Manky Cherries Are A Thing

Wine gets better with age - right? Right? Anyone? Taste is such a personal thing and aged wine sometimes bring characters to them that don't always ring bells for me. The key to the recipe is tannins. Tannins those elusive compounds that apparently make wine the bees knees.

Spanish Tinto

These large complex compounds that are drawn from the wine skins as well as the barrels during maturation are anti-oxidant in nature. You know? the healthy antioxidant.

During the maturation process the tannin compounds will slowly chew up the interesting characters that make a young wine, a young wine. The purple colours and fresh fruit characters.

With their antioxidant effect, the tannins will oxidise these delicate flavours and colours, giving way to the underlying red colour and savoury flavours.

And that is an aged wine. 

Now the Spanish Tinto I tried recently received the following review;

         Well that was a challenging wine.

         Manky cherries, sock-it-to-ya oak 

         spewing out the anise and a slippery 

      acidity to clean it up. One for the wine fans

 #notthattheresanythingwrongwiththat

So if we get serious for one moment, let's translate my dodgy words into a serious tasting note describing this 9 year old wine. And below is a tasting note from the Importer Echelon Wines as a young wine.

Tasting Note:

With a slightly smelly nose that disappears with decanting, the wine is dominated by a slightly over ripe cherry character, followed by a star anise, licorice strongly reflecting new oak that once blended in with the delicate fresh fruit characters. The savoury finish and fine delicate tannins, that sneaks in the end is balanced off with a fresh bright acidity that makes this still a great food wine.

Echelon Wines - 2011
Deep red in colour with purple hues, the VT displays a nose of blackberry, lively spicy fruits, currants, and freshly sawn wood notes. The upfront lifted red fruit palate presents exciting and fun licorice flavors with elegant tannins and a well balanced acid structure.

Is it better? For me no. But for many it is; but the key most importantly is that it is different and that is the joy of wine. Diversity in style, the variation and the unpredictability.  Enjoy.

Heritage Lost

A cellar door environment is such an amazing place to meet a diversity of people. In a place like the Hunter Valley you are  always likely to meet people who work in the mining industry and those that you meet a most likely to be at a relatively high level in the organisation.

Discussion almost always politely leads towards the balance of mining and agriculture. Sometimes I am cheeky enough to discuss environmental rehabilitation programs; always a favourite, because of course as soon as you discuss water table protection and soil profile you get a change of subject - heritage lost.

The Hunter Valley is a place of heritage lost from many different perspectives as I am certain many of the Dairy Industry could tell you. From a miners perspective, there is much money being spent to demonstrate that co-habitation with agriculture is viable long term; go to the NSW Miners Page for more information.

The corporate raiders who make decisions on our lifestyle come from many different fronts and many different eras. For a look at wine rationalization during the 20th century one only needs to look at the treatment of the Lindemans name by companies like the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, followed by corparate winemakers, Southcorp.

This story is best articulated by the "Best Wine Under $20" webpage; the article is titled "Death by a Thousand Cuts".

And to finish on a positive note, heritage is never lost when passionate families get behind their own region and invest for the long term. There is a no better example of this than the Tyrrell family, headed by Bruce Tyrrell http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz_084MGzPM.