A winter wonderland
Hearty winter fare … stunning wine … live music … if this is how you like to spend your Saturday nights then you won’t want to miss the Tallis barrel hall birthday bash August 1st 2009. Last year we opened the newly built straw bale barrel hall with a fabulous celebration exclusively for our Tallisman members and their guests. The barrel hall looked like a winter wonderland, and the evening was a blast. The photos really speak for themselves.
Viognier is a white grape variety that is continuing to grow in popularity in Australia. Contributing to this popularity is its versatility in food and wine matching. Viognier is a great summer wine and its pairing with seafood, especially oysters is tried and tested. Match it with fresh panfried fish or delicious summer salads. With its full flavoured, textured palate Viognier also stands up well against winter fare such as creamy casseroles, chicken dishes, rice, pasta and spicy asian food.
If you have a favourite recipe to match the Tallis Dookie Hills Viognier we would love to see it.
This is really the gossip part of the blog, where we can rave about the latest and greatest or diss whatever in the wine industry is really bugging us right now. With a topic as subjective as wine, there is always going to be plenty of contentious issues so lets talk about them.
The wine glut the Australian wine industry found itself in a couple of year ago led to enormous volumes of wine pouring out into the marketplace, often at incredibly cheap prices which barely covered their production costs. A significant proportion of that wine went into the cleanskin market and generated excellent value for money for many consumers. In more recent years, disasterous climatic conditions have brought the oversupply of wine under control, with drought, bushfires and hail reducing wine production volumes. As a consequence, less high quality wine is being fed into the cleanskin market, and it is returning to its original intention as a means for selling wine that frequently doesn’t meet quality standards to be labelled under the winery brand. Many consumers continue to use cleanskin outlets to purchase low cost wine however they are now experiencing lower quality wines than previously. Cleanskin wine is frequently sold in case lots rather than single bottles, and is often sold without a tasting opportunity depending on the outlet, so consumers run the risk of being lumped with a case or very average wine with little or no recourse.
A more reliable means of buying cheap wine which is actually drinkable is to get to know and understand the wine brands and varieties that represent value for money, then looking for ways to buy them cheaply. Many bottle shops offer great specials, so it is worth dropping into your local on a regular basis to see what’s on offer. Joining wine clubs and purchasing wine directly from the winery can provide excellent deals. Many wine clubs offer large percentage discounts to wine club members which make the wines available at comparable prices to cleanskin outlets but with a quality guarantee.
Viognier is still a relatively new kid on the block with many people still grappling with how to pronounce it. Just to complicate the issue further, there are two accepted pronunciations. You can try “vee - on - yay” but if that isn’t working for you, try “vee-on-yer” and you will more than likely get what you ask for in the bar or bottle shop. We will look at other wine variety pronunciations some other time, but for now lets focus on this complex and seductive white.
Exotic … sensual … voluptuous … are just a few of the words used to describe viognier. With such a reputation it’s hard to believe this grape variety was nearing extinction as recently as 1986, with just 20 hectares of the grape planted in Condrieu, its place of origin in the Northern Rhone of France. Fortunately for wine enthusiasts, the increase in popularity of Rhone Valley wines during the 1990s brought this variety back into the spotlight again.
While Viognier is the only grape variety permitted to be grown in the Northern Rhône appellations of Condrieu and Château-Grillet, plantings of the variety are increasing in other appellations such as the Côte-Rôtie. Viognier is also now grown in the Southern Rhone Valley, other appellations of France, and several of the new world wine regions including Australia.
Unlike its outgoing personality as a finished wine, the viognier grape can be quite shy in the vineyard. Difficult to grow, and low yielding the most challenging quality of viognier is the tiny window of opportunity the variety offers to be picked at optimum maturity. Top quality viognier relies on the skills and experience of the winemaker to ensure maximum flavour development is not achieved at the expense of excessive sugar or diminished acidity.
