A team of investors which includes Stuart Langton and Andrew Caillard from Langton’s Fine Wine Auctions has created one of the most arresting new wineries built in Australia for ten years. It’s found on the estate at Victoria’s grandest mansion, Werribee Park, famous for its outdoor zoo and extensive polo fields. While I am less than comfortable with the degree and taste of the modern intrusions into the classical shapes of the wings of the historic mansion which now form part of the newly-opened Mansion Hotel, the Shadowfax winery is truly something else. Underneath its oxidised red metal exterior, which gives Shadowfax the look of an upturned rusting shipwreck, is a smartly designed and functional winery with a remarkable underground barrel hall whose entrance is even more remarkable, plus a large gourmet foodstore and cellar door space of distinctive modern colour and design. All of which might threaten a winemaker challenged and charged with the first vintages in a signature location, but young New Zealander Mat Harrop has breezed through in typically relaxed style. While Shadowfax does have a young vineyard adjacent to its Werribee site, it’s anything but a traditional estate winery. As its first five releases have illustrated, Harrop has been given a brief to make varietal wines using fruit from any number of regions in whatever state of Australia, as long as he’s happy with the source and the final outcome. I’ve been very impressed with Shadowfax’ first five wines, not only because they’re each a thoroughly decent drink, but because Harrop is clearly prepared to make distinctive and flavoursome beverage with a healthy disregard towards mainstream winemaking trends. Each, irrespective of their intensity of flavour, has an attitude of fineness and elegance that I find most appealing. The Sauvignon Blanc Semillon 2000 is a delicate, racy wine whose lightly herby and passionfruit flavours are offset by clean, austere acids and light oak. The Pinot Gris 2000 has a delicate spicy fragrance of pears and apple blossom, before a tight, but generous palate of juicy ripe citrus fruit and a lingering chalky finish. There’s poise and style in the rather reserved and creamy Chardonnay 1999, a wine with bright citrus and stonefruit flavours and an impressive mineral edge. It’s very musky and perfumed and its alcohol perhaps a shade assertive, but the Riesling 2000 presents clear, bright pear, apple and lime riesling qualities and steely definition. The only red in the group, the Shiraz 1999 is a McLaren Vale red with a difference. It’s restrained and very spicy, and with its sweet red berry fruit opens up deliciously into a smooth, lightly smoky wine with a generous palate of ripe fruit and mocha oak. There’s not a hard edge in sight. And the name Shadowfax? Chief amongst horses in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Shadowfax shone by day and passed unseen at night. Like a great chardonnay?
