10 Australian Shiraz - and Shiraz blends - that might surprise you

Although there’s still plenty of the rich, lush style of Shiraz we’ve come to associate with Australia there’s more than one style as I discovered on my recent trip. If you like more restrained, even funky syrahs, Australian producers can deliver. Unsurprisingly many of them are organic or biodynamic and made with a minimum of sulphur. Most are from cooler vineyards. Take your pick . . .

Battle of Bosworth Puritan Shiraz 2011 (on UK shelves from March/April. about $20-22 in Australia)
If you’re going to the Bibendum tasting this week you’ll be able to taste this electric young syrah from Joch Bosworth’s (right) organically run vineyard. No oak, no sulphur, designed for early drinking. "We wanted to make a fresh, vibrant Spanish ‘Joven’ style of Shiraz ready for opening and enjoying immediately" he explains. He has.

Bobar Syrah 2009, Yarra Valley. Excel Wines has the 2010 at £120.20 for 6 bottles. £20.25 St. Clair & Galloway Fine Wines, Bognor Regis. £24.99 The Smiling Grape, £28.50 Green & Blue. Australian suppliers are on to the 2011 vintage.
More in the funky natural wine vein this won’t be to everyone’s taste and I suspect will be more susceptible than most to the day on which it’s tasted and the conditions under which it’s been stored and transported. I tasted it at a dinner at the Healesville hotel and it was delicious with a really fresh, mineral, spicy character. Unfined and unfiltered. The current 2011 vintage is only 12.5%

Castagna Adams Rib 2008 Nebbiolo/Shiraz, Beechworth £23.50 St. Clair & Galloway Fine Wines, Caves de Pyrène
I mentioned Julian Castagna’s Genesis Syrah in my Guardian article because that’s the wine that’s most widely available but I also loved this perfumed, supple Nebbiolo blend with its lovely bitter twist - the perfect wine for drinking with Italian-style grills and roasts. There's also a cracking Syrah/Sangiovese called Un Segreto at same price as the Syrah ($75 in Australia)

Clonakilla Hilltops Syrah 2009, Canberra NSW. £14.99 West Mount Wine £18.50 Fortnum & Mason slurp.co.uk has the 2010 at £16.95, $25 in Australia
Not a producer I visited but one of the best examples of new wave Aussie shiraz that you can find on the shelves at a reasonable price though it no longer seems to be available from Waitrose. More in the classic lush style but with real finesse.

Eastern Peake Walsh Block Syrah 2008, Victoria N/A in UK, $35 in Oz
I tasted this at the end of a long wine bar crawl with Max Allen at Gerard’s wine bar in Melbourne so can’t vouch for the accuracy of my tasting notes but remember finding it wonderfully fragrant, spicy and smoky. And delicious with fresh mozzarella and smoked tomatoes.

Jamsheed La Syrah 2010 N/A in UK, $20 in Australia
A bright, breezy young syrah sourced from 4 different vineyards in the Yarra Valley. 50% new oak, unfiltered, unfined “my take on Crozes - a good young quaffing syrah” says winemaker Gary Mills who worked for 2 years for Ridge in California. “A lot of the time we used to mimic South Australian shiraz. The best now comes off cooler sites.”

Ngeringa J.E.Syrah 2009* imported by Caves de Pyrène. £17.25 www.scc-finewines.co.ukaround £106.60 a case of 6 from Excel Wines, around $25 in Australia
Another bright syrah - or ‘bright and chirpy’ as Erinn Klein (right) from this biodynamic producer in the Adelaide Hills puts it. They compare the fruit to Schwetchen plums - I thought the predominant note was black cherry with a good kick of spice. Either way it’s delicious - as is the more expensive Ngeringa Syrah (about £35 here, $50-60 in Australia)
* pronounced neringa

Paxton Quandong Farm Shiraz 2009 McLaren Vale £18.90 Fareham Wine Cellar, £19.99 Cadman Fine Wines, £20.45 Noel Young Wines, £22.95 Jeroboams
I mentioned Paxton’s AAA shiraz/grenache in my Guardian column this week but I really like this scented, floral, almost violetty shiraz too which comes from a single biodynamically farmed vineyard. Shows McLaren Vale fruit can have finesse as well as weight.

Ruggabellus Archaeus 2009, Barossa N/A in UK, 40AD
One of three blends of grenache mataro and shiraz from Eden Valley which were released to rave reviews and sold out within six weeks. A fascinating insight into what young producers in the Barossa are doing - aromatic, spicy and peppery. “We use no new oak and pick early looking for vitality, crunch and intrigue” says winemaker Abel Gibson.

The Yard Riversdale Shiraz 2010 Frankland River, Larry Cherubino. N/A in UK, around $35 in Australia from March
If you want to get an idea of what Western Australia’s Frankland River is capable of look out for this sensuously soft, natural tasting shiraz with a lovely structure that Cherubino suggests drinking with duck, French-style roast lamb or spiced meatballs with rosemary. The secret? "We don’t make shiraz outside the Great Southern - Margaret River is too maritime for shiraz" he claims.

You might also be interested in two other wines I mentioned in my column, First Drop's Mother's Milk Shiraz 2009 (£14.99, The Secret Cellar, Tunbridge Wells; £15.03, The Sampler, London SW7; £15.99, Cambridge Wine Merchants) and Picardy Shiraz (£22, auswineonline.co.uk)

Pairing cheese and claret

I’ve always had a bit of a problem finding cheese matches for red Bordeaux. Cheddar is often suggested but I find mature versions have too much ‘bite’. Stilton slays it and so do most washed rind cheeses, oozy Camemberts and Bries . . .

