Saturday evening saw two of my daughter's close jazz musician friends join us for dinner, where, with celery soup, we all enjoyed my first ever bottle of Brokenwood ILR Reserve Semillon from the excellent 2005 vintage. This wine drinks superbly today albeit with significant potential for further development. The colour is a shade past a bright pale straw, followed by a seamless bevy of nuance in its wonderful fresh bouquet - green melon, straw, lemon zest, grilled nuts, a subtle toasty overlay and the classic Hunter semillon traits of lanolin and soap. The palate is remarkably smooth and almost silky showing amazing class and polish with bucketloads of crunchy melon and citrus fruit with perfectly-wrought, counterbalancing lemony acidity slowly etching out a brilliant portrait that will be complete in, perhaps, a decade's time. The wine's length is exemplary and you find yourself wanting to go back to it time and time again. 93 points. (11% A/V)
With a roast vegetable tart, we opened a 2000 de Montille Volnay 1er Cru "Les Mitans". A lighter styled pinot noir from a difficult vintage, this opened encouragingly enough with sappy cherry and sous bois aromas but on the palate this bottle displayed very little of the sumptuous, sexy fruit and structure found in the last bottle I opened last month. A drinkable wine with a few good points but rated at 80 points and almost passed it.
Last night, we invited a friend recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery for dinner and consumed the following wines. The Joseph Sparkling Red (disgorged July 2011, 13.5% A/V)) is a potpourri of red wine vintages going way back to the 'sixties topped up with a yearly hogshead of Joe Grilli's Moda Cabernet Merlot and Primo Estate Shiraz and then finished off with a mixed dosage of old Aussie fortifieds! As Mr. Grilli so aptly concludes on the back label, "don't ask any questions, the answer is in the bottle!" Not surprisingly, the wine offers up a splendid array of the best of the very old and the new, with a myriad of elegant aromas and flavours from dusty sweet earth and old book leather to delectable small berries and subtle spicy oak. The most admirable quality though is the method that Joe pulls all this together to deliver a precisely assembled package of freshness and vitality coupled with the softness and elegance of maturity for the discerning wine-drinker. At 93 points you'll no doubt enjoy it, but it ain't cheap. Always a drink now experience, but it will hold for several years if you're waiting for a special occasion to open a bottle.
Next up with fillet mignon we opened a 1998 Jamieson's Run Alexander's Block Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. This very fine wine holds a solid ruby core with virtually no bricking in the edges, throws up an intense fragrant bouquet of ripe blackcurrant and mulberry backed by a touch of regional spearmint, hints of spicy/malty oak and later, some developing secondary complexity of saddle leather and spice/cigar box. Initially the wine was smooth as silk in the mouth, gliding down the throat without as much as a whimper, full of rich, sweet, mouthfilling black fruit and, predictably, seriously good length. With considerable time, however, the tannins began to assert themselves providing some terrific counterbalancing structure that proved a perfect foil to all that glorious Coonawarra cabernet fruit. This is quite a formidable wine that could well see it's drinking window extend for another decade or more. A superior drinking experience for me. 92 points. (13% A/V)
To finish off a fantastic night we served up some quality dark chocolate treats that went well with a one hour decanted 1964 Saltram Mueum Vintage Port. In A1 condition, this blend of Shiraz and Cabernet, mainly sourced from Langhorne Creek, surprised us with its very dark colour, superb aromatics of cherry kirsch, dark Jamaican chocolate, licorice and lifted clean brandy spirit followed by an amazingly smooth, but still fresh palate of considerable class with very similar nuance to the bouquet with an added Christmas cake complexity running amuck. Smoothly resolved astringency was found throughout the wine's unmitigating and most impressive finish. A real eye-opener, and, I'm guessing, well-kept bottles with live for some considerable time to come. 94 points.