Max Allen
Phillip Jones has a way of talking out of the side of his crumpled face - half conspiratorial, half wary - when he’s explaining how he makes his Bass Phillip wines.
‘The secret,’ he said, pausing to look straight at me, to make sure I was paying attention, ‘to a good rosé is that you have to start from scratch. You’ll never make a truly great rosé as an afterthought.’
What Jones meant was that you can’t just bleed off some pale-coloured juice from your fermenting red grapes, whack it in a stainless steel tank, add some yeast and hope it turns into a good pink wine. You need to grow the grapes specifically for rosé, pick them when they have the right flavour balance for rosé - probably a little less ripe than you’d pick them for red wine - and give them some love (a little wild yeast barrel ferment, perhaps) in the winery.
I was given this little winemaking lesson years ago, in the mid-90s. At the time, you could count on one hand the number of Australian winemakers producing what you might call ‘serious’, or ‘European-style’ dry rosé - pale pink, savoury, complex wine that tasted seriously good with food. There was Bass Phillip, Bannockburn ... and, um, that was about it. Indeed, good rosé of any description was thin on the ground back then: Charlie Melton had the market for the ‘Aussie style’ of magenta-pink, fully-fruity gluggable rosé pretty much to himself with the consistently-excellent Rose of Virginia.
Since then there’s been an explosion in the production and popularity of Australian rosé: walk into any bottle shop - especially at this time of year - and you’re bound to find a whole shelf in the fridge devoted to pink wines; hop onto a stool at any trendy wine bar and you’ll be offered at least two rosés by the glass; visit any cellar door and you’re almost guaranteed to find a pink wine in the winery’s range.
The bad news is that the vast majority of these new rosés are what Phillip Jones would describe as an afterthought. They’re the product of young-vine fruit - until the short 2007 vintage, many were the product of the unwanted oversupply of grapes. Very often they’re made from juice that’s been bled off from fermenting shiraz or cabernet or sangiovese in an effort to concentrate the resulting red wine rather than produce a great rosé. And they’re often too sweet because that’s what the winemaker thinks the market wants. As a result, most Aussie pink wines are thin, dilute and sugary.
Not all of them, though. The good news is that an increasing number of quality-conscious winemakers (see breakout for a lit of recommendations) are responding to the public demand for rosé by producing some serious, savoury, dry, textural pale-pink wines. And when I say ‘serious’ here, I don’t mean boring and worthy - I mean seriously delicious.
Pete Schell makes one of the best of this new breed of rosés in the Barossa Valley. Inspired by the great pink wines he tasted while working in Provence for two years, he was determined to make the style part of his Spinifex range of wines when he returned to Australia. And he obviously shares Phillip Jones’ view on how to go about it.
‘I identified old Barossa grenache and cinsault and mataro vines to specifically provide grapes for rosé,’ says Schell. ‘I pick them ripe (the wine is 14 per cent alcohol) but only leave the juice in contact with the skins for just 18 hours, so there’s a lightness of colour, delicacy of flavour and balance.’
The result is a disarmingly floral, perfumed, pale-salmon-coloured wine that builds and builds in the mouth, finishing dry and spicy and long.
Over in the Yarra Valley, ‘European-style’ rosés - usually made from the Yarra’s most widely-planted red grape, pinot noir - are particularly successful and deservedly popular. Wines from tiny new producers like Mac Forbes push the savoury qualities of the style to its austere, nutty, and food-friendly extreme, while the much larger De Bortoli wine company has also jumped - very convincingly - on the bandwagon: the marvellous estate-grown pinot noir rosé is given the full catastrophe of ‘natural’ winemaking techniques such as wild yeast ferment in big old barrels and no acid addition to produce a wine that’s both delicate and bone-dry but also round, soft and creamy.
The latest brilliantly complex, dry pink wine to hit the shelves is the 2007 Arrivo Nebbiolo Rosato from the Adelaide Hills. Again, it ticks all the ‘best rosé winemaking practice’ boxes. Some of the nebbiolo grapes used to make this wine are different clones different from those used to make the Arrivo nebbiolo red wine (one is even the clone used in Piedmont to produce rosé); each clone is fermented separately, spends two weeks on skins, and the wine has a touch of tannic, extended-maceration nebbiolo red wine blended in for even more complexity and structure.
Sometimes, as is the case with this Arrivo, the new wave rosé style can be so complex and satisfying that it blurs the boundaries between pink wine and light red.
I was at a tasting recently of Australian and European wines, whites and reds, made using biodynamic methods. It was a blind tasting, and the tasters - many of them biodynamic winemakers - had no idea what the wines were.
The first of the red wines was a very pale, transluscent crimson. It smelled amazingly fresh, pure, like just-picked raspberries. That same bright fruitiness was the first thing to hit you when you took a sip - but then the wine tightened in to a silky, powder-dry, refreshing finish. And an amazing, long, complex finish.
I happened to be standing next to Phillip Jones at this tasting (he started using biodynamic methods in his vineyards in 2006) and he had the same wine in his glass.
‘So: is it a rosé or is it a red?’ he asked, half conspiratorial, half wary.
‘I’m not quite sure - but it’s bloody delicious!’
And the wine in our glasses was? The 2007 Bass Phillip Pinot Noir Rosé of course.
One advantage of these complex, ‘serious’, dry pink wines is that they don’t need to be drunk very young to be enjoyed at their best - as the darker-pink ‘Aussie’ styles do. Very often, in fact, they develop extra character and deliciousness with a year or two in bottle. Nick Farr’s 2005 Farr Rising pinot noir rosé, for example, was still drinking superbly in late 2007, two-and-a-half years after vintage, and I’ve enjoyed even older bottles of Julian Castagna’s very complex and textural Allegro rosé.
Seriously.
THE PALE PINK LIST
These winemakers produce Australia’s best ‘serious’, savoury rosés
Hunter Valley - Krinklewood
Adelaide Hills - Arrivo, La Linea, Pike & Joyce
Barossa - Spinifex
McLaren Vale - Noon
Gippsland - Bass Phillip
Heathcote - Vinea Marson
Beechworth - Castagna
Yarra Valley - De Bortoli, Dominique Portet, Innocent Bystander, Kiltynane, Mac Forbes
Bendigo - Fairbank, Bress
Macedon Ranges - Bindi
King Valley - Pizzini
Geelong - Farr Rising
Mornington Peninsula - Scorpo
© Max Allen
www.redwhiteandgreen.com.au
www.maxallen.com.au
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