iFor some years now Dalwhinnie has been the sleeping beauty of Australian wine. No longer. The grapes here are grown on the most stunning of sites; it’s one of the few vineyards that every Australian wine lover should visit at least once. A recent change in ownership and winemaking has seen these Pyrenees wines roar back into elite contention. Welcome back, Dalwhinnie. CAMPBELL MATTINSON, Wine Companion
The renaissance of Dalwhinnie continues apace. GARY WALSH, Wine Front
Here’s one for persistence of a wine rep and a quality wine that just wouldn’t leave our consciousness. For about the last 6 months our Tuesday tastings have been intermittently shown the Dalwhinnie LDR Shiraz (light, dry red). Each time, we’ve all looked at eachother and said, we have to offer this wine. It’s a brilliant medium-bodied central Victorian red that delivers big in every department BUT, for reasons I can’t explain, that hasn’t happened until now.
Quick recap on Dalwhinnie in case you’ve missed the copious amount of press coverage on the estate of late. Dalwhinnie is back, arisen; rolled the stone back from the tomb, pushed Lazarus out of the way and is firing off wines that are, not only the equal of those that made this estate in Victorias Pyrenees region, an Australian icon, but better! Way better.
What’s the story?
Well, without going into the full nitty gritty, after years of false starts and false dawns the estate was finally sold to the Fogarty family; a big deal wine crew out of WA who know good ground and they know how to both, build from scratch but also have the technical chops to bring old fashioned estates living on their past glories (yes, Dalwhinnie) into the present.
A large part of their success is driven by their resident winemaking genius, Jules Langworthy. His CV is peppered with pretty much every show trophy in Australia and includes the Jimmy Watson. Fair to say, he can pretty much make palatable wine out of dirty sock water.
He was unleashed on Dalwhinnie around 2019 and we’re now starting to see the fruits of his labours. The most recent set of estate releases bares testament to his talent but also bring to life the dazzling and unique terroir, of this site. His winemaking style strips away the hunkering, lumbering and extractive old-fashioned styling of the past and in it’s place the wines have clarity, ripeness without heaviness and a wonderful overlay “Central Victorian spice” woven into fabric of each one. They are truly wonderful. Alex Dobson, wrote about the ‘big dog’ wines earlier this year.
The fish that probably didn’t belong in that bucket though was the not-so-humble, LDR Shiraz. Bringing you back to my opening words, it’s a wine we keep tasting, keep loving, keep buying for the stores BUT we’ve never offered.
It’s all estate fruit but Langworthy has put a different spin on it by comparison to the other wines. It’s about showcasing vibrancy of fruit and vineyard and not over-cooking the winemaking artefact. Here, that means a decent portion of whole bunch, 12 days on skins, pressed to a large format wood.
The net result is a medium-bodied wine that grabs all the black fruits and spice elements from the site but delivers them to you in a less ponderous altogether more immediate package. The tannin is there but it’s a gentle guiding hand in the background. Oh, and I forgot to mention, it’s bloody delicious.
Cheers
Michael