Happy Trails in Clare Valley
At his winery in Auburn one fine spring morning, winemaker Jeffrey Grosset was lamenting that it had taken nine weeks to sell his winery’s entire production for the year. “The last few years, it’s only taken six weeks,” he said. “And people are telling me to raise my prices!”
Of course, his only problem was figuring out how to allocate his Watervale and Polish Hill Rieslings among eager customers, but that was no consolation. “The sooner that [sold-out] sign goes up outside the cellar door, the happier I am,” he said.
That sign and its like are seen at cellar doors throughout South Australia’s wine country more and more of late, especially along the Clare Valley’s Riesling Trail. The domestic wine economy is booming, exports are going through the roof and small to mid-size wineries with distinctive bottlings are all the rage.
Australia entered the world wine market in a big way during the 1980s on the strength of its excellent renditions of generic commodities: branded Cabernet and Chardonnay wines that were big, bold, flavorful and smooth but otherwise undistinguished.
Meanwhile, the best and brightest wine producers were working to fine-tune the two Australian wines that truly are distinguished: Shiraz and Riesling. Shiraz from Oz is already familiar to a wine world in the midst of a red wine boom. Whether Australian Riesling makes the same impact abroad remains to be seen.
Dry Rieslings from Alsace and Germany are making new headway in the world market. The top Australian Rieslings are in a class with the best wines those regions have to offer, without merely duplicating them. Australian Riesling is unique, and it is superb.
At the moment it’s a moot point for us, because precious little good Riesling makes it out of the country. That is likely to change, however. There is a groundswell of winemakers, particularly young winemakers, committed to fine Riesling. Like the Shiraz producers, they are working with a viticultural treasure: a wealth of mature vineyards planted on their own roots, the last substantial stand of ungrafted Riesling stock in the world.
Most of the vines were planted 20 years ago during the last white wine boom, but there are more venerable survivors too; for example, Rockford Basket Press makes its Vine Vale Riesling from a vineyard known to have been planted in 1886.
Lime blossom is the salient characteristic of Australian Riesling. It appears in various nuances of aroma and flavor from nose through finish in greater or lesser degrees depending on . . . on what? Nobody seems to know, although everyone speculates.
Coincidentally (or not?), Australian Semillon often shows a similar lime character, suggesting that it may have something to do with the effect of climate on some compound common to both grapes.
It may also having something to do with the vines growing on their own roots, rather than being grafted onto phylloxera-resistant rootstocks, as they are in Europe and in most of this country. (That view is supported by the occasional appearance of a lime character in Riesling and Semillon from Washington state, where there are also ungrafted vineyards.)
Clare Valley is one of those monumentally sprawling Australian landscape features that provoke descriptions that somehow seem implausible, as early descriptions of kangaroos, koalas and kookaburras must have seemed to Europeans in the 17th century.
It is more like a great rambling dell than a valley, recalling the Shire in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth (except that the people aren’t at all hobbit-like). There is a sense of completeness in the landscape, the self-referential wholeness of a place that is a world unto itself.
The inward-folded terrain creates convoluted views and perspectives that are startling to those of us used to the bold lines and definition of California’s coastal valleys and Europe’s orderly, time-worn viticultural features. Driving around the Clare’s internal valleys, ridges, benches and swales, I found myself entering familiar places at unfamiliar angles, a clue to the complexity of air and water movements among the vineyards.
The Grosset Watervale bottling comes from a hilltop vineyard about 1,300 feet above sea level. The ’96 and ’97 both show generous perfume, at once delicate and piercing, a lovely combination of fullness and clarity on the palate, with lingering finishes. The ’97 is bigger and stronger, but I preferred (not for the first or last time) the finer tuning evident in the ’96. The ’87 had broadened into a luscious beauty, still fresh but deepening into honey and lime marmalade flavors. The ’82 was all toast and honey, rich but not heavy and quite firm, gliding beautifully back through the palate as if on steel rails.
The Mt. Horrocks ’97 Watervale Riesling was like a sunny spring morning in Clare Valley: fine and delicately perfumed; fresh, lively and gracious on the palate; lilting into a gentle finish. There is a definite difference--mostly in impact and scale--between the two. “I’m quite conscious that the wine is going to be drunk in the next six months,” explained winemaker Stephanie Toole, “so I want a very fine early-drinking style. Quick handling of small lots of fruit is the key.”
Grosset’s Polish Hill Riesling comes from the Clare’s most interesting interior feature. Polish Hill consists of a U-shaped ridge, well east of the Riesling Trail, formed by a pair of rocky arms flaring northward from Mt. Horrocks and gradually opening to a rolling plain. Some of the vineyards rise above 1,500 feet. The western ridge lurches north well past Clare. Along its various contours, in lean soils that are mostly sandy loam over shale, are clustered vineyards (including Knappstein, Brian Barry’s Judd’s Hill, Jim Barry’s Lodge Hill and Brian Croser’s Hanlin Hill). These vineyards and others produce wines which are typically different from those grown around Watervale and Clare. The most distinctive wines--big, powerful Rieslings--come from the immediate vicinity of Mt. Horrocks, east of Sevenhill in the Hill River drainage basin.
Polish Hill River Rieslings are muscular and well-defined, with a marvelous transparent density on the palate that makes the almost ethereal delicacy in the nose and finish that much more amazing. Grosset says, “That definition is why I didn’t want to blend Polish Hill and Watervale. I didn’t know it would become a region. I’ve always seen Polish Hill as a style, but now I’m being driven to recognize differences in areas within it that I never thought would exist.”
More than Watervale and Polish Hill River Rieslings, Eden Valley Rieslings have a capacity for coming out of the fermenter all bony and awkward, then blooming into ravishing beauties after a year or two in bottle.
To my eye, Eden Valley is no more a valley than Clare. I would describe it more as a high, broken saddleback in the Mt. Lofty Range east of the Barossa Valley and southeast of Clare.
Whatever we may call it, the Eden is another enclave of great South Australian Riesling vineyards: Yalumba’s beautifully sculpted Pewsey Vale (originally planted in 1847 by John Gilbert, restored in 1961) and equally picturesque Heggies, Henschke’s Julius, Orlando’s St. Helga and a dozen others.
The Eden Valley wines are more delicately scented and finer than those from Watervale, not as big and powerful as Polish Hill River wines yet with similar definition. Many believe they hit the golden mean and are Australia’s best Rieslings, which would place them among the best Rieslings in the world.
It’s not a point I’m willing to contest, at least not without a great deal more vigorous assessment and comparison.
Grosset and Mt. Horrocks Rieslings are available at Hi-Time Wine Cellars in Costa Mesa, (949) 650-8463, and Woodland Hills Wine Co., (818) 222-1111. Or ask your retailer to contact the distributor, Australian Wines of Distinction at (310) 266-8539.
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Smith is a writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits Magazine.