What was the first term you memorized about Australian wine? I’ll bet it was ‘Terrarossa Soil’, the unique iron-rich, red earth of the Coonawarra district in South Australia, the soil in which grow ancient vines whose grapes are the heart of Wynns Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon, an iconic wine that for the last 25 years has been made by Sue Hodder, a legendary winemaker, who we were supposed to meet again the other night at a gala dinner inspired by the color red.
But Sue couldn’t make it. Her flight path from Singapore was blocked by typhoon Doksuri. She appeared only briefly on screen, larger than life, like an abstract visitation from the goddess of Australian wine.
Instead we heard mainly from Yancy CHU, Wynns’ brand manager based in Hong Kong. Yancy managed very well on her own in Mandarin and didn’t have to translate from English for Sue.
The theme of the dinner was RED, to echo Terrarossa, and most people found something red to wear, though you could hardly call it a costume party. Eric Tsai punctuated his usual black suit with a brilliant red pocket square, and I sported a pair of capricious red pants I bought years ago in Italy but had never before worn.
The food from Bencotto was elegantly photogenic, unpretentious in its flavors, and delightfully paired with a lineup of 8 Wynns’ wines, beginning with a refreshing Riesling before moving through the iconic Wynns reds.
Wynns and Treasury Wine Estates now team up with the new marketing spinoff from Taiwan’s premium drinks magazine, Wine & Spirits Digest. Congratulations are due all round for this powerful pairing.
I still love the Cabernet Sauvignan from Wynn’s. It often appears on blind-tasting exams, and it’s worth knowing also because it’s so good, so typically Australian, just as deep, but lighter in body. This theme, the signature of Sue Hodder’s consummate skill, extends through all the offerings to the latest, called V&A Lane, where, as Eric Tsai discovered, V&A means Victoria & Albert, after Great Britain’s Queen Victoria and her consort Albert.
As to aging these wines, I have something to say. The supreme challenge for a winemaker is to create a wine that achieves two objectives: It will benefit from aging, and it is accessible when still young. Year after year, Sue surmounts this challenge, and the only difficulty we have is that Wynns’ wines are so beautifully accessible that it’s hard to find one old enough to test the limits of its age-worthiness. Best to visit the winery, I suppose, but Coonawarra is far from anywhere, a tiny town (137 people) and halfway along a 9-hour drive from Melbourne to Adelaide.
One more thing I learned last night, in case you’re still reading. The claim that Coonawarra is a ‘cool climate’ region seems a bit bold. The country around it is hot, and the ocean is warm too, but if you look at the water-temperature map I photographed from the presentation screen, you will see in the ocean next to Coonawarra a blue patch indicating 15-degree water. There it is, the reason why Coonawarra is cool.
The day we were there, we interviewed Sue Hodder at 0630 so that we could still stand in the vineyards. The temperature at that hour was already 35C, and that day it rose well into the 40s. You can imagine my skepticism when Sue declared that Coonawarra is a cool-climate region. But she stuck to her guns, and now I realize that on that day we were in a heat wave, and Australian heat waves are a lot like Typhoons in Taiwan. They may do a lot of damage, but they don’t last too long, and soon things get back to normal.
Big thanks to Noah Wu for the invitation. All the best to you all going forward.
