The first and only Australian example of a dry wine made from the Hungarian variety furmint also happens to be an absolutely delicious drop. With its deft balance of nuance and detail against big flavours and palate presence, we can chalk this wine up as another win for Brian Freeman – one of Australia’s foremost experts in alternative varieties.
A beautiful burnished gold colour in the glass, this wine leads with a cider-like nose of bruised green apple pulp and slippery apple skins, backed with rich, unctuous notes of lanolin. Underneath this, notes of hay, clover flower, beeswax, Greek mountain tea, lemon blossom and lemon pith gradually emerge. On the palate, though, it’s fresher than the relatively rich nose suggests, with a zesty acidity that pushes those apple flavours down the palate in a broad, sherbet-like sweep – not at all linear or piercing, but definitely mouthwatering and refreshing. There’s serious flavour and fruit presence here that leads to a persistent finish – one with pronounced chalky minerality and a fine, slippery apple-skin texture. A precise touch of phenolic bitterness punctuates the finish, adding length and extra character. It’s a wine that can stand proudly next to Hungary’s best examples of dry furmint – and yet more proof that Brian Freeman is one of Australia’s masters of alternative varieties.
Although furmint is a rarity in Australian vineyards, it has been present here for a very long time – in fact, it was probably first brought to the country as part of James Busby’s famous ‘Busby Collection’ in 1830, and the odd rogue furmint vine can still be found in old vineyards in Victoria. Despite this history, most Australian wine-lovers will know it (if they know of it at all) as the key grape variety of Hungary’s famous sweet wine region Tokaji, where controlled infection from the fungus Botrytis cinerea concentrates the grape’s sugars to a luscious nectar. Given that demand for this style of wine is (unfortunately) on the wane, a small movement of young producers in Hungary have started to make very interesting dry wines from the variety, showcasing its fundamental versatility.
Centred around the regional centre of Young in New South Wales, north-west of Canberra, Hilltops is (as the name suggests) a high-elevation wine region. This altitude, alongside its distance from the Pacific Ocean and the protection of the Great Dividing Range, gives it a desirably cool and continental climate, with chilly winters, warm summer days, and cool nights that help grapes keep freshness and acidity. Despite its advantageous climate, its distance from Sydney means that it has not experienced the same level of viticultural development as other cool-climate wine regions in New South Wales such as Orange, although an emerging groundswell of quality-minded producers is changing this.
Most wine consumers are familiar with only a small handful of the 1300+ grape varieties currently turned into wine. These well-known varieties are often called ‘international’ varieties because, thanks to consumer demand, they’re now grown across a wide range of climatic conditions worldwide (even if they nearly all have French origins). But there’s far more to the world of wine than pinot noir, chardonnay, and shiraz – and, as it happens, many of these relatively rare grape varieties are a better fit for Australia’s climatic conditions than the French grapes that continue to dominate our vineyard area. While many wine snobs will unthinkingly turn their nose up at varieties they feel are insufficiently ‘noble’, Australia’s wine drinkers are in general more supportive of alternative varieties than wine drinkers in other countries – thanks to the pioneering efforts of our viticultural community and institutions such as the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show (AAVWS). And of course, what counts as an ‘alternative’ variety can change rapidly – in the early 1990s hardly anyone in Australia had heard of pinot gris/grigio, let alone consumed any, but it’s now Australia’s third most important white grape variety by harvest weight.
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