Bring something exceptional from your cellar, was the command. Ten of us showed up with what turned out to be a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of wine, with every post a winner. Reds were served in pairs of broadly similar weight.
- 2015 Veuve Clicquot Champagne Brut Vintage - France, Champagne
{cork, 12.5%} [Greg] Disgorged Jan-2025, according to the back label. Very mild yeast & sourdough aromas. Hint of grapefruit. Medium/full weight for fizz, seems quite youthful, with dry citrus flavours still apparent. Wants some cellaring. Bubbles quite big and vigorous. The decade on lees has been a kind of statis as far as development goes! The medium/long finish augers well, but nuance to the flavour isn’t really apparent to me yet. - 2003 Egon Müller Scharzhofberger Riesling Kabinett - Germany, Mosel Saar Ruwer
{cork, 10%, AP 12 04} [Graeme] From an ultra-ripe year; feels like a Kabinett/Spatlese cross. Solid yellow, but not too dark. Developing and seductive aromas and flavours of apple custard, a hint of apricot, maybe pineapple. Quite a fruit salad. Palate is quite rich without ever seeming to veer into off-dry, and yet it’s quite a honeyed sort of finish. Ripe but still finishing crisply; great balance of acid & sugar. Only seems to be light/medium in weight; there’s a lacelike delicacy to the texture. No ullage, not served too cold either. Will keep, although I think it’s probably at best now. - 2021 Alan McCorkindale Pinot Noir Single Barrel - New Zealand, South Island, Canterbury, Waipara
{screwcap, 13.5%} [Glenn] Perfumed and fragrant. Roses and strawberries, with a faint malty oak hint. Palate has a proper earthy fungal sense, the oak is very much hidden; it’s light-bodied but with a great range of flavours from floral roses to a gentle meaty character. It maybe only light-bodied, but it’s quite persistent, with medium acidity and low chalky tannins. Still improving I reckon; another five years should see peak. Tidy effort. - 2016 Bersano Barolo Riserva Badarina - Italy, Piedmont, Langhe, Barolo
{14.5%, cork} [Dan] A little muted after the young pinot preceding it, but the class of this is very much present. Absurdly young for a decade old, there’s a little bit of tar and dirt to offset the cherry, meaty aromas. The medium-bodied palate is polished, evenly balanced, with roses and dark cherry flavours riding on medium dusty tannins and medium acidity. Oak in tiny supporting role only. Only partly developed, really, and steering a line between the best of old and new style Barolos. Will sail through the next ten years, improving all the while. Really impressive. - 2012 Penfolds Shiraz St. Henri - Australia, South Australia
{screwcap, 14.5%} [Gordon] Double-decanted a couple of hours beforehand. Plush and only partly-developed nose of roses and raspberry jam. Oak adds depth, not flavour. Medium/full weight in this ripe, high-quality vintage, tasting as you expect from the nose, with medium powdery tannins and medium/low acidity. Silky smooth palate, almost chocolatey, balanced towards the front of the tongue a bit. Medium/long warm finish. Still very much on the upslope of development. Interesting stylistic contrast with the ‘matching’ Clonakilla SV – like looking both backward and forwards, as someone remarked. Warm & cool climate contrasts, really. - 2009 Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier - Australia, New South Wales, Southern New South Wales, Canberra District
{screwcap, 13.5%} [Stephen] The ever-varying amount of viogner in this wine has always frightened me off, being averse to too much sweet apricot without compensating botrytis! Here though, there’s only the faintest transient whiff of that spicy, lifted sweetness. It’s mostly mid-red fruit, cool raspberries, cherry, with a hint of cola on both nose and palate. Medium/high acid, medium chalky tannins, and medium weight. A touch soft on the back palate, it finishes medium length, satisfyingly savoury. Getting close to peak, should still hold for the best part of a decade. - 2009 Penfolds Cabernet Sauvignon Bin 169 Coonawarra - Australia, South Australia, Limestone Coast, Coonawarra
