Last night I opened my last bottle of 1994 d’Arenberg d’Arry’s Original Shiraz Grenache and it was a joy to drink. Sometimes I’ve drunk old reds – very old modest reds, way over the hill, and thought ‘ten years ago, before this volatility enveloped the wine completely, this would have been a lovely drink’. Well, this wine is at the point of perfect drinkability right now.
The wine is brick red, with some fading at the rim. It’s neither intimidatingly dark, nor alarmingly onion-brown. It just looks like old red wine. The nose is of sweetly rotting red berries, overlaid with old polished leather aromas. There’s no doubt to my mind that a hint of volatile acidity (acetone) is giving it a lift – from a Vinum shiraz glass the aromas are just as forward and persistent when the glass is sitting still as when swirling the wine.
Secondary flavours fill the palate. The wine is quite seamless, with fruit, acid and tannin now blending into a luscious, rich, evenly-balanced experience. The grapes were obviously ripe – the wine has lovely fruit-cake richness to its warm flavours, and there’s no hint of any green or stalky components. Whatever oak nuances there may have been have long departed – such faint astringency as remains appears to be remnants of soft grape tannins on the back palate. At the end of the finish there’s a final bloom of sweet raspberry fruit, yet not hot or sugary. The wine is 51% shiraz, 49% Grenache, and just perfectly balanced at 13.5% abv. Beautiful in every respect. I’ll admit it’s not a hugely complex or intellectually challenging wine, but it offers such sensory pleasures that this can be excused. Years ago, this wine was generically labelled ‘Burgundy’, and it’s easy to see this why was done.
Although only ten years old, this bottle seems to speak of a time long past. I bought it for $10, at the old Grapefellas store in Epping, Sydney, a store that has since been swallowed up by the corporatisation of wine retailing in this country. It survived in my cellar for so long (since July 97 in fact) because it was autographed by d’Arry Osborne himself, who was in the store at the time, at a tasting of McLaren Vale wines. And of course, it’s less than 14.5% alcohol. Does d’Arenberg sell a red like that today I wonder? We still have a third of the bottle in the fridge – so I’ll be interested to see if it falls apart completely overnight!
A lovely drink indeed. This is why we cellar wine – particularly humble ones. Incidentally, I see in Jeremy Oliver’s old 1998 Wine Annual, this was his highest-pointed vintage of this wine for some years, and he recommended drinking 2002-2006. Spot on!
Cheers,
Graeme