Australia has a long traditional of making world-class fortified wines. As a group, their intensity and sweetness, plus their strength and smoothness, tends to lend themselves to the Chinese palate. Made with the addition of alcoholic spirit to table wines either during or after their fermentation, they typically contain at least 17 percent alcohol by volume, while many contain much more. As such, there are strong cues with the rice wines commonly enjoyed around China today.
By increasing the level of alcohol in a still-fermenting wine, the fermentation is immediately brought to a halt, leaving whatever sugar still remains to lend sweetness to the finished wine. Dry fortifieds are instead made by adding the spirit to wines once they have fermented dry.
It’s not very often that you see a vintage year on a bottle of fortified wine. Most are blends of many different years, nurtured by a complex fractional blending system known as a solera or a derivation of it. A solera resembles a stack of barrels in carefully ordered layers with the oldest wine in the barrels at the bottom. Wine is drawn out of the bottom layer for bottling, leaving room for wine from the next layer to be moved down. This initiates a flow-like effect in which wine is moved from each barrel to the layer below all the way up the stack, so that there is ultimately room in the top layer for the new year’s wine.
Inside the solera, the fortified wine undergoes a slow and controlled oxidation, resulting from the imperceptible passage of oxygen through the pores of the wood and into the wine. Ageing in this fashion mellows and softens flavour, increasing both wine complexity and concentration.
Here are three of Australia’s finest fortified wines, each a perfect antidote to the coming Australian winter
Seppeltsfield Solero DP116 Aged Flor Apera (Barossa Valley)
A complex, nutty, faintly honeyed and citrusy sherry style that initially began life as a pale-coloured and racy young Fino style. Additional time in old, neutral barrels has enabled the wine to develop more colour, depth of perfume and complexity, while its palate has fleshed and filled out with more roundness and depth. Finishing with exceptional length and savoury qualities, it’s the perfect winter’s solution to pre-dinner drinks or else to be taken to the table where it matches perfectly with a wide range of soups from both western and Chinese cuisine.
Penfolds Grandfather Rare Tawny (South Australia)
Here is an iconic Australian example of a traditional tawny port style in which wines from thirteen different grape varieties are matured separately for more than 12 years before being introduced to a solero-styled blending system that presently contains vintages from 1960 to 2004. Ultimately bottled with an average age exceeding twenty years, the Grandfather has a relatively pale, green-edged tawny colour and a raisined, fruitcake-like bouquet lifted by mellow, high quality spirit. It’s deeply concentrated in flavour, warm and gentle, with an assertive core of lusciuous, beautifully preserved fruit that persists long and sweet. While similar in style to many rice wines produced in China and served with a meal, this is perhaps best to enjoy towards the end of dinner, or afterwards.
Old Premium Rare Liqueur Muscat (Rutherglen)
One of Australia’s most distinctive and definitive wines, this is an artfully blended dessert wine that marries the profound richness and complexity of ancient base wines with enough youthful material to retain freshness and brightness. With its browning, khaki-like colour, its profoundly raisined, floral, spicy and chocolatey bouquet precedes a palate of extraordinary intensity, sweetness and lusciousness that delivers an endless impression of finely balanced fruit and cask-aged development. Some regions around the world create wines of similar style, none of comparable quality. A wine to savour, it’s best with chocolates or cheese.