{screwcap, 14.5%} [DavidH] Double-decanted before serving. This is only the second modern vintage of this wine (after 2008), which seems to have sailed under the radar for most of us. Maybe that’s because it looks like a 50/50 effort; it wasn’t made in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2020! Current release is 2022, asking $300! This is such a dark colour you’d never believe it’s 17 years old. There’s more maturity on the nose and palate; cassis/currants, cedary oak, dark chocolate, some herbs, and a reasonable dose of mint. There are medium/high powdery tannins, medium acid; it’s medium/full in weight too, with a medium/long finish that carries the alcohol pretty well. A 2020 Rewards of Patience note gives it only three stars and suggests best drinking to 2026; this seems very conservative on the basis of this bottle. It’s very much in the house style, but with less coconut and vanilla than, say Bin 707. Still, close to peak drinking for me, should hold 8-10 more years easily enough. - 2005 Château Rauzan-Gassies - France, Bordeaux, Médoc, Margaux
{cork, 13%} [DavidM] Double-decanted before serving. Developing, tick-the-box Bdx with cassis, cedar, graphite, cigar-box characteristics. Past primary in character, but still on the long upslope of development for my taste. Medium weight, medium/high chalky tannins, medium acid. There is a little bit of rose-and-perfume character, but it’s quite meaty and weighty for Margaux. Perhaps the first of the night’s wines that could clearly use some more age, and yet it was already the oldest red here tonight. Very good, though. - 2018 Greenock Estate Shiraz G.E. - Australia, South Australia, Barossa
{cork, 15.5%} [Andrew] World’s heaviest bottle, surely, maybe to offset the world’s most understated label? Fruit-driven nose, despite the oak that’s obviously present, of blueberries and chocolate, black jam and rocky road. This carries onto the palate, which the weight of fruit is such you hardly notice the alcohol. Medium acid and perhaps too-soft powdery tannins hide in the background, giving it an inky, iodine-like character on the palate. Lots of weight on the front-palate, but it coats all the tongue really. Medium/long finish. It’s a current release, so I guess they think it’s ready to drink; I still think it wants a few more years to fully settle down, but I reckon it’ll be better at ten years than twenty, just given the style. But it’s a plush, luxury cocktail wine for the moment. - 2022 Sons of Eden Shiraz Zephyrus - Australia, South Australia, Barossa, Barossa Valley
{cork, 14.5%} [Andrew] Super jammy, rich and black-fruited Eden shiraz. Stewy. Like a compote. So much blackberry fruit on the palate. Seems almost too much fruit for the medium acid and gentle chalky tannins that manage to make themselves felt. Full-bodied, yes, but not over-oaked, and with a sense that five more years in bottle will see it come together nicely. - 2018 The Standish Wine Company Shiraz The Standish - Australia, South Australia, Barossa, Barossa Valley
{cork, 14%} [Aaron] This saw a quick double-decant before service. So big – a compote of black fruits; with chocolate, medium chalky tannins, and buried cedary oak fighting to emerge. There’s a sweetness to the aromas and flavours, but things dry out properly on the medium/long finish. Put this away til its ten years old, at least; it’s just way too young to show properly. - 2016 Marius Wines Shiraz Symphony McLaren Vale - Australia, South Australia, Fleurieu, McLaren Vale
{screwcap, 14.5%} [Aaron] A tease of a wine; alternating between richness and austerity. Why do I have no sense of this vintage in SA? Where has it been compared to 12, 14, 18, 19? This has ripe black fruit on the nose, but shot through with a lean, medicinal edge; a stalky character. The palate is all plummy ripe fruit, but then a lean edge is apparent. Faint gritty tannins seem in space, somehow; there’s mid-palate weight, and a medium length finish, but it has the sense of a shotgun pattern that hit everything except the bullseye. Very strange. Hard to call this late in the night! - 2022 Château d'Arche La Perle D'Arche - France, Bordeaux, Sauternais, Sauternes
{375ml, diam, 13.5%} [Greg] Clean, spirity nose of lime juice and honey. The impression continues on the palate; it’s like licking mild honey out of a stainless steel mug. No sweeter than off-dry though, light-bodied, but the fairly low acidity is what lets it down somewhat. Little apparent botrytis character, but I’d not be game to age it to see what happens.
