Today it was my pleasure again to front up at the Melbourne Cricket Club’s Long Room Wine and Food Society’s Old Bottle Lunch. Members of this august society are petitioned to bring along old and interesting bottles from their cellar to enjoy around a very long table over a long lunch at the MCG. It is my job to taste each and every wine so presented, and to attempt intelligible comment thereafter and thereon. It is always a very mixed bag, and today the full extent of the highs and lows of cellaring wine were put on show. While corks and cellaring conditions were to blame for some of the disappointments, vintage conditions and winemaking were clearly responsible for some members feeling slightly miffed after opening their ‘treasures’. Here are some of my highlights, for which I sincerely thank all those present: Chambers Rosewood Vintage Port 1980 Classic ripe, licorice-like spicy and spirity Australian style beginning to turn savoury and chocolate-like. Baileys Shiraz 1984 Porty, black and tarry; leathery, sweet and mature. Moss Wood Cabernet Sauvignon 1984 Still firm, measured, intact. Vasse Felix Cabernet Sauvignon 1984 (375 ml) Deeply flavoured, intact, hard-edged. Saltram Pinnacle Coonawarra Beerenauslese Riesling 1984 (375 ml) Remarkably fresh and extremely intense, luscious but not cloying, with some savoury characters helping to clean up the palate; a big surprise. Moss Wood Semillon 1989 Unbelievably fresh and youthful wine with astonishing primary fruit flavour, length and freshness, plus the beginnings of bottle-aged complexity. Orlando St Hugo Cabernet Sauvignon 1990 Developing classic cabernet complexity, still ages to go. Baileys Shiraz 1991 Big, black and brooding. Penfolds St Henri 1991 Great wine, firm for a St Henri, still a pup. Mount Pleasant Rosehill Shiraz 1991 Wonderfully complex and developed expression of the soft, smooth Australian ‘Burgundy’ style. Tyrrell’s Vat 9 1992 Astonishingly ripe, fleshy, dark and youthful; a classic in the making. Chateau Tahbilk Marsanne 1993 Very mature bouquet, nuts and honeysuckle, long complete palate with fruit sweetness and an intact, refreshing finish. Henschke Keyneton Estate 1994 Very spicy and scented, a little confected on the nose, but fleshing out, long finish. Dalwhinnie Cabernet Sauvignon 1994 A deep, dark, concentrated and powerfully structured pup of a wine. Henschke Mount Edelstone 1996 Perfumed, spicy and peppery, developing richness and depth, excellent structure. Lindemans Coonawarra Pyrus 1996 Deep, dark and bursting with pristine fruit; great oak and fine tannins, needs time. Hardy’s Eileen Hardy Chardonnay 1997 Developed, complex, still fresh and lively, not too toasty and buttery; good wine. It was also one of those rare events at which the oldest was actually the best. In this case it was a truly brilliant bottle of a 1969 Seppelt Great Western Shiraz sourced from the St Peters and St Ethel’s vineyards (this one has since been grubbed out), which had been given a typed-style label. Wonderfully fresh and intact, with an ethereal, musky and peppery fragrance of polished leather and cedar, its palate remains incredibly youthful, displaying a great length of fruit sweetness and a velvet-like spine of soft tannins. The wine was in no danger whatsoever of reaching its use-by date. Having just checked in with Ian McKenzie, who knows the old Great Western wines of Seppelt as well as anyone alive, he remembers this wine with great affection, saying it was always rated as one to keep. Thirty-five years down the track, I couldn’t agree more.
