Savour Australia Day 3: Yalumba Museum Tasting

Posted on 26 September 2013

As every good wine event, Savour Australia was peppered with a host of fringe events. Surely one of most exciting was the Yalumba Museum Tasting that offered an unparalleled opportunity to taste Australia’s leading bottlings back to… 1922.

One of the highlights was the Pewsey Vale Eden Valley Riesling. Incidentally it was the first Australian wine I ever tasted, back in 1998 when I travelled to London and bought a mixed case of wines from Oddbins that I never heard about and that were unavailable in Poland. When I later worked for Oddbins in 2001/2, it was one of my favourites sells.

I tasted the 2013 on another day here in Australia and it was the quintessential, perfect Aussie Riesling: vibrant and electric, with limey and green peachy flavours slowly unfolding in the glass, bone-dry and food-friendly. Here at the Yalumba Museum Tasting, we jumped instantly into deep water with the 2002 Contours Museum Release. Contours is Pewsey Vale’s higher bottling, coming from a selection of best-exposed Riesling vineyards. The 2002 is in top shape (I guess it can age further), complex on nose with beeswax and forest floor and the finest acids. But what to say about the 1973 “Rhine Riesling”? A dark orange-coloured with orange peel aromas, softly honeyed and sweet, it seemed completely timeless! We then tasted the 1938 Riesling, which in turn was bone dry, subdued, green-appley, crisp and surely not tating forty years older than the preceding one. An incredible treat to taste this, which for 30 minues remained the oldest Australian wine I ever tasted – until the baked-sugary, toffeed 1922 Yalumba Port arrived at dinner!

There was a Chardonnay table, and a mini-vertical of the Yalumba The Virgilius Viognier where I preferred 2010 to 2003 and 2007. Then Yalumba presented their flagship wine, the Cabernet–Shiraz The Signature from 2009 and 2004 to the 1992. The latter was utterly delicious, sweet and fat but delicate with those trademark Aussie overtones of eucalyptus, and still quite tight. And on we went to the 1966 Galway Vintage Reserve Claret, a fascinating old wine full of brilliant ideas – not just for its age – still tannic and just remarkable.

Yet it was not even my favourite red of the night. That title goes (again) to Jim Barry’s The Armagh Shiraz. We tasted the 2006, 1994 and 1989; on other occasions during Savour Australia I tasted the 1998, 1992 and 1990. All of these are just breathtaking, 95+ wines. The Armagh is a wine that starts with so much natural concentration that as it ages, it just uncovers layers and layers of aromatic and textural complexity. Firmly my no. 1 Australian red.

Disclosure: my trip to Australia including flights, accommodation and wine tasting programme is sponsored by Wine Australia. Dinner and museum tasting courtesy of Yalumba and participating producers