pop & pour

Let’s play word association.  I say:  “Australian wine”.  You immediately think — ?  You are probably lying if you don’t say “Shiraz”, and with that comes immediate images of big, lush, ripe, fruity, alcoholic reds, bursting with flavour and spice if lacking slightly in nuance.  The wine scene in Aus is certainly becoming more varied and complex as the years go on, but consumer memory changes slowly and initial impressions run deep.  That’s why one of the first instructions that Virginia Willcock, esteemed winemaker at southwestern Australia’s Vasse Felix winery, gave us about her wines was:  “Don’t call them Australian wines.  They’re not.”  At least not in the preconceived way we all think about them.

Vasse Felix is located in the Margaret River region, a 3 hour drive south of Perth, which is a city surrounded by, well, nothing.  Willcock calls it “the most isolated wine region in the world”, but what it lacks in proximity it makes up for in a much cooler, more temperate, maritime climate than the rest of the country, a growing season that is often compared to that in Bordeaux, and resulting wines that exhibit finesse, elegance and character, wholly unlike the fruit monsters on which Australia made its international name.  Vasse Felix is the first wine estate founded in Margaret River, established in 1967, and it produced the area’s first Cabernet Sauvignon in 1972.  It continues to specialize in Cabernet, and also in Chardonnay, both classic Margaret River varietals, and it does not produce any other types of wines.  As Willcock says, they elected to be the master of a couple trades instead of a jack of all of them (a lesson that many other New World wineries could be well served in learning). Read the rest of this entry »