While viognier is still considered a relatively new variety in Australia, its popularity is on the rise. As a table wine, viognier presents as a rich, luscious, textural wine with an array of flavour and aroma compounds including stone fruits, particularly apricot, honeysuckle, orange blossom, grapefruit, muskiness, fruit pastille, spicy and exotic characters. Viognier is sometimes described as oily so acidity is essential to balance the medium to full bodied palate weight. Full or partial barrel fermentation, malo-lactic fermentation and barrel lees stirring are just some of the winemaking techniques used.
In Australia, viognier is increasingly blended with shiraz as the marriage of these varieties enhances the qualities of shiraz. This blend originated in Côte-Rôtie in the Northern Rhone Valleywhere shiraz and a small parcel of viognier are co-fermented. In Côte-Rôtie the percentage of viognier may be as high as 20% but in Australia it is usually between 3 and 7%. The inclusion of viognier in the blend adds vibrancy to the colour of the shiraz, adds floral notes to the aroma and creates a silky textural quality to the wine. Such is the enhancement that viognier offers to the shiraz that this particular blend is currently one of the most popular in Australia.
On a much smaller scale, viognier has been used to produce a sparkling wine with quite incredible results. Tallis Wine may in fact be the first Australian winery to produce and release such a wine. In our trials with viognier as a sparkling base we discovered that less than 12 months on bottle lees produced a wine retaining many of the varietal aromas and flavours of typical of viognier however additional time led to yeasty toasty characters dominating, with undertones of stone fruit and spice. With a preference for the complexity given by additional time on lees we have chosen to use the traditional method of sparkling wine production for our viognier. Our current release Traditional Method Sparkling Viognier 2007 displays these very characters.
To read more about this exciting variety visit www.vin-condrieu.fr
Max & Alex assessing the grapes
Lets start with this old chestnut …. great wines are made in the vineyard, not in the winery.
As a winemaker it pains me to say it, but this one is partly true. Now that I’ve agreed though, the skills of a winemaker are still required to ensure this potential is realised. The old saying goes something like “you can make good or bad wine from good grapes but you can only make bad wine from bad grapes”. A good winemaker can pull a few tricks out of the hat to make the best of a bad vintage of grapes, but the wines will have limited potential. If the fruit intensity isn’t there, it’s never going to have that element in the finished wine, there is no secret additive. It can be propped up with clever oak use and other winemaking strategies but the depth and complexity will be lacking. Put a top quality parcel of fruit in front of a winemaker and the potential for creating an outstanding wine is in the hands of the winemaker and their skills. So on this occasion, as a winemaker I would put it out there that great wines are made in the winery but only with the right ingredients.
This autumn is a great time of year to be at Tallis Wine. Not only for the changing colours of the season, but to experience the changes that have swept through our winery. Like many small businesses Tallis Wines’ humble beginnings had our small team squeezed into Richard and Alice’s home office. After several years of invading each others personal space we have finally graduated to our new office. A large crane unloaded the “donger” (yes really) a couple of weeks ago and we loving our spaceous new surrounds, all of which is organised and labelled to within an inch of its life due to our neatness freak, aka T2 (Tanya C). And …. now we only have to touch if we really want to.
Another significant milestone is that after six long years, Richard and I have finally graduated from our winemaking degrees, for which everyone around us is thankful, particularly our significant others, Alice and James. Thanks for being so patient with us. Now we are back in the land of the living, enjoying flaunting our achievement and its entitlements, some of the most lucrative being the corner spaces in the new office with north easterly views over the vineyard. If you thought the wines were good previously, wait until you see what we are capable of now!!!
Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand the last few years, you couldn’t help but hear the terms blog, twitter and online forums being thrown around. Cyberland has become the way we keep ourselves informed and in touch with what interests us and it’s a way of making social contact with other like-minded people on the topics or interests we are passionate about. We noticed there are loads of wine blogs that review wines but not as many cover a broad range of wine topics … and so the Tallis Wine blog was born.
Add a bookmark to the Tallis Wine blog and visit us often. We will cover all the bases including winemaking and viticultural issues for the technical types among us, a getting into wine section aimed at the beginner, wine appreciation, reviews, food and wine matching, recipes, current wine industry news and a fact or fiction page. Whether you agree or disagree with what we write, voice your opinion and exchange banter with other wineophiles. Don’t be shy, join in and have some fun.