Great Western Shiraz
Great Western is the name of a small township on the Western Highway just under four hours’ drive almost due west from Melbourne. Grapes have been grown there and around the townships of Moyston and Armstrong since 1858. While it happily co-exists with a major national brand of quaffing sparkling wine of the same name, for a century and a half it has been a small, finite source of special shiraz of distinction and scarcity.
Great Western is the only Australian wine region of any note that can claim to have been founded by the French, since it is widely believed that Anne Marie Blampied and her husband Jean Pierre Trouette narrowly beat the Ararat butchers Joseph and Henry Best to become the area’s first grape growers. While it’s humid and cool, it’s essentially a very dry location, and irrigation water is at best very hard to come by. Its rainfall during the growing season is less than half the Yarra Valley’s.
Viv Thomson has worked at his family’s Bests vineyard and winery since 1960 and has run it for ages. It’s his belief that ‘on the right sites with the right soil types, water is desirable, but not absolutely necessary’ at Great Western. Warm to hot days and cool nights in the ripening season contribute to the intensity of flavour and pleasingly high levels of natural acidity in its grapes. Fortunately, Great Western is ideally suited to grapes that ripen later in the season, like shiraz, for which it is rightly famous.
Drinkers of Great Western shiraz well understand what quality and value in red wine are all about, and while they might not appreciate anyone like me drawing attention to it and making it more difficult to find than it already is, the good news is there’s about to be a whole lot more. While plantings in the region have held constant at around 200ha, another projected 300-plus hectares will almost treble its production.
Viv Thomson has worked at his family’s Bests vineyard and winery since 1960 and has run it for ages. It’s his belief that ‘on the right sites with the right soil types, water is desirable, but not absolutely necessary’. It will be interesting to see how Rosebank fares, but given that its owners dug 96 soils pits around the property, it’s a fair bet they know what they’re doing.
Southcorp’s chief winemaker Philip Shaw reckons so, since his company has agreed tois takinge nearly every grape the new Great Western vineyards produces.
‘We had a lot of shiraz at Rosemount Shaw was formerly Rosemount’s chief winemaker prior to its takeover of Southcorp, but now we’re looking for another dimension, especially one that offers more pepper. We get lovely plummy fruits from McLaren Vale, and I think the combination of the two regions has great merit. Central Victoria is an exciting region for shiraz in its own right, especially for Rhone-like styles, and we’ll use this resource for a number of our labels, especially for Seppelt’, he explains.
At its best, Great Western shiraz is perhaps the most drinkable of all in Australia. It’s only middleweight in boxing parlance, still able to pack a punch of flavour, yet it’s built for endurance. They typically offer an exceptional length of flavour, typically of cassis and sour cherries, while their tannins are firm, yet fine and powder-dry. The best would only rarely pass 13 alcohol by volume, and longevity is never an issue. The typical hallmark of fine young Great Western shiraz is its almost sneezy aroma of intense black pepper and musky, exotic spices, occasionally punctuated by a hint of peppermint. With age, they develop marvellous earthy, Chesterfield leather and chocolate-like complexity with surprising fleshiness on the palate, although few would ever be described as rich.
Discover Great Western shiraz before the Americans do. For when that happens, you won’t be able to afford it.
Breakaway:
Buying Great Western Shiraz
Best’s and Seppelt are Great Western’s two principal makers of shiraz. Best’s flagship is its stellar Thomson Family Shiraz, made exclusively from vines planted on the property in 1868. The Bin ‘0’ Shiraz is also one of the finest, most affordable, incredibly drinkable and elegant of all Australian red wines. The Seppelt style is more wild and briary, and its Great Western Shiraz is typically faster to develop earthy and meaty characters. A new Reserve label includes two stellar wines from 1997 and 1998. The other current maker of classic Great Western shiraz that I rate highly is Garden Gully, while recent vintages of Armstrong show genuine style and elegance.
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