Anyone interested in serious Western Australian wine will be acutely aware of how difficult it has been to obtain decent quantities of wines such as Leeuwin Estate, Cullen, Howard Park, Pierro, Moss Wood and Cape Mentelle, especially at what might once have been considered a decent price. There’s certainly an undercurrent of new prestige wineries in Margaret River and to a lesser extent in the Great Southern, as names like Chateau Xanadu, Vasse Felix, Cape Clairault, Redbook, Lenton Brae, Plantagenet, Brooklyn Valley and (less frequently of late) Evans & Tate produce stellar wines to fill a steadily widening vaccuum. One winery which has really answered the challenge in spectacular style is Voyager Estate, the ambitious project of South African-born Michael Wright, who has spectacularly redeveloped what began as Freycinet Estate in the Cape Dutch style of his home country’s winelands. You can’t do much better for under $40 in Australia today than to take a serious look at it. Voyager’s early wines were rather attractive, promising semillons and clever blends of this variety with sauvignon blanc, but it was after tasting the very sumptuous, concentrated and very stylish 1994 Cabernet Merlot that I really started to pay it some serious attention. That wine was followed by a more restrained and elegant wine from 1995 with serious style pretensions to Bordeaux and it, in turn, by a wine of equal elegance and poise from 1996. These are clearly Margaret River wines, their background of wet, pungent earth stamps them as that, but they are as contemporary and stylish as all but the rarest of the more restrained expressions of Australian cabernet from Moss Wood, Mount Mary and Cullen. And when you’re looking at a wine from which you’ll receive decent change from $40 per bottle, it’s serious value indeed. Don’t let the grass grow under your feet. Winemaker Stuart Pym has refined the Semillon into a reserved, lean and laid-back expression, with some of the grassiness almost expected of Margaret River semillon, balanced with intense fruit and lively acids. The Chardonnay is a deliciously plump and plush wine, bursting with an harmonious marriage of fruit and oak with winemaker-influenced malolactic and lees-derived flavours. At present it’s relatively early to mature next to wines like Pierro and Leeuwin, but the latent potential is obvious. One of the most admirable features of Voyager’s wines is their maturity at release. Not many makers are today releasing reds at three years of age and whites at two. The benefits of this extra year become obvious once you taste them. But with even more maturity are two wines in the pipeline, each given the new top-billing ‘Tom Price’ label. The first is a Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blend from 1996 which is nothing short of superb. It’s a fully oaked and worked wine made in a supercharged version of a top Bordeaux blanc. Pym has brought back some of his experience working at Domaine de Chevalier, custodians of the style, and it shows. A red blend of Bordeaux varieties is also imminent, but I have yet to sample a bottle in assessable condition (the bottle, that is). But my biggest tip of this story relates to another white wine, made at Voyager by Pym and Janice McDonald of Devil’s Lair fame. It’s another sauvignon blanc-semillon blend which rejoices under the rather memorable name of Suckfizzle Augusta. I admit, my first inclination was perhaps to look for something else to taste instead, but I’m glad I didn’t. Here is one of the raciest, most vibrant, long, refreshing and utterly alive wines I have experienced from these varieties when grown in Australia. The 1997 vintage is virtually sold out, but make a note right now to look for the 1998 edition. Trust me!
