2010 Yelland and Papps Divine Shiraz

A typically seductive, ripe, full bodied wine in the Divine range by Yelland and Papps,  smelling and tasting of plush, juicy blackberry, black plum fruit, supported by good quality sweet cedary oak. With air, liquorice and mixed spice open up on the nose.

At 14% abv it has some alcohol heat, though fully in step with the powerful fruit across the palate. A real crowd pleasing wine from a great Barossa Valley vintage. Drink now or cellar 10+ years.

Rating: 95+
ABV: 14%
RRP: $75
Website: http://www.yellandandpapps.com/

2011 Yelland & Papps Devote Greenock Shiraz (Barossa Valley)

A good wine from a tough vintage. A seductive nose of berries, chocolate and a hint of tar. To drink its medium-full bodied, with an appealing liquorice all sorts note. A creamy texture is underpinned by good acidity. Just a hint of mulch a signpost to the wet vintage. If you like your Barossa Shiraz just a touch understated this is lovely drinking.

Rated:

RRP: $35
ABV: 13.7%
Closure: Screwcap
Drink: 2013-2016
Website: www.yellandandpapps.com


Red

2011 Yelland and Papps Vin De Soif (Grenache Mataro Shiraz Carignan)

The new vintage release of the entry-level Yelland and Papps ‘Delight’ range see’s the bottles kitted out in a new, contemporary label that fits snugly with the spirit of the Delight wines.

The Vin De Soif, a new addition to the range, leaps out of the blocks with a surprisingly fragrant, spicy nose of cloves, dried green herbs and salted liquorice. On the palate, the wine is a bit more mellowed; relaxed but generous. Medium bodied with juicy blackberry, dark cherry and raspberry fruits flavours, herbaceous and meaty on the mid and back palate, finishing with soft, drying tannin.
The 14.5% abv does not stand out or throw-out the balance of the wine.
‘Vin de Soif’ can be broadly translated into English as ‘thirst quenching wine’, and as such, this wine is aptly named. You could easily serve it slightly chilled in summer or more conventionally alongside Mediterranean food in the cooler months. Moreish and approachable,  I found it a good value wine to enjoy here and now, saving the contemplation for conversations at the end of the night.

Rating: 89 pts

RRP: $19.95
ABV: 14.5%
Winery Website: www.yellandandpapps.com

Yelland and Papps Devote Greenock Shiraz 2010

The 2010 Yelland and Papps Devote Greenock Shiraz was made using grapes from a single site in the northern Greenock sub-region of the Barossa Valley. Inky purple in colour and with a fruitcake spice and black fruit nose, the wine has impressive, silky blackberry, spicy dark plumb fruit flavours flowing through from the front to back palate, some milk chocolate and chinotto flavours on the finish and pliant, ripe tannins.

The fruit flavours are powerful and sweet, though balanced with the sensitive (and relatively understated) use of new and old American and French oak. This is not a subtle wine, more seductive and overt than demure and suggestive. However, the result is not confected or overwhelming, just enjoyable and moreish.

After three days on the tasting bench, the wine didn’t budge much, other than for the tannins to assert themselves some more and the sultry fruit cake spice.

This is another example of Yelland and Papp’s enjoyable, fruity and flavoursome Devote range, and from a very good vintage – it has enough restraint, expensive oak treatment and structure to suggest it will age nicely in the cellar, yet will please a majority of wine drinkers right now – a ‘win-win’ approach.

Rating: 93pts

RRP: $32
ABV: 14.5%
Website:
Source: Sample

Red's Xmas Wines

Time with family, gorging on wonderful food, and imbibing great wine. That is what Christmas is to me and it’s a time of year I always look forward to. This year has been no exception.

Jacquesson Cuvee no. 734 Champagne – Disgorgement 2 quarter 2010 – Drinking beautifully with fine acidity, strawberry fruit, and a beautiful creaminess. Power and finesse.

2006 Franck Bonville Blanc de Blancs Champagne – A nice change up from the Jacquesson and of equal quality. More taut and with more prominent acidity. Lovely citrus and yeasty flavours. Great length.

