Whitey names his bargain winemaker of the year – a producer of beautiful honest wines which the likes of Hungry Dan’s cannot consistently match for quality or price, regardless of their loss-leader discounts.
Longhop Mt Lofty Ranges Pinot Gris 2013
$17; 13.5% alcohol; screw cap; 93+ points
Longhop is old Gawler High School mates Tim Freeland and Dominic Torzi. They bought this fruit from the premium uplands of Lenswood. They pressed it with some whole bunches in the basket, and refrigerated the juice for 14 days to settle it. After they racked it off its gross lees, the solids left in suspension assisted the natural yeast fermentation, which they managed cool for eight weeks. They then left it on its yeast lees for another eight weeks. They’ve made a wine of serious character. It smells like quinces and pears, especially the Passe-Crassane pear, which is a cross of the two. It has a persistent acrid topnote that tickles my nostrils and reminds me of Lenswood on a dusty summer day. Its texture is chubby, and the confidence and authority it shows when settling into the mouth is invasive. However, its oily viscosity is soon matched by a stern rise of natural acidity to balance, and the sorts of grainy tannins that set your salivaries dribbling with delight and the anticipation of more of it. It’s the opposite of Sauvignon blanc. It’s like a white, how you say, GSM? It’s great with choucroute, the Alsace version of steaming hot sauerkraut, where the pork is usually salted, smoked or both, and the mustard is dolloped on. Which makes sense, because in Alsace, the Pinot which is grey (grigio; gris) is often served with exactly that. I can recall no other Pinot gris as fulfilling and real from these parts. And it’s $17. You can easily pay $35 for a half-decent Alsace version. Knockout.
Torzi Matthews Schist Rock Eden Valley Shiraz 2012
$20; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
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Here’s another from the same Dominic Torzi, this time in partnership with his partner Tracy Matthews. It’s from their Shiraz vineyard in the Kanmantoo Group Schist of Mt McKenzie in the high Barossa. It smells more like it came from the staff entrance of the Mustang Ranch. It’s rude and rich and voluptuous in the fruit department, with a great mush of ripe red berries and plums wallowing about. Maybe even baby beetroot. Then it blasts off a topnote of musk and confectioner’s sugar, and yes, the faintest whiff of the Kanmantoo pit after a blast. Like a good explosion spreads in said mine, this bit quickly grows to the point of dominance, but, like a master tease, stops just short. After all that, the palate is sublimely elegant, as lissom and athletic as it is brittle – it’s one of those wines that’s like a tantalising see-saw of what you want now and what you want next. At the moment, it’s raspy satin and grosgrain; in five years you’ll have more lush silk and fur. So now, I’d have it to contrast food, and set it in counterpoint to, say, dribbling pig off the spit. In 2020, I’d be using its mature slickness to make harmony with more seriously slow-cooked pork belly in a cassoulet, where the meat slices are more like jelly. And, without even being ripped off, flogged and butchered by Hungry Dan’s, it’s only TWENTY BLOODY DOLLARS! It is wine like this, which Dominic Torzi consistently releases, which makes him, unquestionably, my bargain Australian winemaker of the year. He puts thousands of more pretentious couldabeens, more narcissistic wannabes, even much more famous fadmakers well and truly in the shade. If they saw this and had a deep think, they’d soon be queuing up for their Imposter Syndrome Pills.
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