There’s no doubt that it’s the age of the retrospect. They are building Mini Coopers again in England, outwardly identical to the cars of the past, but with thrills under the bonnet enough to seduce even the Japanese. Flares are back, it you’ve the legs to wear them; the Beatles are reforming and Frank Sinatra just won a Grammy. BRL Hardy has joined in the party and re-launched the Leasingham Bin 56. That, I am here to tell you, is great news indeed. I could have killed them the day they dropped the Bin 56. Especially for a pompous-sounding name like Leasingham Domaine Cabernet Sauvignon Malbec, I ask you! Instantly the definitive Australian country red wine was given a name to drop at Double Bay and everyone’s idea of a cosmetic label in case you missed the subtleties of the rename. Offended and thoroughly sick of being told that I was no longer the sort of person that should have been buying the wine, I didn’t. The losers, in no particular order, were the Hardy Wine Company, the owners of the brand and thousands of enthusiasts like myself. So now, when all that was old is new again, Bin 56 has risen from the dead, just as good as ever before. If not better, I do declare. The wine of my long university afternoons, when as far as I cared if it was red and any good it was certainly Australian and value for money, has returned to shine. Older now, and perhaps a little wiser, to tackle a recent vintage of Leasingham Bin 56 is for me to momentarily beam down, Star Trek style, to a favourite, shady watering hole where only the most friendly species meet. Bin 56 never lacked flavour. You could always tell regardless of whether or not you knew anything about wine, that it had what it takes to improve in the bottle. You just felt that. And the fact that it was a blend of cabernet sauvignon with that most individual of the Bordeaux varieties, malbec, reassured you that no matter how conservative your exterior, inwardly you were always drinking on the edge. From the late ‘seventies to the early ‘eighties, it was the favourite red wine of thousands. It had its classics, too. There was the unforgettable, long-living ’71, rare as an honest politician and twice as memorable. And the super, seductive ’75, whose edges have only recently surrendered to the inevitability of time. Bin 56 was no pushover, no matter which way you looked at it; all of which made the decision to scrap it the more absurd. The new wines given the Bin 56 label have quickly captured the imagination of the doting admirer, although the 1992 vintage is vastly more memorable than its predecessor, which I found thin and more of pretender to its name. There’s more overt new oak in the ’92 Bin 56 than its devotees will recall, but its plummy cabernet fits ever so neatly with the pungent greenish and vegetative qualities courtesy the malbec. The palate is guaranteed to excite those who find joy in the fresh blackcurrant and minty expression of many top young Australian red wines, while the length and firmness of the finish reassure those of us to whom cellar life counts for more than a theoretical possibility. The only clues to its Clare Valley origins are the slight but unique eucalypt/ menthol/cream characteristics that are the regional hallmarks of so many classic wines from this picturesque vignoble. My pleasure at greeting the Bin 56 to my table like an old friend is almost rivalled by the re-emergence of a faithful old sister in Bin 61 Shiraz. The new release is from 1992 – a voluminous, rich and slightly tarry wine, with raspberry fruit and chocolate, cedar oak. Aside from these traditional bin number labels, Leasingham’s new up-tempo Classic Clare range includes a very polished 1991 Cabernet Sauvignon and a blockbuster of a 1991 Shiraz, a monumental red of richness and fruit flavour without excessive portiness. Australian shiraz is so good today that we must all wonder why we treated it as a second-rate citizen for so long. Furthermore, Hardys have revitalised another name closer to their home in the McLaren Vale, Chateau Reynella. I always found it difficult to equate the robust, traditional old reds made under this name with the thin, simple and mulberry-flavoured wines produced when Chateau Reynella caught the bug of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Today, however, Chateau Reynella has re-emerged as one of the key mature, low-yielding red vineyards in the Southern Vales. BRL Hardy’s winemakers have returned without apology to traditional techniques such as open concrete fermenters and basket presses to recreate the dense, robust, yet finely tuned red wines which experienced wine enthusiasts recall with fondness and new converts to wine are keenly discovering for their first time. The quality revealed by Chateau Reynella’s reds from the 1988, 1990 and 1991 vintages leads one to wonder what great wines we might have had in our cellars today had not most Australian winemakers tried to re-invent the red wine making wheel throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. More than any of the four wine companies which control the overwhelming majority of the wine grapes in Australia, BRL Hardy has been most uncertain in its identity and inconsistent in its branding of its red wines. Hardys has consistently bemoaned its image as a white wine maker, yet with only a few exceptions, the Eileen Hardy red being one of them, it has not given the public sufficient reason to buy its reds ahead of such brands as Penfolds and Lindemans. Perhaps now that they have made two such obviously correct decisions to drop the new and revert to the old, BRL Hardy will begin to establish a solid red wine base, perhaps one day even to rival its competitors.