Both Champagnes were a hit and while different, people generally found it difficult to split the two

2008 Grosset Polish Hill Riesling – not sure if this is a representative bottle as it was surprisingly developed and forward, compared to when I had this a year ago. The toast, honey and kero that often come with an aged Riesling were already apparent on this occasion. As such it was actually drinking beautifully, having moved into a more generous stage of its life, and was consumed with great gusto. I will be interested to see what future bottles bring to the table

2009 Freycinet Pinot Noir – the great thing about this wine is that it works for both pinotphiles and punters. Around the table at Christmas lunch it was universally enjoyed, and yet undoubtedly this wine had the balance, length, and inherent complexity to age beautifully. Enticing aromas of dark cherry, spice, and forest floor lead to a generous yet refined palate that doesn’t let up through a long finish. Loved drinking this, and envisage loving my other bottles over the next decade. With succulent Turkey, stuffing, gravy, and cranberry sauce it was just the ticket.

2006 Charles Melton Grains of Paradise – I’ve had a lot of great Barossa Shiraz of late, that finds that balance between the inherent power it brings to the table and a sense of restraint and elegance, and personally I’m loving it. This is yet another example. Relatively medium-bodied within its style, there is an intoxicating cedar and spice to this wine that really won me over. Beautiful fruit flows through a long finish. Superb.

Morris Cellar Reserve Grand Liqueur Muscat – liquefied dark chocolate. Yes it’s much more than that, with some lovely nutty notes providing some balance, but the overall impression is one of complete decadence. It went wonderfully well with a plum pudding, and afterwards I needed a nap . . .



Red

2002 Peter Lehmann Stonewell Shiraz (Barossa Valley)

This wine represents Barossa Shiraz at its best. It is a refined and elegant rendition of the style of wine that nevertheless lacks nothing in terms of generosity.

The Stonewell Shiraz is Peter Lehmann’s top wine and 2002 was a fantastic, yet cooler vintage in the Barossa. The fruit was sourced from a range of smaller growers.

This is a wine that is now fully integrated, with hints of secondary flavours apparent, and years in front of it. It has a beautiful bouquet of exotic spice, dark fruits, chocolate, and hints of leather. This bouquet creates high expectations, and the palate delivers. Beautiful fruit, mid palate drive, fine tannins, and fantastic length. It has a lovely emerging earthiness, that adds a wonderful sense of texture as well.

The 2002 Stonewell Shiraz will do the next decade in a canter (cork permitting), and where it peaks is likely to depend on your preference for primary fruit vs secondary, savoury characters. A wonderful wine.


Rated:


RRP: $90
ABV: 14.5%
Website: http://www.peterlehmannwines.com/


Red

2010 Head Brunette Syrah (Barossa Valley)

Put simply, this wine is awesome. I tasted it over 3 days and it just got better and better in that time. From a single vineyard in the Moppa sub-region of the Barossa.

It’s beautifully perfumed and aromatic. It has a bouquet that continued to evolve and at various stages produced notes of blueberry, chocolate, lavender, citrus, five-spice, and a savoury meatiness.

To drink it’s an almost perfect rendition of a balanced, restrained style of Barossa Shiraz. Which is to say it still has a power and richness to it, but it’s all kept in check with lovely natural acidity, and low-ish alcohol. There’s a wonderful complexity of flavour, with many of the same flavours as on the nose, along with a hint of steminess that adds rather than subtracts from the wine, and a lovely earthy minerality. The flow and length of the wine along the palate is a thing of beauty.

It’s a beautiful wine now with a bit of air, but will undoubtedly be better in 5-10 years time. Everything is there to suggest it will age a lot longer to. $45 and worth every penny. Loved it. 4.5 Stars

Rated:


ABV: 13.8%
Website: http://www.headwines.com.au/


Red

Squirrels and Woodchips: Autotune and the Over-use of Oak in Wine

“This is anti-autotune, death of the ringtone

 This ain’t for Itunes, this ain’t for sing-along

I know we facin a recession

But the music yall makin gonna make it the great depression”

Jay Z – D.O.A (Death of Autotune)

I am more a fan of indie guitar music, but Jay Z has a point in D.O.A – the proliferation of songs filled with autotune is not a promising trend for music, especially any musician aiming for some form of artistic credibility.

Personally, I see the overuse of oak in wine as the oenological equivalent to over use of (or in my view, 'any' use of) autotune in the production of music: if the fruit was top quality, the wine would likely be just as good with the oak turned down a few notches. If the fruit was poor quality, no amount of oak will ever fully mask this fact. As with 99% of autotune-heavy music, neither style of wine will live long in the memory, and if it does, it is likely to be for the wrong reasons.