The most successful match I’ve found so far is Mimolette so maybe it was auto-suggestion at work when I tasted a deep orange Red Leicester at The Fine Cheese Co’s Cheese Fair in Bath at the weekend and immediately thought of red Bordeaux.

It was the Sparkenhoe Red Leicester from David and Jo Clarke of the Leicestershire Handmade Cheese Co. a revival of an old recipe and a lovely mellow, typically English cheese. Extraordinarily it hasn’t actually been made in Leicestershire for 20 years and for even longer - over 50 years - on a farm in the county.

It has more flavour than milder cheeses like Caerphilly and Wensleydale which are better suited to a white wine in my opinion but lacks the intensity of a farmhouse cheddar which can sometimes throw a medium to full-bodied red. I tried it with a bottle of André Lurton’s 2004 Chateau La Louvire Pessac-Lognan from Bibendum, a mature Bordeaux of exactly the sort you might bring out with the cheese over Christmas and it was perfect.

Coincidentally I tried another aged Bordeaux (a 1999 Chateau Tour du Haut-Moulin which was drinking quite beautifully) with cheese the following day and found that although it was again overpowered by a ripe Brie it went really well with a Vacherin Mont d’Or, a combination I’d never have expected. I think it was probably because the cheese wasn’t that mature and the wine was. The problem with reds and cheese is mainly about unintegrated tannins. Older vintages seem to survive better.

• You can buy Sparkenhoe from The Fine Cheese Company and other stockists listed here.

Photo by Ray Piedra

Pairing Cheese and Champagne

Cheese and champagne might not sound like natural bedfellows but if you think about the pairing for a moment you immediately realise they have quite a thing going. Many canapés - like gougères and cheese straws - are made with cheese for example and go wonderfully well with champagne but what about individual cheeses?

I had the opportunity to taste a range of cheeses with champagne recently and came to a few new conclusions.

• Mild slightly chalky cheeses work well. The classic example is Chaource, a cheese which is often paired with champagne but a mild but flavourful cheese like Gorwydd Caerphilly is good too. Very mild cheese like Mozzarella is an undemanding but also slightly uninteresting match

• Rosé champagne seems a more flexible partner than ordinary non-vintage. We tried two - a Moet rosé and a Benoit Marguet Grand Cru Rosé and they both showed well, particularly with Mistralou (goats cheese wrapped in chestnut leaf) and a Brie de Meaux. But a stronger goats’ cheese killed the Marguet stone dead so you need to take care.

• An Ossau Iraty sheeps cheese went well with most of the champagnes - the slightly nutty taste and smooth texture of hard sheeps’ cheese seems a good foil to champagne

• Washed rind cheeses as usual are tricky. If they’re not too mature, like the Reblochon and Langres we tried, they may work but if they’ve been allowed to get very mature like an incredibly gooey St Marcellin they’ll slaughter champagne (along with most other wines)

• Strong blues, as might be expected, are quite overwhelming but the creamy texture of Stichelton, an unpasteurised verson of Stilton, made it an unexpectedly good match for an elegant low dosage Jacquesson 732 (though coming mainly from the 2004 vintage it has quite a bit of bottle age)

• Parmesan is probably the ultimate champagne cheese - a case of umami meets umami

In general the stronger the cheese the older and more powerful the champagne you need. A mature Comté for example overwhelmed the fresh-tasting non-vintage champagnes but I suspect would have been great with an older champagne or a Prestige Cuve like Krug.

I shall just have to carry on experimenting ;-)

Image by delo from Pixabay

What food to pair with mature Margaux

The other night I was lucky enough to go out with a wineloving friend of mine and his wife who brought along a bottle of Château Palmer 1990 with them. It was a lovely wine but, as any 20 year old vintage would be, quite delicate so immediately created the dilemma of what to eat.

The dishes we chose - braised partridge, seared breast of duck and cassoulet were all fine with it - but none of them was perfect. Wines like this are better with unsauced dishes - simply roast partridge would have been better. The seared duck was accompanied by caramelised chicory which really needed a younger, more vibrantly fruity wine and the cassoulet would have been better with a more rustic red like a Marcillac. The Palmer also struggled with the cheese, as is inevitable if you offer a selection.

It underlines a point I’ve made before that treasured bottles like this are really better served at home. No chef can really afford to serve the sort of plain, unadorned food that suits fine wine, especially Bordeaux, best. Customers would regard it as dull and take the view (quite rightly, really) that they could do the same at home.

The ideal dish would have been a simply roast leg of lamb with possibly a gratin dauphinoise (cream and potatoes flatter most old reds). Resist the temptation to serve lots of vegetables or condiments alongside because the more flavours you add the greater the risk of taking the edge off your treasured bottle. (This doesn’t apply so much, of course, to younger wines.)

So far as cheese is concerned it also pays not to offer too much choice. If you’re going to serve cheese at all a hard sheep’s cheese like a Manchego or Berkswell is going to be the best kind of foil for an old wine and again leave aside compotes and particularly chutneys. Mature parmesan can also be delicious though I’d suggest no more than two years old.

The great advantage to this strategy is that this is not difficult food to cook, you’ll enjoy your wine more and you’ll pay a fraction of what you would pay in a restaurant for it. Which is quite a result.

For more inspiration for mature Margaux, see this Match of the Week from 2017: Margaux and Turkish Chicken with Walnut Sauce

Image result: jacqueline macou from Pixabay