It was with considerable gusto I accepted an invitation to open the recent Artfeast festival on Kangaroo Island. It’s an incredible delight, driving down the Fleurieu to its tip, and catching the ferry across that sparkling straight.
Off the boat at Penneshaw, the first thing you hit on your way to the pub is the Dudley winery’s cellar sales outlet. There’s wine everywhere. Straight through the kangaroo’d twilight to Kaiwarra, at Seal Bay. A very cool jazz trio oozed the works of Carlos Jobim in the corner, the walls hung thick with local artworks, and there on the bar squatted a line of wines that pulled me right up.
Many years ago Caj Amadio drove me about the island, showing me the scattered fledgling vineyards that a few brave souls had planted. He’d put in a tiny trial block at Emu Bay, to prove it could be done. I remember the fine sangiovese rosé he made, and how well it swam with fresh whiting. I learned vital stuff, like the Island crows’ love of these new grape things. The locals quickly perfected the perfect crow scarer. Talkback radio.
It’s a damned hard thing, just turning a wine industry on. Anywhere. Like it’s a year to find your site and prepare the ground, a year to plant, three years before you get any sort of a crop, four or five years before you know whether it’s likely to work, a year in wood and a year in the bottle and then, if everything’s going well, four or five years in the cellar. On an island where there’s no next door neighbor to borrow a mono pump, or pinch a spray unit when the odium hits, anything practical and dead simple like winegrowing and winemaking is impossible.
But islanders traffi c in travail. It’s their line of work. Like the first night at Kaiwarra I found myself talking to the bloke from next door. Next door went all the way to Parndana, and there he was telling me how one of his ancestors tied the legs of 27 sheep together, lay them in the hull of his boat, and rowed them across from the mainland. Planting vines is a breeze if that’s the sort of stuff you’re used to.
Kangaroo Island’s true potential first poked its head up in the Top 100 tasting I conducted annually for that other paper. There in an army of masked cabernets, hundreds of them, the wine of Michael and Rosie Florance – marketed then by Caj under the Kangaroo Island Trading Company brand – made it into my fi nal 15. It was a cabernet blend, with merlot, and cabernet franc, and it stood there with strapping confi dence among wines of a great deal more pretense, presumption and legend. Ten years in a row. If only I’d put those 10 vintages in the dungeon! These Bordeauxstyle reds age in a Bordeaux time frame. Like slow.
I felt like Elvis in the fabulous new penthouse at the Ozone, til they sent in a uteload of wine. Eleven brands. Best tasting room in Australia. “Tell us what you reckon Whitey.” Well what I reckon is “well done”. There was no bad wine. But a few things are obvious. Like, everybody’s got sauvignon blanc. Vinho verde. It makes tight green wine that repeats its style from one brand to the next.
Given the island’s austere, cool climate and hard, worn soils, the raw grassiness of the white sauvignon repeats in its red cousin, the cabernet. Both these varieties are austere and humourless without the addition of something softer, like the franc and merlot that always prettied up those remarkable wines of the Florances. But try the savvys-B of Two Wheeler Creek and False Cape, and you won’t have to go to New Zealand.
While even the chardonnay is a little like sauvignon blanc, the better ones are like standard level chablis. Check Rookery, and Bay of Shoals. Chablis. That’s saying something. But overall, they tend to hard greenness, and need some lees and malo, some work to break their steely backs.
Cabernet? Florance and False Cape. Beautiful, confident, long-living wines of certain finesse.
The shiraz was astonishing. Much of it has that acetone/ black boot polish bouquet common to tempranillo. When your shiraz tastes like tempranillo, what would your tempranillo taste like? Somebody will give it a go. I’d be planting more Mediterranean varieties if I was the Jesus of KI viticulture; there’s enough Bordeaux, and it takes too long to soften. Tempranillo, grenache, carignan, cinsault, barbera, even nebbiolo. They’ll get round to it.
One shiraz rang my bells so confidently that I brought it home and nudged it over a week. It took me to the north Rhone. It’s called Lathami, and delighted me, a feather perve, because its lovely label sports a tail feather of the glossy black cockatoo, Calyptorhyncus lathami, with its bold red stripe. Up the mighty Bombers!
Hit my blog to see the full tasting notes. Then hit that ferry.
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