[SOLD-OUT] Greenock Creek Mataro 2014

It's 16 years since Michael planted these bush vines, unirrigated, in the alluvium beside Greenock Creek. Even without added water the cuttings got their roots marching and very quickly made grapes. Like too many grapes. Michael didn't like the wine much until this vintage. Few vignerons would show such eternal patience. Just waiting, waiting, convinced that one day everything might settle down. After all that, this Mataro is as close as Greenock Creek has got to a wine that happens to be ready to drink a bit earlier than that line of mighty Shiraz wines that deserve decades.

Sometimes, good Mataro - called Mourvèdre in France; Monastrell in Spain - seems to top all the above fruits with a lacquer of leather and walnut polish, and then a breeze heavy with summer dust, which is its tannin. It becomes Moorish: it takes me to some old Algiers salon. Groovin' down the casbah.

Then that typical blue-and-black berry juice of Mataro and the hint of little black olives below it wafts me up along the border of Spain and France and somehow dangles me there in the grainy summer sky. It's a west Mediterranean adventure. Whatever they've done, like the level these vines have achieved in root depth and trunk wood; their lignin ... probably intensified by realising the boss would eventually grow impatient ... and then the way Michael and his winemaking offsiders have dealt respectfully with that fruit ... other than the erudition, patience and diligence it reflects,

I don't know the secret of this magic but it's delicious and it's gonna grow more so with another five years in the cellar; maybe many more. This 'new' addition to the Greenock Creek family of wines is a very fine introduction wine, quite logically fitting the Waughs' vineyards and cellars suite. For now. I won't be promising any accurate dates, but I suspect this vineyard will eventually do what Alice's did. It'll gradually get more serious and profound. What started as a source of early-drinking wine eventually shows its true grit and the vineyard ends up growing fruit that lasts as long as everything else. In this case, it'll do that a lot more gradually than Alice's. Astonishing.

Philip White, 2016

Country:

Australia

Region:

SA- Barossa Valley

Variety:

Wine Red - Other

Size:

750mL