Rutherglen's Fortifed Wines

Visiting Rutherglen was on the must-do list for my trip to Australia, despite being over three hours from Melbourne and another six to Sydney. Once the centre of the Victoria wine industry, remote Rutherglen is now best known for its world-class fortified wines made from Muscadelle and Muscat. These are some of the most extraordinary wines in the world, intense, long-lived, and not quite like any other. I had to go there to see in person how these wines are made. Doing so gave me an even greater appreciation of the time and dedication required to make these wines.

Pfeiffer: on the site of an old distillery

I visited two producers: Stanton & Killeen, who have been going for seven generations since 1875, and Pfeiffer, who are just on their second generation. History is important here, not least for the styles of wine produced. Fortified wine, here as elsewhere, is often a blend of different vintages going back decades and more. Chris Pfeiffer started with 400l of stock in the mid-1980s and now has 160,000l of wine that he has built up over the last thirty-five years - and he is one of the newer producers. Winemakers have to nurture these wines, passing them on for future generations, and ensuring that the wines produced reflect the past as well as today. This may seem a romantic notion - and it is such romance about fortified wines which appeals to me - but this is a practical, everyday concern which requires the investment of maintaining wines for decades, as well as blending them together to create a consistently high-quality wine. The production of table wine seems short and easy in comparison.

tawny 

I came for Muscat, tasted a lot of dry table wine, and came away with a new-found appreciation for Australian ‘port’. This term can no longer be used, but Australians have been making their own style of port for generations. Under pressure from the EU, they renamed it Tawny. This can be misleading as the wines are not always tawny in colour, but I think it's a good thing that Australians were forced to rename the wines as it emphasises how unique the Australian styles are. Tawny is very different from Portuguese fortified wines: depending on their age, the wines are intense, oxidised, often amber in colour, with lots of toffee and dried fruit aromas. They are made all over Australia, not just Rutherglen, and style varies according to producer. Outside Rutherglen, Yalumba's Tawny Museum Reserve, made from Grenache and other Rhône grapes, is a great entry into this style of wine. Within Rutherglen, Pfeiffer have just released their first Rare Tawny, with an average age of 25 years, which is an extraordinary example. Such a wine is best thought of in comparison to a Scotch whisky: the long barrel ageing, deliberate oxidation affecting the colour and aroma, and a leathery, nutty, sweet texture.

topaque 

intense tasting: young Topaque on the left, old on the right

This is another style that has undergone a forced name change, this time in response to the Hungarian wine industry. Australians traditionally called this style Tokay (pronounced toe-kay), which Hungary protested was too similar to Tokaji (toh-kai). Both styles are sweet, but other than that they have little in common. It's a great shame that the name was switched to Topaque, as this doesn't really evoke the aromatic, complex nature of the wines (not that Tokay did either). These wines are seriously underrated. Made from the Muscadelle grape, which produces erratic yields, the wines are unique, with cold tea and fish oil aromas. These may not seem pleasant attributes, but it's the best way to describe the tangy, viscous quality of the wines. The wines change a lot with age, fresh and aromatic when young, darker and more developed with age. These changes best evoke how wines develop in Rutherglen, as a young Topaque is hugely different from the oldest wines.

muscat 

solera style system

In an obscure category, Muscat is what Rutherglen is most famous for. Made from Brown Muscat (red-skinned strains of the Muscat variety), the wines maintain the floral, grapey aromatics even through the oldest wines which can be decades old. The wines are even stickier and sweeter than Topaque or Tawny; they also lack the tangy nature of Topaque and have lower acidity, instead being more robust and forward in their fruity aromas. In appearance, Muscat is at first darker than Topaque, though they share a similar, almost black colour when old. That colour comes from deliberate oxidation which takes place in cellars that aren't protected from the warm outside conditions. Such exposure to heat not only changes the colour, but adds nutty, toffee, caramel, dried fruit aromas. All of these wines are intense, sweet, and rich. The oldest wines are the most complex, but require little more than a glass before the syrupy sweetness overcomes the palate. Drink them with dessert (the older the style, the richer the dessert), smoke them with a cigar, or let the richness soak into the stomach after a heavy meal. These are food wines, and should be appreciated as such. Any restaurant, especially within Australia, that doesn't offer one of these wines as a digestif or as an accompaniment to dessert is falling short.

