Domaine Maurice et Anne-Marie Chapuis Corton-Charlemagne 2004

in•dul•gence    [in-duhl-juhns] Show IPA noun, verb, in•dul•genced, in•dul•genc•ing. noun

1. the act or practice of indulging; gratification of desire.
2. the state of being indulgent.
3. indulgent allowance or tolerance.
4. a catering to someone's mood or whim; humoring: The sick man demanded indulgence as his due.
5. something indulged in: Her favourite indulgence was candy.

Courtesy of http://dictionary.reference.com/

Tick. Tick. Tick. A stunning wine. The Domaine Maurice et Anne-Marie Chapuis Corton-Charlemagne 2004. Hazelnut meal, citrus, white peach, lean minerality. Sexy as a nut. That's it really.

Bindi Macedon Ranges Quartz Chardonnay 2004

Only in bottle size people! The Bindi Macedon Ranges Quartz Chardonnay 2004 in magnum is, actually was, superb! To quote Bleek Gilliam – aka Denzel Washington – from “Mo Better Blues”

“….. I’ll even give up my full season tickets to the New York Knicks… Courtside!
And you know how I feel about basketball, that’s gotta be L-O-V-E!”

Yes, Love. Bleek loves basketball, Romeo loves Juliet, A flower loves the rain and I love Bindi; the Quartz for this particular post. It was just perfect. Oyster shell, clean acid, licorice powder, lively minerality; just perfect. L-O-V-E!

Drink with a loved one
Drink with abandon
100/100
Diam cork 14%v/v

Dindi Murrindindi Cabernet Sauvignon 2004

Quite frankly the best bargain I have seen in yonks and it’s been yonks since I’ve said yonks so there you go. The Dindi Murrindindi Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 was such a good wine that I had to phone up Psarakos Markets in Thornbury and ask them if they had made a mistake with the price. And the price, a crazy $8.99!!!

Now I pretty much do all of our fruit and veg shopping down at Psarakos because simply they have the best range and lowest prices, but they also have a very good bottle shop with cheap imported Stella and Heineken; not the crap brewed here in Australia but the real stuff from Holland and Belgium. But every-now-and-then you find a little bargain, something odd and something different that you cant pass up on; the Dindi was this little bargain.

Deep purpley and red in the glass, the nose instantly throws up soft pepper, red capsicum, raspberries, tobacco and mocca – very surprising. The palate was lean and cool – winter helps with that – with long clean acid and tight chewy tannins with more raspberries and mocca. Such a bloody good wine and a fantastic reason to head down to Thornbury for some fresh galangal and a botlle or two of something something.

Drink till 2013
Drink with lamb korma
93
Screwcap 13%v/v $8.99 at Psarakos Markets, Thornbury

Santa Marta Salusrti Tuscany Montecucco Sangiovese 2004 DOC and my Prickly Moses Beef and Potato Pie's

Vineyards of Santa Marta

There is not more important factor than the weather when it comes to producing great wine. The wine maker can be as famous as they want to be, but if they do not get a decent growing season, you can kiss goodbye all those glowing reviews they had been counting on. The final month is probably the most fraught with stress to the wine maker; when is the right time to pick? Can I leave the fruit out for just one more week? Will that rain band alter its course and miss my fruit?

Just one hot day at the end of the growing season can push the potential alcohol up in fruit by up to 2% which can effectively change the style of wine that was intended to be made. In Tuscany in 2003, the vintage after the hottest on record of 2002, growers were faced with this dilemma in late September with their Sangiovese. Ultra dry and hot weather hit the area in the last week of September and pretty much wiped out the fruit for that year to a lot of growers. So in 2004, growers were so vigilant in this period that they had picking crews on standby if the celsius got over 28°. With added bunch and shoot thinning in this season, 2004 eventuated as the most stressful for some years in Tuscany, but the stress paid off with many saying the 2004 vintage as the best since the great vintage of 1997.

