On a couple of days holiday, I am doing my level best to chill out away from Australian wine for a couple of days. But that doesn’t prevent me from some casual research; in this instance a couple of maturing Australian wines from very different parts of the country. Bindi is a celebrated small vineyard in the Macedon Ranges region, located just to the south of the town of Gisborne. 1998 was the second time its owners, Bill and Michael Dhillon, and their winemaking colleague Stuart Anderson, kept aside a small amount of fruit taken from vines planted virtually on straight eroded quartz rock. I’ve always enjoyed the Quartz Chardonnay 1998. It remains today – as a wine now offering everything it was ever going to do – a beautifully supple, elegant reflection of a particular unrepeatable terroir. Great babyfat texture, wonderful nutmeal, honeyed and toasty development, while the vineyard’s characteristic minerality and concentration of fruit remain entirely unimpaired. Just the way an individual vineyard wine should be. A wonderful wine. From a somewhat larger maker comes another individual vineyard wine, the debut 1994 vintage of Orlando’s Centenary Hill Shiraz, which for reasons I don’t understand has slipped beneath the radar of many people who would actually enjoy it. Owned by the Koch family, who are first cousins of the same Gramps who established Orlando, Centenary Hill was planted in 1921, about a kilometre north of the Orlando winery and near where Jacob’s Creek intersects the road from Lyndoch to Tanunda. It’s a south Barossa style, again very reflective of its terroir, with a perfume of cloves and cracked pepper and the pristine flavours of liqueured red cherries. While it doubtless has many years still ahead of it, its penetrative, youthful flavours of blackberries, licorice and superbly integrated oak and tannin culminate in a seamless, almost endless finish. It’s a true classic, presenting the Barossa at its absolute best from the excellent but cooler vintage of 1994, at a lightweight (by modern times) alcoholic strength of 14%. The only bad news about this wine is that this was my last bottle.