Vin Doux Naturel

The most famous fortified wines of the world, port, sherry, and madeira, developed through war and trade, but the lesser known fortified wines of France emerged much earlier as a tribute to the sweet wines of the ancient Greeks and Romans. These wines are called Vins Doux Naturels, which is rather misleading as it means naturally sweet wines: the sweetness is anything but natural as it comes from fortifying the wine rather than from residual sugar. Vins Doux Naturels are made in the south of France, particularly the Rhône and Roussillon. They are something of an endangered species, but are richly expressive of France's wine-drinking history.

origins

Vins Doux Naturels date as far back as the thirteenth century, when in the late 1200s a Montpellier student called Arnaud de Villeneuve perfected the art of distillation discovered by the Islamic world a few centuries before. This allowed this part of Catalan France to replicate the sweet wines of the Greeks and Romans by fortifying the wine during fermentation, and today Roussillon (which borders Cataluyna in Spain) is still the main area for French fortified wine.

styles

There are two grapes used for the production of Vins Doux Naturels: Grenache and Muscat. The Grenache wines were traditionally made in a deliberately oxidised manner called rancio. These oxidative aromas can make a Vin Doux Naturel seem like a red sherry, and differentiate the wines from the much fruiter, more forward aromas of port. Muscat wines retain the fresh, grapey aromas of the grape and its naturally high acidity.

how they're made

Fortification takes place when the grape must has reached 6% ABV, fortifying the wine to around 15-16%, lower than port and most sherries. The Muscats are generally not aged for a long time, but can be macerated on their skins to add extra flavour and colour. The Grenache wines can be aged for years in mixture of old oak barrels and large glass jars (called bonbonnes, or demi-johns in Victorian English) to form very developed, mature aromas.

the appellations

The Rhône has two distinct appellations for Vins Doux Naturels: Rasteau, where it is increasingly rare and being replaced by unfortifed dry red wine, and Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise. The Muscat grape has been grown in this small town since the days of Julius Caesar, and it is perhaps these wines that most replicate those of the Romans: sweet, white, rich, but with a floral delicacy.

It's Roussillon where the most famous fortified wines are made. The most common is Muscat de Rivesaltes, which is sold the spring after the harvest. Its counterpart is plain Rivesaltes which can be made from a variety of grapes including Muscat, different colours of the Grenache family, and the local Maccabéo (like many Roussillon grapes also grown in north-east Spain). This undergoes a longer ageing, which can take part in a range of vessels according to the producer and the style. In my research for this post, I touched two bottles of Rivesaltes from 1931 and 1946 (both priced at around $180).

Although inland Maury is another historic town in Roussillon, the most renowned appellation is Banyuls, a seaside town on the Mediterranean. These are Grenache-dominant wines, where tannins and flavour come from shrivelling the grapes on the vine and from leaving the wine in contact with the skins weeks after fortification. At their best, the wines are aged for twenty to thirty years before release when they will develop characteristic rancio aromas, but the modern trend is to release them young and fruity.

tasting

 

Domaine de Durban Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise 2012 (375ml; $17)

Not quite as delicate as other Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise I have previously tasted, but nevertheless with pleasing floral aromas of acacia and honeysuckle, with quite pronounced aromas of cooked apples and poached pears and peaches. A very strong ginger, nutmeg feel on the palate made the wine more aggressive than I would have liked, but with the body and sweetness to stand up to a fruity dessert. ✪✪✪✪

Cornets & Cie Banyuls Rimage 2012 (375ml; $20)

The most interesting aspect of tasting this wine was to see how it differed from port. It was nowhere near as fruity as a ruby, nor as rich and developed as, say, a LBV. It was also not as spicily alcoholic (at 16% rather than 20% ABV) and the wine was a lot oakier and smokier than most ports. There were clear similarities though, with dried strawberry and cranberry aromas, and grainy, coarse tannins. Still young - older Banyuls is more interesting and distinctive. ✪✪✪✪