Coonawarra

Any doubt regarding the identity of the best red wine-producing region in Australia could easily be laid to rest by lining up the ’84 Cabernets of Bowen Estate, Rosemount Estate, Katnook Estate, Mildara, Hollick, Lindemans and Brands et al. Impressive list, eh? Coonawarra seems no longer to be trendy, but anyone can see that its reputation for quality is deservedly alive and well.

I wouldn’t for one moment suggest that you take the results of the Jimmy Watson Trophy awarded to the best one year-old dry red of the Melbourne Show seriously, but it is an interesting statistic to note that of the last ten winners, seven wines were either exclusively of Coonawarra material or had a Coonawarra component in their blend. The Orlando 1978, the Krondorf 1979 and the Mildara 1981 were the three inter-regional blends, the Wynns 1976, Lindemans 1980, Hollick 1984 and Lindemans 1985 were straight Coonawarra.

Anyone who still thinks that Coonawarra is a grape variety or a single wine company – and I’ve met dozens of them -should take a trip there some time. It is the ideal weekend retreat. The landscape is a featureless flat plain, the roads are straight and monotonous. The climate makes Melbourne’s look positively comfortable. There are no trees, ro rocky outcrops and no rivers although there is Drain C . The advantage to the wine tourist is obvious – all this makes for a completely distraction-free opportunity to taste and appreciate the wares of some of Australia’s best and most interesting wine companies.

Located a comfortable four hours from either Adelaide or Melbourne, Coonawarra’s closely-bunched group of some of our best and most interesting wine companies makes it a wine region unique in Australia. The reason for this is under their feet – the Coonawarra dirt.

Before the days of the Coonawarra Fruit Colony, and indeed before anything was grown there, the region was predominantly pastoral. Go to Katnook Estate and you can see a hauntingly beautiful and massive shearing-shed, whose external appearance remains intact despite an internal coating of orange insulating foam. The road between Coonawarra and Penola, which was once an aborigianl track, then a stock route, is found on a strip of well-drained soil – an important plus when the surrounding grey clays attain the consistency of my father’s porridge in the winter months.

This porous soil is quite red in colour, and the budding wine buff should be intructed to refer to it as `terra rosa’. The `outcrop’ of this soil makes a cigar-shaped patch, running roughly north and south, and most of the7 Coonawarra vineyards are planted in an irregular mosaic over this land, but they haven’t quite covered it yet. There are now considerable plantings on the surrounding grey clays, which were often quite unavoidable since in many vineyards fingers of both soil types seem to intertwine like a giant’s game of snakes and ladders. The truth is that the grey soils seem to be more suited to white wines than the red, but the locals pay the price when they need to borrow the neighbour’s tractor to fish their’s out of the mire come the rain in winter.

You can classify Coonawarra’s climate as having a warm to hot summer, a long cool autumn and a cold, wet winter. Because its vineyards are basically aligned north-south over a distance of around fifteen kilometres, and the coast is not all that distant to the south, Coonawarra’s vineyards can have quite different mesoclimates. Those at the northern end can ripen two weeks earlier than others at the south.

Doug Bowen bets that he could pick where along the straight the grapes were grown in a given year, should you line up a range of wines for him. Any excuse! And I wouldn’t bet against him, either.

Coonawarra is regularly able to achieve an extraordinary depth and quality of fruit in its table wines the fortifieds are so negligible in number that they can be safely ignored , whilst retaining a comparatively light and elegant body. Qualities to look for in Coonawarra reds are a remarkable complexity of ripe berry flavours and a herbaceous, often asparagus-like character. Sometimes certain plantings of cabernet give a now-famous peppermint flavour to the finished wine. Their reputation for cellaring is entirely justified – surely every wine drinker has their favourite old Coonawarra?

Coonawarra white wines have not yet achieved the following of its reds. Surely this is only a matter of time. Some of Coonawarra’s Chardonnays and Rieslings have shown a similar intensity of fruit as the red wines, and some of the Sauvignon Blancs, especially Katnook’s, have been superlative. It shouldn’t surprise us that this variety does so well here, for it shares many of the same flavour attributes as Cabernet Sauvignon, a tried and proven performer in the district.

The Chardonnays of Rouge Homme, Mildara, Katnook and Wynns once again show how versatile this variety can be in almost any climate suited to growing grapes. James Haselgrove has continued from the early experiments with Botrytis cinerea at Mildara to produce a range of normal to late-picked Rhine Rieslings with noble rot-affected fruit under his own label, with encouraging results. Coonawarra’s late-picked wines have a Germanic delicacy and elegance – they certainly lack the bottomless depth of many of the warmer-climate Australian sweet wines – they’re barely in the same mould at all as those from Griffith, for instance.

But the best thing about Coonawarra is its winemaking inhabitants, most of whom can be visited at most times during the week. Or else catch them off-guard at notorious local events like the Grape Zenolian Festival the local wine festival, held every second year and the Coonawarra Cup usually around February each year.

Visits to either event should only be undertaken after passing a thorough medical examination, for the locals have been seen to booby-trap the area with a series of dnagerous hazards under the apparently innocent cover of hospitality-tents. Be warned – if you drink what you find inside, you’re likely to forget the whole weekend! Please login to post comment