Philip White is smitten by two special Italian varieties from By Jingo in the Adelaide Hills.
By Jingo Adelaide Hills Montepulciano Zinfandel 2009
$48; 14.2% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Nostalgia will eat your brain, then your meat and finally your bones as the earth resumes them. Before that process, it can be a lovely thing to recall the past without melancholy. This wine does that: it just kinda sucks my awareness back three or four decades.
Released now at six years of age, it is a time machine. It returns me to that era when wines like this were losing ground to those manufactured by what was beginning to boast of being an industry, but hated me calling its irrigated, petrochem-addicted products “industrial”.
They began to call wine “product” in those days.
The smooth, perfectly-assimilated nature of this beautiful drink is far from nearly everything that’s happened since those ’70s. It has maturity, but it will grow much more of that: beneath its mellow autumnal flesh and pungent fresh cowshit, it has the structure of a locomotive. Most drinkers will not see this. That bit is my job to see. Even reporting it is a risk, because speaking about ordure and chassis may take away from the message about the deep glow one gets absorbing its earthy pungence now.
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It would be a very brave wine nerd to name its varieties, or perhaps even its vintage. Not to mention its source in a tiny vineyard south of the Mount Barker township in the Adelaide Hills. As I have hinted before, it is a wine that would snuggle well among those of Serge Hochar and Max Schubert, of whom I wrote on Tuesday.
Few people have the spirit, the nous, the soul, the patience, the gastronomic intelligence … whatever it is … to even think of wines like this anymore.
John Gilbert can, and then he gets up and ever-so-gradually makes them.
“I just watch them,” he told me in the vineyard last night. “Like slowly, they make themselves.”
At a time when the best of the past is hard to grasp, it’s worth realising that these wines can only “make themselves” in the hands of such rare, patient, confident and sensitive persons who are hated by their accountants.
For the maker, six years is a lot of spend to wait for. Even Grange now hits the market at four years of age.
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This is majestic, mature, supple red wine like kings once drank.
By Jingo Adelaide Hills Montepulciano 2008
$55; 14.2% alcohol; screw cap; 94+++ points
Even harder to explain, this is the above without the immediate comfort of the raisins and currants the Zin brought.
Still mellow and mature, and a whole year older, it’s more zen than Zin. It’s the master version. It’s hard and stony in a way, like waking in the snow to realise you’ve just spent six or seven winters and all those other seasons in a full lotus on a slab of granite.
It’s a slender, velvety wine, yet with calm authority it oozes the following organoleptic division: lovely old saddle-soaped harness. Soft English toffee. Cinnamon and nutmeg, well stewed into the structure, not overt. All the briars and ripe hedgerow berries of the whole of old Europe, picked and macerated at the peak of summer, with their leaves and their heavy drooping fruit, steeped and aged. Billy Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe jumping over the fence for a frolic in the summer sward; sonnets emergent. Ginger. Fruit mince. Soft candied citrus rind. Suet. Caul fat.
There’s nothing else like this on the market.
It makes my mouth ooze, and its beautiful hidden acid sucks the blood dangerously close to leaking through the inside of the lips. It’s sick.
The Sicilians have a special recipe for stew made only from wild black rabbits. I want it. And gorgonzola.
I may have been mean with my points. Not jokin’. Such quality at this price is hard to grasp. Get some. Wallow.
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