The Albany Highway is a good road, two lanes but lots of overtaking lanes. The scenery is easy on eyes: undulating green, lots of trees, rolling hills. Mount Barker is about 400 kms south of Perth. It’s a real country town where wine takes a back seat to sheep and cattle. Let me rephrase that: wine is almost invisible among the Elders rural supplies, the Mitre10, the butcher and the IGA.
Jason’s restaurant The Happy Bull is an oasis where good coffee is served, and good honest food. Steak is a specialty. Our temporary home is a historic homestead in Porongurup range, described as the oldest mountain range in the world, 20km east of Mount Barker. There are 3 wineries nearby: Xabregas, Mount Trio and Castle Rock, which takes its name from a huge boulder balancing on a tiny footprint. The view from the rock across the plain to the north is worth the 3.3km hike.
Our first night was freezing, and we ended up piling more and more wood on the fireplace and later, more and more blankets on top of the bed. It was 2 degrees the next morning, which saw us racing around and flapping our arms to get warm. We didn’t until we jumped into the car and got the engine warmed up.
Mount Barker
The smaller wineries were closed while we were here. Apart from the Riesling, Castle Rock’s wines tend to be over our $ limit anyhow. West Cape Howe on the other side of Mount Barker fits better with our ambitions, that’s why we’ve mentioned their wines more than once or twice. The basic range of buff labels sells for $15, and the black labels range from $17 to $22. The Styx Gully premium wines start just over $25. Here are some of our picks:
Riesling 2013 $17 at MyCellars.
Old School Chardonnay 2013 $16 at Winesellersdirect.
Cabernet Merlot 2012 – $15 at Winelistaustralia. Bit big and chunky in our view but the wine gets lots of raves from lots of reviewers.
Hanna’s Hill Cabernet Merlot 2012 – $18 at Nicks/Vintage Direct. This is our favourite among the WCH reds. Lovely fruit, flavour, balance, length. We preferred this wine to the Bookends Cabernet Sauvignon 2011 which gets 96 points from Halliday’s team, and 89 from the Winefront. We’re with WF on this one.
There are cellar door specials as well, and we really had a very high ratio of winners including a Rose made from Tempranillo.
Castelli came to our attention last year when its 2012 Riesling came tops in Gourmet Traveller Wine’s Riesling shootout. The wine promptly sold out. The 2013 is a good Riesling in the Great Southern style, which means less of the intense citrus hit you get with South Australian Rieslings. These wines add green apple and pear characters, and more minerals. We preferred the cheaper Riesling perhaps because it was more forward but we can’t find it on the website. Most of the wines are above our $25 limit and none stood out so much that we feel compelled to break rules.
Single File is a winery that burst on the scene a year or two back, collecting heaps of praise from Halliday and others. The wines in our price range were good but didn’t really grab us as much as we’d expected. The better wines come with higher price tags.
Lot 807 was a surprise since we’d never heard of this winery. It’s run by Steve Junk and Ola Tylestam, two guys who dropped out of embryology and high finance and turned their hands to wine in 2009. Steve also does the cooking in the small restaurant that overlooks the vineyards where sheep safely graze.
The quality of the wines was the second surprise: the 2012 Riesling is as good a Riesling as we’ve seen from the Great Southern, and the 2010 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is a Cabernet that combines rich fruit and plenty of flavour with great finesse, and it’s a bargain at the $30 asking price. Steve is very proud of his Pinot Noirs but I found them a bit too developed despite their Burgundian character.
Albany is a really neat town and well worth a visit. The town itself is proud and rich in history. Once it was a whaling town, and then a port from which the region’s grain was shipped. The huge Grain Silo still dominates the harbour today, with the ultra-modern Entertainment Centre providing a sharp- edged contrast from a later century. King George Sound and its peninsulas and islands make a wonderful backdrop.
Pemberton
Getting there was a challenge. Not because the place is hard to find but because the weather was so foul. When we left Mount Barker, you could’ve surfed down the main street on a boogie board. It got worse as we drove to Denmark and along the south coast. The area around Pemberton is also known as the timber towns because timber used to be the main industry here. We thought wine might’ve made inroads since most of the south west is now national park, but it still takes a back seat to agriculture.
Virtually all the vineyards were closed on wet, windy, freezing cold Monday so we ended up enjoying the majestic Karri forests and the beautiful countryside. The exception was Tangletoe, where Andrew Mountford makes both wine and cider. The ciders are fascinating and the wines tend to be a few years older than elsewhere; in fact you can buy 10 year old reds here at reasonable prices.
The Mountford reds are elegant and not high in alcohol which is to our taste, but some of them are quite developed and more oxidised than modern reds and need understanding in that context. The 2009 unwooded Chardonnay surprised us with its freshness, on the other hand.
We were impressed with a Rambouillet Chardonnay which we found in a bottle shop. We’ve never heard of that winery, but we do know the wines of Bellarmine which we’ve often recommended.
Moombaki was an accidental find. The weather was so fowl that we were pretty much blown off the beach as we tried to get close to Green’s Pool and the astonishing Elephant Rocks, and pelted with bullets of driving rain. A sign to a gallery caught our eye on the way there on the South Coast Road. Shelter from the storm, we thought, and maybe a coffee.
Yes, there was a gallery but the wines of Moombaki soon grabbed our attention. Most were over our $25 limit but all were worth stopping for. Under $25, both the Classic White and the Chardonnay impressed us, and the 2011 Cabernet Franc Malbec was a true Bordeaux style. This is a real boutique, hand-making just 1000 cases a year from dry-grown fruit on a vineyard run along organic lines. Just how David and Melissa make this work economically I have no idea.
Next week, we’ll conclude this series with our travels in Margaret River.