One of the great wines to come out of this vintage is the Santa Marta Salusrti Montecucco Sangiovese 2004 DOC. Yet another gem purchased from Mediterranean Wholesalers in Brunswick, this wine shows all the hallmarks of coming from a superior year, with just a touch of ripeness telling me that they got the fruit of just in time I’d say. This wine however was not an impulse purchase; I needed something that had great acid structure with fine and tart fruit layers in it for my stout chuck steak and potato pie.


Like most meals I prepare, plenty of time is needed as the chuck steak needs about three and half hours to braise with the spuds. So here is how you do it:
· 500 grams of good stewing beef
· Good oil
· 750mL of stout, Prickly Moses for this one
· Water
· Three Desiree potatoes, peeled and diced
· Two cloves of garlic, crushed
· Three shallots, cut fine
· Puff pastry, baked in oven


As I said, the meat needs to be braised for about three and a half hours, so brown the beef in a pot and add stout and water and bring to boil. The mix will head up quite a bit so keep an eye on it. Once it has boiled, bring to simmer and add the remaining ingredients and stir every 15 minutes. Once you have the braise, spoon in to bowls and cover with the pastry. Bake to a desired puffiness.

Imogen in Action.... literally

A good fun thing to do with the kids is to cut out the starting letter of their names in pastry and put it on top of the layer of pastry. This is an easy way to get your children to eat their meal because they have some sort of ownership in the making of it, that’s what happened with Imogen anyway.
Now the wine. Very Sangiovese in the glass, with a clear translucency about it with a ruby red/pinkish hue. The nose is all prickly fir and morello cherry with a little hint of prunes. Very savoury acid in the mouth that builds to red fruit right at the end. This wine also had about 30 minutes in the decanter before dinner.

Like I said, you get a good growing season you get good fruit and in the end good fruit equals good wine, and this Sangiovese is great and a definite Susan with my pie’s.

Drink till 2025
Drink with my stout beef pie
92
Quality cork 13.5%v/v $30 at Mediterranean Wholesalers, Brunswick

Yarra Burn Yarra Valley Pinot Noir Chardonnay Rosé 2004

Spring Carnival is in the air here in Melbourne so it is the time of the year to think about accessories; comfy shoes for the girls so they are easy to carry at day’s end, new pick up lines for the boys and pink stuff in the way of refreshments. I know that Crown Lager is the preferred choice amongst most men, but Sparkling wine or Champagne is a dead-set must for this time of year, and the Yarra Burn Pinot Noir Chardonnay Rosé 2004 from the Yarra Valley is as good a wine for $20 you will get right now.

Combining two of my favourite things, Sparkling wine and Rosé, the 2004 Yarra Burn has a very peachy pink colour to it with not the best bead, but a bead that hangs in there for a while. There is strawberry straight away with a bit of funk the longer in the glass. In the mouth is very simple, strawberry up front and strawberry at the end, but hey, this wine is what it is, and at this time of the year will be a definite crowd pleaser.

Drink now
Drink with strawberries and cream and a form guide
86

Diam $20 (Dan’s) 12.5% a/v

Jacob's Creek St Hugo Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2004

“What do you mean this wine is $55, I can get this at Dan’s for $30” - but wait, there’s more. “Why don’t you have more wines that I like on the list? Really, a list like this makes me quite angry.”

Now for those restaurant people out there, the first quote is quite common. The second one, however is not, yet one fellow about six months actually said that to me while trolling through my list. It actually made him angry!

People are funny beasts when they have a winelist in their hands; I reckon there are three ways they will go – the safe bet, left field or leave it to the sommelier to choose. And it is the safe bet pick that this blog is about.

The safe bet is the wine on the list that is old school. And this is usually a label from the stables of Fosters, Hardy’s or Orlando. Wines that have been bobbing up for 20-30 years that are more of a house or Domain style rather than that of vintage specific. Now before you start thinking what a snob I am (this is true however), and how I am... well a snob I guess, these wines are what they are because the people who make them know that Bert and Terry and Joyce and Alice will buy them again and again and again. Why you ask? Because they liked it then, they like it now and they’ll like it tomorrow – too easy.

