A small distance further down the road and I was in Yarra Glen. Small town with a big grand old hotel.
I headed on up the valley and stopped at the Yarrawood vinyard.
A little background for those interested in my wine ramblings. If wine doesn't interest you skip to the next post
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The Yarra valley made its biggest impact on the Australian wine scene (in my experience) due to two main things. 1.The fact that the pre-eminent (and IMHO the most influential) wine writer in the country James Haliday has his vinyard (Coldstream Hills) here.
And 2. Coldstream Hills and many other vinyards here grow and put a lot of effort into making very high quality Pinot Noir.
A few years ago at the national wine show (called Tasting Australia) in Sydney I worked my way through quite a lot of Yarra Valley Pinots (and a few Tasmanian ones as well). My home in the Adelaide hills is also a Pinot growing area and I know two of the main Pinot focused winemakers in Tim Knappstein and Stephen George. I have barrel tasted almost all of the barrels from one of Tims vintages with him, learning about the different parcels and clones and reasons for planting a particular clone on particular teroir as opposed to another. I've also spent a week (definitely not long enough) in the main Pinot growing region of France Burgundy.
Some of the Pinots I tasted in Sydney that year were I admit not sitting up top but pulled out from under the counter after short but detailed conversations (usually with the winemakers themselves). These guys are usually very down to earth and genuinely proud of their wine and when they find someone that they feel is passionate about Pinot (one of, if not THE most difficult of grapes to get right) They often want to impress. And I was impressed.
Yarra Burn, Yarra Yering, Coldstream hills and sadly a few others that I cant remember now without refering to my filed notes were amongst the best Pinots I had ever tasted. Tim Knappsteins 2008 Pinot IMHO is probably the best Australian Pinot of recent vintages that I think I've tasted. Mind you I haven't been down to Ashton Hills (Stephen George's vinyard) in a while. Yet again I digress......
AAAAAnyway.... To be honest I was a little disapointed with the quality of the many Pinots I tasted last Saturday in the Yarra Valley. There were a few "good" ones but and even a great one, but no excellent ones to be found. In fact I found them a little flabby and plumby. This was reflected by the fact that not one of the bottles that returned to South Australian with me were Pinot. I am no expert, just an enthusiastic layman but in my opinion I think whats happening is that the drought which has lasted for 10 years here in Australia and finally broken this year has probably seen a warming in the Yarra Valley, a bad thing for Pinot Noir which is fundamentally a cool climate variety. Noticeably by contrast some of the better wines tasted were the Cabernets which require a warmer climate.
Even though Yarrawood was my first point of purchase for the day it already reflected my ramblings above. I bought a very nice Cabernet.
