A textural, mineral-driven version of sauvignon blanc that shows how good this variety can get with a little bottle age.
This wine offers a compelling and heady bouquet of ripe guava, fresh feijoa, pineapple rind, lemongrass, lemon balm, creamy vanilla and sugar snap pea tendril, with a tiny touch of durian funk and a pleasantly earthy/mineral hint of motor oil providing a bass note. The palate is bright with acidity, and shows a slightly creamy texture thanks to ten months of lees ageing. No barrels were harmed in the making of this wine, though, so while those lees add texture and a savoury complexity, this is a wine that doesn’t tip over into full fumé blanc territory – its stainless-steel élevage maintains a firm spine of freshness that helps drive the wine down the palate. The finish is long and vibrant, with a crystalline mineral note that helps hold the fruit characters in focus long after each sip. This is a wine that demonstrates the virtues of cellaring high-quality sauvignon blanc, showing layers of complexity and depth that only time in bottle can generate.
When you think of sauvignon blanc, it’s hard not to think of New Zealand almost immediately, and the pungently expressive examples from Marlborough. But sauvignon also contributes to some of France’s most noble wines – principally in the Loire Valley and Bordeaux – as well as a huge diversity of expressions in Australia, both bottled solo and in blends.
Lees are simply the solid bits in a wine, which are often, but not always, removed from a wine prior to bottling. They’re mainly dead yeast cells that have done their job turning sugar to alcohol during fermentation, but lees can be really any particulate matter in a wine, including fragments of grape skins and the like. The lees can play a big role in a wine, too, with wine kept on its lees (or sur lie, as the French say) developing more texture and sometimes creamy and cheesy aromatic notes (sometimes nice, sometimes not).
The wine zone of Western Victoria contains the three major regions of the Grampians, the Pyrenees and Henty. Being the furthest inland to the north-east, the Pyrenees is more continental in climate with warm days and cold nights. The Pyrenees were planted to vines in the 19th century, with the last vines disappearing in the 1940s, before replanting in the 1960s. Interestingly, sparkling wine was an early focus in the Pyrenees, though the warm summer days make ripening later picked red varieties, such as cabernet sauvignon, a reliable proposition. The fact that both things are possible is testament to the heterogenous nature of the region. The modern founders are still the region’s most acclaimed names, such as Blue Pyrenees, Taltarni, Mount Avoca and Dalwhinnie.
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