbreck is introduced in more detail in a complete review on page 20.
