Whining&dining
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- Jul 7, 2016
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Taming the beast....
Finally opened the bottle of 2003 Greenock Creek Alices Shiraz sent to me by Rug on Friday night and thought I'd share some tasting notes and a couple of photos taken by our in-house photographer (my son).
Oh, my lord, this wine is monumental, think of Mount Rushmore hewn from blackberries and grapes or the Sydney Harbour Bridge's iron lacework replaced with sheer vinosity and strung with black fruits and dark cooking chocolate. The colour is still as inky and dense as night, it's hard to imagine how a wine of this age can show so little evidence of the passing of time, the palate is chewy and concentrated in its cherry liqueur-like immensity, it clings and coats the sides of the glass with the legs of a supermodel or perhaps the muscular pins of Usain Bolt, the 16.5% ABV dissipated by the onrush of fruit. This wine is big without menace, swollen with purpose and is unashamedly New World in style but old school Barossan in execution, there's a lot to love!
Here's a picture of the beast in question followed by Phillip White's take on it (verbatim, it's worth it!):
Greenock Creek Alices Shiraz 2003 (16.5 per cent alcohol)
Alices delivers its fourth crop like four semis colliding at a crossroad. One’s loaded with coconut and caramel chocolate bars, one with blackberry syrup, another with fine dry tannin, and a fourth loaded with pure alcohol. To be more polite, you could cut that back to two – American oak and tincture ofBarossashiraz; or just one nuclear spontaneous combustion blast of flavour, after the smoky oak style developed by Peter Lehmann, Max Schubert and John Glaetzer, Wolf Blass’ red master, in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. Funny thing about those guys: all grew up in smoky kitchens – Max was a blacksmith’s son – and all were/are heavy smokers. The smell of smoky wood is home to them. They judge their bacon by the degree of smoke it’s had. Which is not to say the Waughs have ever seen a whisper of stray smoke loose in their house (Michael was a stonemason who specialized in the hyper-efficient fireplaces designed by Benjamin Franklin). Better to suggest that this amazing vineyard, which was intended to be Greenock Creek’s straightforward commercial yielder, simply, audaciously, packs out more and more punch every year, and one of the obvious things to do with its mad fruit is wrap it in smoky oak. After twenty four hours it looked sweet as a pina colada, with that oak barely managing to wrap around the intensity of Alices’ cordial fruit – while the mouth’s talking to the carpenters, the juicy fruit crawls determinedly through the slats. Then comes that wave of tannin. Whoooeee! Lord knows how long it’ll take to smooth out – a decade? – but one thing’s manifestly obvious: Alices is no commercial slurper. 92 now: more glory later.
Finally opened the bottle of 2003 Greenock Creek Alices Shiraz sent to me by Rug on Friday night and thought I'd share some tasting notes and a couple of photos taken by our in-house photographer (my son).
Oh, my lord, this wine is monumental, think of Mount Rushmore hewn from blackberries and grapes or the Sydney Harbour Bridge's iron lacework replaced with sheer vinosity and strung with black fruits and dark cooking chocolate. The colour is still as inky and dense as night, it's hard to imagine how a wine of this age can show so little evidence of the passing of time, the palate is chewy and concentrated in its cherry liqueur-like immensity, it clings and coats the sides of the glass with the legs of a supermodel or perhaps the muscular pins of Usain Bolt, the 16.5% ABV dissipated by the onrush of fruit. This wine is big without menace, swollen with purpose and is unashamedly New World in style but old school Barossan in execution, there's a lot to love!
Here's a picture of the beast in question followed by Phillip White's take on it (verbatim, it's worth it!):
Greenock Creek Alices Shiraz 2003 (16.5 per cent alcohol)
Alices delivers its fourth crop like four semis colliding at a crossroad. One’s loaded with coconut and caramel chocolate bars, one with blackberry syrup, another with fine dry tannin, and a fourth loaded with pure alcohol. To be more polite, you could cut that back to two – American oak and tincture ofBarossashiraz; or just one nuclear spontaneous combustion blast of flavour, after the smoky oak style developed by Peter Lehmann, Max Schubert and John Glaetzer, Wolf Blass’ red master, in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. Funny thing about those guys: all grew up in smoky kitchens – Max was a blacksmith’s son – and all were/are heavy smokers. The smell of smoky wood is home to them. They judge their bacon by the degree of smoke it’s had. Which is not to say the Waughs have ever seen a whisper of stray smoke loose in their house (Michael was a stonemason who specialized in the hyper-efficient fireplaces designed by Benjamin Franklin). Better to suggest that this amazing vineyard, which was intended to be Greenock Creek’s straightforward commercial yielder, simply, audaciously, packs out more and more punch every year, and one of the obvious things to do with its mad fruit is wrap it in smoky oak. After twenty four hours it looked sweet as a pina colada, with that oak barely managing to wrap around the intensity of Alices’ cordial fruit – while the mouth’s talking to the carpenters, the juicy fruit crawls determinedly through the slats. Then comes that wave of tannin. Whoooeee! Lord knows how long it’ll take to smooth out – a decade? – but one thing’s manifestly obvious: Alices is no commercial slurper. 92 now: more glory later.
