When the Festival's over....it's back to the vineyard

The past month has gone by so fast. In between my last post and this one we have had the 2009 Barossa Vintage Festival, numerous days of grape-picking and even my first drive around the Barossa in our newest acquisition with friends from the city. The Vintage Festival was a huge success and the weather for the week-long event was truly the Barossa at its beautiful best. The Valley was full of people attending many events. It was great to see everyone still enjoying themselves despite the current economic climate. That was the best thing about the Festival - there were events that were free to attend and ones that were well over $100 per ticket and everything price range in between so there really was something for everyone.

During the Festival a few of James' friends, John and Annette, stayed at Nuriootpa for a couple of days during which I took them on a tour to a few unique places in the Valley in our recently restored classic old Holden. They met some of our Collective counterparts - Steve Kurtz and Wayne Ahrens - for a private tasting, and it was wonderful to finally bring them to our place and sit in the old stable having a few glasses of wine. After a few extra stops we ended up having dinner with them at The Branch in Nuriootpa.

This week has been spent doing part days hand-picking of our Eden Valley Shiraz - a half tonne picked on Monday to pool with grapes from Colin Sheppard (from Flaxman Wines) for a Sparkling Shiraz. On Tuesday we picked our old vine Eden Valley Shiraz (about half a tonne only) for our own BullFrog Flat Shiraz and the last of the young shiraz was picked yesterday for our Red Blend. A very busy week indeed. James has taken leave from his full-time job at ETSA to be active in making our reds and today is picking up some Eden Valley Cabernet which we have sourced from David Brown (Mountadam Winery). In between all of this we have still been visiting Rocland (see the photo below of James and Juicy in front of the tank) to see how our riesling is progressing and so far, so good. All in all, in a few weeks time life should resume some normality and then it will be time to start pruning!

Finally, other news is that we have a new distributor for NSW, ACT and VIC - Single Vineyard Sellers and a new venture about to start in Tasmania so things are quite hectic on the paperwork/despatch side but very positive. I will also be attending a dinner in Brisbane at the end of July with many other Barossa winery representatives hosted by The Purple Palate. I will post more info regarding the Brisbane dinner and our own Barossa At Home dinner as things are confirmed in the coming weeks but for now, on this lovely rainy afternoon, I am heading to the kitchen to make a batch of scones and open a bottle of red which will be consumed watching the AFL match on television later tonight. It's been a huge month and it is certainly time to kick back and relax for a day or two.

New reviews from Philip White

The weather is a scorching forty one degrees celcius outside and I am not in a hurry to leave the computer, nor the air-conditoned room, for any reason. So it appears that the best way to spend my afternoon is to update my blogs, answer emails and print off any new reviews. So, in that respect, even though neither wines are officially released (both wines will be released after vintage ie March or April 2009) here are the latest reviews. It is our first review for our 2006 Shiraz and the second for our 2008 Riesling. Both reviews have been written by Philip White. You can read his wine blogs here: Drankster and Drinkster.

Karra Yerta Flaxman's Gully Eden Valley Barossa Riesling 2008

$20(?); unlabelled pre-release bottle; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points

Alsace. Germany. Tasmania. High Barossa. Who cares? Honey and nuts; gewurztraminer and roses; spicebox and creme caramel: you'll find all these sorts of delicioso swimming round this bowl. It's not the austere crisp rapier some earlier Karra Yertas have been, but it's rich and wholesome, like some of the more Germanic rieslings made in the Barossa in the sixties and seventies, and what I imagine Petaluma tried to do sometimes during the eighties. The flavour has lovely honey as much as lemon and lime: not exactly sweet, but with an illusion of sweetness as much as your actual unfermented sugary juice. The aftertaste is a tantalising tumble of spiced mead, citrus pith, dried apple, lemon blossom and dry stones. It's like a serious spatlese riesling fermented dry. It'd be perfect with a creme caramel flavoured with a tiny squirt of lemon and garnished with citrus rind; or King George whiting fillets wrapped around a little squirt of prawn mousseline in beurre blanc. Savvy?

Karra Yerta Flaxman’s Gully Barossa Shiraz 2006

pre-release unlabelled sample; ??% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points

The stony, barren ridge at the top of Flaxman’s, where the ancient rocks poke through high above the Barossa, is the home of some of the world’s most expensive and elusive shiraz wines. (Think Ringland, next door. McLean’s Farm at the northern end; Mountadam at the southern.) This vineyard is windswept and wild, freezing in the winter, and even cool at night in the midst of the most vicious heatwaves. So this rare tincture has quite a lot to live up to. It has the most intense and complex bouquet, riddled with twists of beauty that seem so blacksmithed into compression they unwind in a dreadfully gradual and teasing manner. Musk, lavendar, violets, licorice, mint, cedar, sandalwood, vetiver, blackcurrant, blackberry, beetroot, morel, porcini, ancient soy, salt, schist, podsol, guano, gunpowder, swarf, burlap ... I dunno. I could go on, and I’ve only had my hooter in the glass for thirty minutes. I know now that this wine is gonna be a king hell striptease viper with a voice like Barry White and Grace Jones for a Mum. The palate’s disarming and confronting from the first sip: just mildly viscous, especially compared to the intensity of its flavours, with, yep, the lithe form of the black whipsnake slithering around your mouth like some professional girls apparently dance on poles. It’s strangely compact and intense, as I’ve said too many times, but still seems ethereal in its saucy habit of letting little shots of its myriad components just go: they’re there for a flash as they evaporate, and suddenly they’re replaced by something else. And on and on it goes. The dance of the hundred and summit veils. Sometime a long way off all these bits and pieces will assimilate and homogenise and the damned thing will be mature and formal and very, very famous, and those astonishing components will let go at the same time in equal proportions and really, really gradually, but shit, that’ll kill people, and by Bacchus I love it now. I doubt that I can stay alive long enough to drink it at its peak, and if I did, it’d kill me anyway. Karra Yerta has never hit the top ten in the glambam gobstopper any price you like stakes, but it will, and it will outshine most of those wannabeez and cooderbeenz. This is a stunning, secret wine. Gimme! JAN 09