For those not familiar with autotune, it is the computer voice tuning/pitch assistance program that enables even the tone deaf to sound bearable when recorded, and can be tweaked to create a ‘unique’ vocal effect. Musical sadists like T Pain and the Black Eyed Peas have embraced the software, and music has not progressed artistically one iota as a result. Luckily, in the years since Jay Z downloaded on autotune not many artistically credible musicians (across multiple genres) have embraced autotune in the same way as T Pain.

There was consternation in the wine cellar when cult contract wine maker Brice Dickenson suggested their wine could have used a little more new American oak.

Ironically, unlike music with autotune, the wine industry seems more inclined to drown a wide range of different wines - excellent, underrated, average and ordinary - in a layer of oak. Perhaps the lower incidence of death by autotune vs death by oak at the above average to elite level is due to the added production options when making music compared to wine.

The tragedy with overuse of oak in wine is that many wineries inflict it upon their best grapes: their reserve crop. If I had a dollar for every time I tried an estate wine that was far superior to the more expensive liquified oak tree reserve, I would be a millionaire (ok, maybe if I had $150k for every time). Somehow I cannot see Paul McCartney in the studio wanting to add an electronic autotune robot voice to the verses in Yesterday (noting  Yesterday was his Beatles, not Wings era), or Kurt Cobain insisting he have his grungy growl in the chorus of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' soar like a chipmunk as in Cher's horrendous autotune defining song, ‘Believe’.

“Do you believe in wine without oak? I can taste some fruit in this glass,
but really can’t taste it strong enough”

I am not saying every winery does this –unless rudely oaked wine is their house style, the elite winemakers get it right more often than not depending on the fashion of the day. Furthermore, in some very lucky vineyards it is harder to make a bad wine than a good/great one. 

Unfortunately, I have had too many glasses of (relatively) expensive, cellared, over oaked wine; the fruit trying valiantly to peep through in its death-throes. In these situations, I cannot help but think that there are many similar wines out there that could have been timeless classics, were it not for too much tinkering with the oak meter.

For our non-Australian readers, the Australian wine industry has battled its oak (and acid) demons for some time now. You need only compare a late 1990's/early 00s (Parker Points aspiring) Hunter Valley Shiraz with their equivalents being made today to realise how much of a positive difference reducing the amount of new oak had made to the wines. The Region’s ‘voice’ is heard, unaccompanied and solo: infinitely more enjoyable and long lasting without the wine equivalent of autotune smothering it. This example is one I would love to see more often in some other regions.

The Black Eyed Peas inspect one of their many low-yielding, biodynamically grown Pinot and Riesling vineyards in between recording of their new autotune-lathed album.

At the lower end of the wine market, it is all out marketing and stylistic warfare. We have wine companies marketing non-vintage fruit and herb infused cooler as wine, low calorie fizzy alcoholic grape juice as wine, and the topic of this post, cheap, sweet, heavily oaked (chipped) reds and whites.

At this end of the wine and music market, the use of oak and autotune is not so much of a tragedy as a lazy lost opportunity. The $5-$15 wine segment is as much awash with sugary sweet wines as it is heavily oaked wines – most commonly in combination, though there are more than enough straight out sweet wines.

As with the lower end wine market, the music industry is overflowing with sugary sweet pop and RnB songs that chart one week and are forgotten the next. The music is generic, the style derivative, the attention span of the listener fleeting, and the cultural impact of the song, negligible.

Part of me would love to see smarter, well-crafted throw-away pop songs being produced, or a higher percentage of intelligently conceived, quaffable wines released.

One is, stupid, cynical, sickly sweet, infantile and supposedly attractive to the 25- 35 year old female demographic. The other is David Beckham
      

However, in this segment of the music and wine markets, autotune and heavily oaked wine is merely one of a multitude of problems facing both industries and the topic of a much longer conversation (to be held with a glass of oaky Cabernet in hand and the dulcet, autotune-affected tones of the Black Eyed Peas playing in the background. Not.)

2009 Yelland & Papps Devote Greenock Shiraz (Barossa Shiraz)

While 2009 was not a perfect vintage in the Barossa, given that early heatwave, it ended up being a lot better than initial reports suggested. This wine more or less reflects this, having a touch of warmth, but otherwise being a damn good Shiraz.

