I was recently involved in a big blind tasting to assist the organisers of the Gorgeous Food, Wine and Music Festival select wines at a price suitable for pouring their bonnie show at Serafino Wines, McLaren Vale, on November 22 and 23. This offered the chance for me to taste many wines which would not normally come my way, like the less-expensive cellar-door sparkling specials many wineries offer to fill out their portfolio. These are not necessarily from the region; McLaren Vale is hardly a great champagne producer. But we found three quite remarkable sparklers of very different styles, at miniscule prices given their quality, and I happily recommend them all for everyday refreshment.
Oliver’s Taranga Vineyards McLaren Vale Moscato 2013
$18; 6% alcohol; crown seal; 88 points
Given the flood of PR bumpf our new wave of low-alc fizz washes ashore, it’s worth being skeptical about Australian warm area White frontignac ever making wine with the finesse of the Moscato d’Asti it emulates, Asti being on the cool Piedmont of the Alps in north-west Italy. But check this: maybe not as elegant as a top d’Asti, with some of the tell-tale brilliantine and fresh sweat bouquet of your most common fronti, it also exhales a hint of heady florals and musk, and hits the flavour funnels of the tongue with little of the rubbery coarseness this variety will show if grown for fast cash in a hot place, like the Mallee. So we have a pleasant sweet white of good balance and a motherly fleshiness, with bubbles that tickle rather than fizz and foam: a perfect breakfast or morning tea wine. Ideal hair of the dog medicine. It handles an omelette really well, even one with fresh tomato – a tricky flavour to match with wine – and can deal with blistering chillies, like way up in the nether regions of the Habanero, Ghost and Scorpion types. Don’t be scared to chill it stiff. It’s a very happy wine for a purpose. Like drinking, not thinking. Noice!
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Maxwell Envious
$15; 12% alcohol; cork; 75 points
A non-vintage sparkling wine – NVS, geddit? – made from Chardonnay and Pinot noir from unspecified sources, this is a fair fizz for this price, with a little more style than the biggest refineries tend to manage when they fill these cheaper shelves with suds. The ticklish acrid edge of the bouquet is sulphur more than terroir, but it flares the nostrils in a similar way, and never quite covers the rather amorphous champagne varieties that lie below, with their vague hints of strawberry pith and custard apple. It’s much more delicate and satisfying in the mouth, however, with a clean, direct line of flavour and some really appetising bone china tannins. Dry and tidy, crisp and crunchy, adult but cheeky, it’s pretty much the sort of stuff most of us would love to schlück as we loll on the verdant sward beneath the gums at a gentle festival weekend of good music and tucker. It goes perfectly with slices of Italian almond biscotti.
Settlement Wines Cellar Door Series Sparkling Shiraz
$15; 12% alcohol; cork; 93++ points
Perfumed and heady, with alluring wafts of licorice, pepper, musk, christmas pudding and panforte di Siena well-dusted with confectioner’s sugar, this is a very fine example of sparkling Shiraz. The first sniff is the killer: you know you’re done for pretty much straight away. It’s never thick or claggy, but truly elegant and stimulating. The flavours are fine but intense, reflecting all those pretty tints the bouquet promises, but with the neatest rise of leathery tannin to counterpoint the wine’s hidden sweetness. It never seems too big or boisterous, but retains a neat line of poise and demeanour through many consecutive glasses. Fizzy Shiraz comes and goes in waves, as the better makers are followed in by the wannabees and wouldbe-couldbees who soon muck it up by making too much cheap gloopy sweet muck from excess fruit. This is not part of the coarse latter group, but a champion of the former: many other wines of this superlative quality will cost you $50 more.
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