So, onto the wine.

This week, Erin and I opened a bottle of Jacobs Creek St Hugo Coonawarra 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon (geez that was a mouthful hey). Now I bought this cos I thought that there was way too much Pinot going in here, and hey, Coonawarra Cab is good.

The wine to look at is big bright red, almost black in the middle with a bright pink hue. The nose is all ripe raspberries with prickly acid. Then the alcohol hits. Big hit – 14.5% to be precise. After that there is not much to pick up other that the booze which goes on for a while. I will say that over time, two hours, and the alcohol sort of blows off with a more eucalypt feel to it. In the mouth it is big, big and big with ripe fruit, quite acidic and in the end very astringent. In the end, just another JABS (see previous blogs).

Drinking old school is something that will happen more often than not considering the almost oligopoly that three producers have in Oz. So when you do, make sure that it is a variety that is suitable for the region, but most of all make sure you like it before you buy! And by the way, when a wine has the bottle number on it, this usually indicates a special release or small number production, but when the bottle number is 400,854, I can rest easy that it is certainly the safe wine that I have been writing about.
Toodaloo.

Drink till 2014
Drink with anything that has been cooked well! (That’s well done!!!)
14/20

Kennedy Point Syrah 2004 Waiheke Island, New Zealand

New Zealand doesn’t just make Savvy Blanc people. They make a hell of a lot (in Kiwi years) of Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and a little bit of Chardy. Now we know this, but it is a surprise to a lot of people, including some ‘angry people’ out there – you know who you are – that the Kiwi’s make really good Syrah, or Shiraz as we know – that really big red wine from Barossa hey bro.
Now being serious, I really do love the Syrah coming out of NZ. It’s the type of Shiraz, Syrah, which I would sit down to with a meal. Syrah is primarily grown in the north island, and saying that, north of Hawkes Bay up to Auckland.
Kennedy Point is located on Waiheke Island, about a 30 minute ferry ride from Auckland. With about 6 hectares of Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon, Neil Kunimura and his team are producing some real classy wines. Like any good grape grower and/or winemaker, these guys are taking advantage of some great terroir, or in other words growing the right fruit in the right area. The vineyards are located on the south side of the island, where they are sheltered from the battering winds from the north shore.
This wine has great, deep colour – ox blood if you will. At 13.5% alcohol, I am tipping this wine spent at least 20 days on skins to get colour like this. The nose is quite green, with eucalypt coming in quite soft, but nothing else. It all takes shape in the mouth with blueberries being predominate, and sour morello cherries at the back holding the acid in check – and boy is there acid. It gets quite grainy at the back end also, so this wine may need to be decanted off of sediment in later years.

This is a great little wine that still has plenty of kick. Drink till 2015.
Eat with game, something like a partridge, pheasant pie.
17/20

Tarrington Cuvee Emilie Pinot Noir 2004

I first came across this wine at a friend’s wedding (Chris Tarrington –not related to the label) back in 2002. You see Chris isn’t short of a dollar, so for the reception, we had Tarrington Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. My relationship with the wine lasted, Chris’s marriage sadly did not.
Tarrington Vineyard is located in Tarrington in western Victoria of all places, just east of Hamilton. First planted in 1993 with small amounts of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, this winery has consistently produced wine that in very good vintages is easily passed as Burgundy. The vineyard is close planted with up to 8170 vines per hectare, spacings of effectively 1m x 1.2m. This is important to the quality of the finished product, but that can wait for another blog.
The approach in winemaking is very old school, with the Chardonnay seeing no oak and staying on lees for the entire nine months of maturity.
So, to this wine.
The colour is quite deep, very deep for a Pinot Noir. The nose is very spicey with cinnamon really coming on strong. In the mouth, like the nose, is full of spice with game and bacon fat opening up the longer in the glass; only good Pinot can do this. By the end of the wine, the hue was fading quite a bit, telling me that the wine is in its the home stretch.
All in all, sexy stuff this one.
Eat with rare to medium rare beef, and yes, duck.
Drink till 2012
17.6/20