Jasper Hill has one of the greatest vineyard sites in Victoria. Its mean-cropped shiraz vineyards, known around the world as Emily’s and Georgia’s Paddocks, can make some of the finest wine in Australia. I’ve just opened a bottle of the 1993 Emily’s Paddock, and it’s bowled me over. It’s been several years since I tasted this wine (November 1998), and back then it was greenish, blocky and hard-edged, just like so many southern Australian wines from this capricious vintage. Today the wine could hardly have looked more different. Beginning dumb and unflattering, it opened slowly in the bottle to reveal a multitude of layers of flavour, from youthful deep, concentrated and almost heavy-handed fruit, to delicate but exotic Eastern spices, hints of black earth and bitumen with restrained, but perfumed French oak. Going by its colour you’d suggest the wine was a maximum of five years old, going by its strength, structure and balance, you’d give it another decade and (much) more. Fully aware that these sort of remarks are likely to excite many of the anonymous contributors to the various wine forums, who imagine that tasting wine is akin to dipping a calibrated meter into a bottle and who think that everything about the way wine develops should be almost boringly predictable, I offer these thoughts simply to illustrate why I have a cellar, and why some of us who don’t yet should perhaps contemplate the idea. No matter how good you might think you are and how good your training has been, you will never get it right with wine all the time. And that’s the wonderful, frustrating, infuriating joy about the whole darned thing.
