Falanghina has found a special place in the Chalmer’s family’s Heathcote vineyard, showing a new face to the southern Italian grape, revealing an exotically aromatic wine of intensity, drive and freshness.
This southern Italian variety has found a striking home in the Chalmers family’s Heathcote vineyard. This is intensely aromatic with notes of pine, fresh dill seeds, makrut lime leaf, mint, pomelo and galangal. There’s a richness of fruit, too, with white currant and poached apple notes. That richness carries to the palate, with fruit weight and texture leading, but the combination of acidity and a burr of leesy phenolics give this shape and decisive direction.
Primarily a Campanian grape, falanghina is grown primarily along or near to the coast, producing wines that show characters of yellow orchard fruits, citrus and green notes. There are two principal types, falanghina beneventana and falanghina flegrea, with the former more reserved and mineral and the latter more open and fruitful. Beneventana is the clone/biotype that has been imported to Australia by Chalmers Nursery.
Heathcote is rugged country, a tinder-dry landscape of rusty iron-rich soils littered with sculpturally stacked granitic boulders. It’s mythical territory, ancient land, and home to some of the world’s oldest viticultural soils. But as a wine region, it is a relatively young one, which saw an explosion of growth in the 90s. Shiraz led the charge, and it became Victoria’s answer to the Barossa or McLaren Vale, producing wines of significant power. But Heathcote is very different to both those places, and it is not that easily defined. Today, shiraz finds myriad expressions, and many other varieties are taking a firm grip, especially those suited to dry and warm climes.
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