It has an expressive nose of berries, musk, oak, and spice. It smells fresh. It tastes pretty fresh as well with some beautiful berry fruit on the front palate. There’s some reasonable focus here to with a nice line and length, never letting it get too broad. Some lovely spice and malt. Plenty of yum factor and on a cold winter’s night with a T-bone steak this was the perfect match. That touch of warmth would make me question its long-term potential, but right now it’s drinking beautifully and should do so for the next few years. A step-up from the 2008.

Rated:


RRP: $32
ABV: 14.5%
Website: http://yellandandpapps.com/


Red

The Cerebral Hedonist

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
~ Oscar Wilde


What takes your fancy? That which is cerebral, or that which washes over you in waves of hedonistic pleasure? This could be a more general question about your attitude to life, but is also a relevant question with wine.

For anyone who drinks wine, from the casual drinker to a devoted tragic like myself, the concept of a hedonistic wine is probably pretty self-evident and something most of us have experienced. In a very broad sense, it will be a flavoursome wine whose charms will be immediately apparent.

That being the case, what is a cerebral wine? This is perhaps less evident. When someone talks or writes about a wine being “cerebral”, to me it signifies that it is first and foremost a wine of structure. A cerebral wine might seemingly lack flavour in comparison, but rather has you thinking about things like its shape, its fine line of acidity, its powdery tannins, its sense of texture. For the more casual wine drinker, these concepts might seem a bit abstract. Moreover, if you’re drinking a “cerebral” wine, especially in its youth, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about and why it warrants a $60 price tag. Conversely there is many a wine lover who go a bit gaga over this type of wine, as something worthy of contemplation and potential future greatness.

Of course, it’s not an either or proposition. While a wine might have a bias towards one of these broad traits, it will very often have a reasonable amount of the other characteristic as well. And indeed there are good wines that really don’t exhibit either trait, and fit into a more luncheon claret type mould. However, arguably the greatest wines are both cerebral and hedonistic. In the same way that great classical music stirs both the purist and the public, and some great films can not only be enjoyed, but also appreciated, a great wine for me sits on a bedrock of structure worthy of contemplation while also enabling you to sit back and savour its layers of flavour. It delivers the best of both worlds.

The interesting thing for me are those wines that have a predominance of one trait in youth, and then engender the question as to whether they will ever exhibit enough of the other trait to become a great wine. An ageworthy and complex wine. For a wine that might be described as hedonistic in youth, there is always the question as to whether it has enough balance and structure to really develop and improve with time. Barossa Valley Shiraz is perhaps the most obvious example in Australia of a style of wine that has typically sat on the hedonistic side of the fence. When drinking a young Shiraz from this region, more often than not its charms are immediately evident, and there’s generally no shortage in pleasure that this style of wine brings to the table. What is less evident is whether leaving a bottle of Barossa Shiraz in the cellar for 10 years or more will see it much improved. Will the structure of the wine enable it to age well, and indeed is there enough inherent complexity there to warrant ageing it for that long. For the very best Barossa Valley Shiraz the answer is absolutely yes, but for the majority I would argue that it is debatable, and that the greatest amount of drinking enjoyment is to be had in the first 5 years. The question for which there is often a fluid answer, is how to tell which of these wines will be the former, and which will be the latter.

Conversely, there are wines that seemingly have the structure of a great wine, but in their first few years of existence you are forced to question whether they will ever generate enough flesh or flavour to provide real drinking pleasure. They are wines whose grapes might well be picked on the under-ripe side of ripe, and whose acidity is rather prominent. They are wines that will often be treated in a rather gentle way in the winery, with for example a lesser percentage of new oak (or no new oak at all). They are often challenging wines that require thought as to where they are heading given time. The new vogue of lean Australian Chardonnays in many instances fall into this category. I’ve reviewed a number of Chardonnays on this site, where I’ve appreciated the structure of the wine, but have nevertheless questioned whether they will ever build enough flavour and generosity for my tastes. Lets hope they do, as it’s arguably one of the most enjoyable things in wine appreciation to see a wine go from one of structure and promise in its youth, through to something complex and enjoyable over 5, 10, or 15 years.

In my cellar I have wines that cover all these permutations. Wines that give great drinking pleasure now, but that I have an inkling may also go the distance. Wines that are somewhat austere and unyielding, wines of structure, but that I believe will blossom with time. And finally wines that would seemingly enable you have your cake and eat it to, drinking well now but with everything in place to age with confidence. Only time will tell how these different styles of wines ultimately age and develop. My hope is that they will all age well and help me embrace my inner cerebral hedonist . . .


Red