A winery has to do something pretty special to receive two substantial reviews in OnWine within the space of a year or so. By opening a bottle of every red wine it’s made since its inaugural 1979 vintage, excluding its pinot noir, Dalwhinnie, the leading small vineyard in Victoria’s Pyrenees region, has done just that. For several years Dalwhinnie has been rated amongst Australia’s leading shiraz vineyards, having fine-tuned a style which crosses over between the spicy, briary and somewhat Rhone-ish and the deeply concentrated, densely flavoured expressions of shiraz so popular today. Its wine has little, if anything to do with the more opulent and thickly fruited wines of McLaren Vale or the plush, chocolatey shirazes of the Barossa. Its rare, and not inexpensive Eagle Series Shiraz, takes ‘Rhone-ness’ a stage further, with a strong accent on secondary, earthy and smallgoods flavour development. Dalwhinnie’s cabernet has typically been one of the more robust and extractive of its kind, made in a ripe, plummy, savoury and occasionally minty regional fashion that cries out for an extended spell in the cellar. This tasting confirmed a number of things for me, the first being that Dalwhinnie is principally a shiraz vineyard. At its best its Cabernet is dense, ripe and thickly tannic, deeply flavoured and able to mature for decades, but in virtually every vintage, the Shiraz makes a better wine. While the Shiraz is of comparable longevity, it is possible to enjoy it while young or youthful. In this respect, Dalwhinnie’s Cabernet presents more of a challenge, a bleeding cut of porterhouse nothwithstanding. If there’s a danger facing David Jones every year, that danger is harvest time, especially in warmer vintages. It’s always a juggling act to capture the fruit at its best, ripen tannins and seeds, but there’s little doubt that the best Dalwhinnies avoid the hotness and dehydrated characters present in so many contemporary shirazes. Like many, he’s pushed the gauntlet the closest in 1998, just taking off the fruit in time. Given that Dalwhinnie’s wines come from a single vineyard, I was still surprised by the extent of vintage variation, especially from the Mitchelton decade. I’ve always rated the Pyrenees as one of the most consistent wine regions of Victoria but clearly, especially once they have matured in the bottle, different vintages appear to be pulling away in different directions. If ever such reinforcement was needed today, Dalwhinnie’s evolution shows how clear it is that the best wines are made in the vineyard. In the early days its makers astonished themselves with the big flavours and raw tannins they could capture, and then they sought refinement by harvesting too early. Correcting this approach they pursued sugar ripeness which left flavoursome, if unbalanced wines, while today the quest is for genuine fruit ripeness across the parameters of flavour, tannin and sugar. As such, Dalwhinnie reflects much of the changes to Australia’s approach to viticulture over the last twenty years. Other than a small shed with enough red fermentation capacity to handle the rather limited quantities of the Eagle Series Shiraz, Dalwhinnie has made a habit of outsourcing its winemaking. Consultant Gary Baldwin has kept an eye on the process since 1990. Gary Farr, then the winemaker at Yellowglen, oversaw Dalwhinnie’s winemaking between 1979 and 1982, making the 1982 at Bannockburn. The 1983 vintage was begun by Claude Thibaut at Yellowglen before being finished by Tony Murphy at Merbein, while the 1984 reds were made by Jeffrey Wilkinson at Yellowglen and finished by Gavin Hogg at Mildara Coonawarra. The 1985 and 1986 wines were made in their entirity at Coonawarra by Hogg, while Mount Avoca’s Rod Morrish made the 1987 and 1988 vintages. Chateau Remy’s Vincent Gere made the 1989 wines, while between 1990 and 2000 Dalwhinnie’s cabernet and shiraz were made at Mitchelton. 2001 marks the company’s first vintage at Mount Langi Ghiran, although David Jones does confess that his own winery is imminent, one day. Remarkably, the vineyard has to a large degree exerted itself over the wines throughout these changes, although the move to Mitchelton represents a clear watershed in wine quality. All of a sudden the rich, succulent texture we typically associate with Dalwhinnie’s reds begins to appear, especially in the Shiraz. Since Dalwhinnie has long been a collector’s wine, I thought it worth marking this unique tasting with a full complement of tasting notes.
