Gewurztraminer
There’s but a single Australian winery that could interest me with a vertical tasting of twenty years of its gewurztraminer: Delatite. The Ritchie family’s alpine eyrie; cool, often downright cold and exposed. Wet in winter, but so dry in summer it often couldn’t shed a tear. Late to ripen, and sometimes dangerously so, but home to some of Australia’s finest wines from white Germanic varieties grown outside the Clare and Eden Valleys.
Delatite’s first steely, scented rieslings and spicy, perfumed gewurztraminers were feeling their way onto the market in the early 1980s when, as a young agricultural science graduate, I first realised they were something special. Sure it helped that they won a swag of gold medals in the wine shows, and it certainly helped that their maker, Rosalind Ritchie, was amongst the first of the present generation of female Australian winemakers, but it didn’t require a palate like Picasso’s to register that these were exceptional wines.
Trouble was, they haven’t always been an easy sell. Nothing to do with quality, of course, and it was hardly the Ritchies’ fault that in the mid 1980s, when their Riesling, Gewurztraminer and ‘reserve’ Dead Man’s Hill Gewurztraminer looked set to take all before them, that Australians in their droves switched their palates towards chardonnay. We’re wiser now, of course, and hopefully much choosier in our chardonnay, and perhaps ready to revisit some of the wines that give this industry and our lives in general more colour and diversity. Hence my suggestion that you go and immediately buy a bottle of Delatite Dead Man’s Hill Gewurztraminer.
From1985 to 1990 Delatite actually made two different gewurztraminers. It has only made one since which is still called ‘Dead Man’s Hill’, so popular did this wine become. The move was less a marketing exercise than a rationalisation whereby the Ritchies would have but a single gewurztraminer to sell – which is one more than most companies at the best of times – and that from a stylistic point of view there was very little point in keeping the fruit from the Dead Man’s Hill vineyard separate any longer from that grown on the rest of the estate.
Over the decades the Australian wine industry has thrown up a number of excellent reasons never to buy one of its own gewurztraminers. Virtually all of them are grown in the wrong places, most are sweet, confection-like and oily, and the overwhelming majority age so fast in the bottle that they’re past the use-by date even before bottling.
None of these truisms apply to Delatite. Its climate is, perhaps, at towards the cooler extreme of gewurztraminer’s ripening preferences, so there’s no fatness, oiliness or coarseness its wines, even from the driest of seasons. Instead, there’s an accent on the grape’s floral perfume, its more fragrant spicy and musky aromas, its length and ability to cellar well in the bottle if carefully protected in the winery and bottled with a sufficient complement of racy mineral acids. With time the wines slowly build in the bottle, those from lighter years perhaps more resembling mature rieslings in their flavours, while those from richer, riper seasons leave absolutely no doubt concerning their varietal identity. Even the 1984, 1985 and 1986 wines are absolutely fresh and lively today.
These days it’s virtually a cliche to describe anything as a ‘food wine’, but the Dead Man’s Hill certainly is. It’s long, clean and refreshing, with fragrant musky aromas and bright citrus/stonefruit flavours in its youth, finished with a tangy cut of lively acidity. With time it slowly builds and even becomes slightly oily, but doesn’t ‘blow out’ the way most Australian traminers do. Instead it retains its racy freshness, builds a spicy bouquet of toast, honey and dried flowers, before a typical lingering and savoury lemon-lime finish. All of which conjures thoughts of freshly shucked oysters, platters of ripe fruit and a decently ripened Jindi Triple Cream. And that’s just for starters.
The Select Few
Seven Australian Gewurztraminers Actually Worth Buying
Brown Brothers
Delatite Dead Man’s Hill
Knappstein
Lillydale Vineyards
Moorilla Estate
Pipers Brook
Skillogalee
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