I recently bought a bottle of Curlewis Reserve Pinot Noir 2002, a wine that has received some astonishingly high reviews and ratings from other critics. I had not tasted much wine from Curlewis in recent times, and given the wine’s status, it seemed a good place to begin to reacquaint myself with what has since become a high-profile maker. The bottle was purchased from a small retailer in the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne for a price of $79. I tasted the wine and posted this review on this site shortly thereafter: ‘An incredibly hazy wine with an extraordinary level of suspended solids and opaqueness. Its nose is wild, meaty and herbal, with cooked tomato and cherry-like fruit over powerful influences of dried herbs including sage and bay leaf. There is also a worrying level of meaty, horse hair-like undertones. The palate is initially cooked, forward and intensely fruited, before thinning out towards a drying, metallic and lean finish seriously deficient in fruit and freshness. There’s rawness and flatness, plus a lingering herbal meatiness. Very likely to dry up very quickly, and with an apparent level of brettanomyces that is likely to dominate the wine in the near future. (Geelong, $79 retail, approx., 14.5, drink 2003-2004)’ Two days later, the wine’s maker, Rainer Breit, was on the phone. He suggested to me that the bottle I had purchased was in fact one of seven or so cases that had managed to escape onto the market, which he has since been unsuccessfully trying to recall. He explained that these bottles had been affected by a filter that had blown during bottling, which accounted for its exceptionally high solid content and the resulting spoilage characters I observed. Since that time, Rainer and his partner Wendy Oliver (no relation of mine but a former attendee at some of my wine courses some time back) have shown me vertical tastings of each of their wines. I am presently in the process of writing up those notes for the site. Interestingly, the exercise has thrown up a succession of pertinent issues that cut across the business of crafting a niche as a top-level maker of small volume wine. Over the next few days I’m going to be exploring these issues in some detail, using the Curlewis story as a fine example of the complexities involved in creating and then fine-tuning a quality reputation. Incidentally, as part of the process, which included a vertical of the Reserve Pinot Noir back to 1998, I re-tasted a bottle of similarly affected 2002 vintage wine that Rainer Breit had decanted off its in-bottle deposit. While this bottle was marginally superior to that which I had tasted (without decanting) previously, the issues of under-ripeness, volatile acidity and brettanomyces spoilage were sufficient to keep its score to 15.0/82. I hope to find a non-affected bottle one day, and the moment I do, will update my ratings. However, the more recent Curlewis wines certainly present positive news, with a significant improvement on its still relatively recent early days, as Breit and Oliver learn more about their site and how to refine its wines. Without giving too much away, some of the highlights of the tasting were the exceptional 2003 Chardonnay, the 2003 Shiraz and a pre-bottling sample of the (non Reserve) 2004 Pinot Noir. Click here for a full and extensive update on Curlewis and its phiosophy on pinot noir.
