pop & pour

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

I believe, Eden Valley. I believe.

I’ve talked before about how valuable comparative tastings can be.  Want to understand what Malbec tastes like, or what makes California Cabernet different from the same grape grown in Bordeaux, or what oak aging does to Chardonnay?  Don’t buy one bottle and drink it in isolation; buy two or three, which belong to your target group or establish your desired contrast, and have them together.  In this case my research question was:  how does Australian Riesling age, and what happens to it when it does?  My sample set was about as perfect as you can get:  two Rieslings from a star region (Eden Valley), from the same producer (Riesling expert Pewsey Vale), even from the same VINEYARD, separated only by six years of bottle age and the winery’s Museum Reserve library release program.  The results were phenomenal.

The Pewsey Vale Vineyard in the cool and elevated (and thus strangely named) Eden Valley, located northeast of Adelaide and right beside and above the Shiraz mecca (and actual valley) Barossa Valley, is a specialized Riesling-only shrine, exactly what you would see in the textbook description of a great Riesling site:  cooler climate (brought on in this case by its 500m altitude), poor rocky soils, hilly landscape.  The vineyard is 169 years old and has the distinction of being the very first spot planted to grapes in the area; when it was first planted in 1847, those inaugural vines included a few plantings of Riesling.  After the vineyard fell into disuse and disrepair, subsequent owners recognized its potential and single-planted the whole vineyard to Riesling in the 1960s, using cuttings from those first 19th century Riesling vines to do so.  Today all of Pewsey Vale Vineyard’s plantings have been propagated from those original 1847 vines. Read the rest of this entry »