As chief winemaker at Penfolds for a decade, responsible for Grange and the rest, Peter Gago holds unarguably one of the wine industry’s plum jobs. He’s also a master entertainer. I don’t think I’ve attended a wine tasting tutored by a more dynamic personality. Gago was constantly on the move, gliding up and down the floor of the ‘masterclass’ theatre at the London Wine Fair in May as if on stage at Wembley arena.
Zlatan Otok makes some interesting wines on the Croatian island of Hvar. The white Pošip is pretty good and their Plavac Mali, in various guises, ranges from the meaty to the tannic. The Crljmenak [Primitivo] 2008 was also pretty good. I thought that Gracin made an interesting red from the Babić variety. I also had a look through the wines of Korta Katarina in southern Dalmatia – lively whites from the Pošip grape and gamey, forest floor Plavac Mail from Dingac and Postup. These wines are clearly only a fractional snapshot of what is going in Croatia.
The chance to taste fourteen separate Chablis from a single grower across the same vintage was an opportunity too interesting to pass up on the final day of the London Wine Fair. Also thrown in were a couple of 2009 wines. Jean-Marc Brocard is one of the larger Chablis producers, a business he started from scratch in 1974. Some of the vineyards have been put on a biodynamic footing.
An isolated strip of red soil on the South Australian and Victorian border has for the past fifty years provided Australia with its finest Cabernet Sauvignon. Great Cabs do come of course from Western Australia’s Margaret River and also from Victoria but no region in Australia has consistently produced such fine Cabernet as Coonawarra. In that sense it is the ‘Medoc’ of Australia, if not necessarily in style, certainly in importance.
