I keep telling folks to seek out wines from Western Australia. Try enough of them and it's like discovering a whole new country--the distance from the big producers of South Australia to the small coastal region of Western Australia is 2000km (1200 miles), about the distance between Los Angeles and Dallas. Or to put it in European terms, it's the distance between the cool northern wine regions of Germany down to the hot islands of Greece. For instance, yesterday I tried the 2009 Xavier Flouret Waroo Shiraz from Pemberton, Western Australia, enclosed with a convenient screwcap. $18, 14% abv. Blackberry jam, touch of cinnamon, brambles, tea, big firm tannins. It has a long, lingering full-fruit flavor, and would pair well with grilled lamb or goat, but keep it in mind if you make some really intense burgers where you grind up some beef, pork, and venison and top them with a little dry blue cheese and slide them under the broiler just long enough to barely brown the cheese crumbles before placing the whole thing on a toasted brioche roll with some wilted radicchio... Sorry, got off on a food daydream there.
This wine is made under contract by Fonty's Pool Wines in Western Australia. When I saw that name, for some reason I thought it might be some sort of obscure Aussie reference that I might have to explain, which would of course first require me to try and decipher the rules of cricket for the dozenth time, or perhaps try to dig up my old research on wombats. But it turns out that Fonty's Pool is actually a place where you go swimming, built by an Italian immigrant farmer (Archimede "Archie" Fontanini) who dammed up the river and created a fun recreational reservoir in 1925.
Note: This wine was received as a sample.
4 comments:
i was visiting a winery in the far west Margaret River region, and I asked the winemaker if he ever got to Sydney. he looked at me as if i were mad. "Oh, no, mate," he said, "that's like a different world to us."
what do you think of the label of the Xavier Flouret Waroo Shiraz? i was expecting you to analyze it, typographically speaking.
Fredric,
I thought I had covered the label with one of the other Xavier Flouret wines in the past, but it looks like I didn't. Die cut labels can be gimmicky, but I like how this one looks and they don't try to cram too much text on it. Kudos to the printers for pulling off a tricky full bleed on that die cut, resulting in a beautifully even 3/16" blue border. That's hard to do.
The signature is lovely, and they didn't just take a handwriting font and write it in--some artist drew it like that. Minor quibble? I would have put Waroo and Shiraz in the same typeface and all uppercase. They look nice in red ink to stand out from the rest, but I find the font and case difference jarring.
Cheers,
Benito
So when you get around to making the "really intense burgers where you grind up some beef, pork, and venison and top them with a little dry blue cheese and slide them under the broiler just long enough to barely brown the cheese crumbles before placing the whole thing on a toasted brioche roll with some wilted radicchio," let me know. I'll bring the wine. : )
Kimberly,
Will do. I don't often grind up my own burgers, but that combination seems pretty tasty. Half beef/half lamb is pretty great as well, and often easier because you can get both pre-ground.
Cheers,
Benito
Post a Comment