So what, you probably never ask yourselves, does a wine writer do when on holiday? Today has been a cold, wintery, cloudy and meteorologically challenging sort of a day during which the beach at Torquay was simply out of the question for all but Georgia, the German Shepherd. For her, at least, it was indeed Movie World and a trip down a rampaging Tasmanian gorge all rolled into one. But enough about her Ð she doesn’t drink wine.Lunch was spent tasting some of the most exciting new wine in Australia Ð Doug Neal’s collection of 2008 reds and Chardonnay under the Paradise IV label, a brilliantly revitalised site in Geelong’s Moorabool Valley that is as close to the cutting edge of Australian wine today as it is possible to sit without experiencing a very sharp pain between the buttocks. Look for them and drink them. You will be happier for the experience.Then, after yet another beachside sortie with the Shepherd, for whom no amount of bad weather is enough to shield the sun from her day, I returned to the beachside base for a decent glass of red. From a little village between Sienna and Florence comes the Chianti Classico of a family that has been tilling the same soils for over four hundred years: the Mazzeis. And they drilled it straight through the big posts with the 2004 vintage, of which I managed to pick up a bottle locally, for just under $50.The older I get, the less obvious I want my wine to be. I’ll still mark up the big, up-front show ponies for whatever they’re worth Ð and mark them down for whatever they’re not Ð but if I want a bottle of red to share (which means I’ll be struggling to score half with my wife, especially if Tuscany has anything to do with it), I aim squarely for the elegant, the savoury, the medium to full weight and the dry. Which is why I could hardly be happier right now, given that there is but a tiny splash of this perfect Tuscan elixir remaining in the glass. Had I another bottle in the place, it would be opened before you finished this paragraph.Here’s a wine that slowly unfolds itself. Entered into an Australian wine show it would be tossed out with the slops. There’s no hurrying this wine; it’s a sleeper; a savoury and astringent red of medium to full weight that appears only to open another of its endless layers of flavour in nothing but its own time. But once it’s really there, in your glass, in your own hand, it’s pure treasure. Heady, wild and briary, it’s long, finely crafted and astringent, with deep, dark sour-edged plum and cherry fruit backed by the most alluringly complex presence of earthy, leathery and mineral character and underpinned by a grade of bony, fine-grained tannin so dusty it could have blown up from beside a desert road.I absolutely love this wine, and I want more of it. None of which has anything to do with the fact that I know the place it comes from, having spent some time in Fonterutoli several years ago (at my own expense), during which I commenced what I hope will ultimately fulfill itself as a lifetime’s relationship with pasta and wild boar.Sadly, while Victoria’s surf coast has much going for it, I can’t help feeling I’m drinking this fantastic wine somewhat out of context. Which is why although I’m here, I’m already working hard on my next holiday plans!
