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.

The Sweet Stuff

There are different ways of making a wine sweet. The simplest sweet wines are made so by adding what is in effect unfermented grape juice. The greatest, most complex wines use other methods. The most famous is picking grapes when they are affected with noble rot (botrytis cinerea), a mould which causes the grapes to shrivel, concentrating the sugar levels in the juice. Noble rot is behind the sweet wines of Sauternes, Germany (for Trockenbeerenauslese), and Tokaj in Hungary. Other methods can be used, as outlined below, to create truly extraordinary wines.

Rutherglen

Hot, inland Rutherglen has been producing some of the greatest and most memorable sweet wines since the nineteenth century. These wines are so sweet, the Australians have an apt name for them: "stickies." There are two styles of Rutherglen, Muscat and Topaque (which used to be called Tokay, but the name was changed for legal reasons). The former, made from a dark-skinned version of Muscat à Petits Grains Blancs, can be aged for years and released very old (sometimes a century later); the latter is generally younger and less complex, made from the Muscadelle grape. Both are made in similar ways, however, in a solera system in tin huts accumulating heat in Rutherglen's warm climate. Instead of killing the wines, as one would expect from such conditions, the heat adds complex oxidative aromas as it does in Madeira. The grapes are picked when turning into raisins, fortified during fermentation to maintain high sugar levels, before being aged in oak barrels. Although producers regulate themselves, there are four tiers for both Muscat and Topaque, rising in maturity and quality: standard, Classic, Grand, and Rare.

Pfeiffer Classic Rutherglen Topaque NV ($40; 500ml)

A pale amber colour, with lots of dried fruits - raisins, sultanas, figs - on the nose, and quite floral too - roses and honeysuckle (Muscadelle is an aromatic grape). There are also oxidative aromas of toffee, fudge, and caramel. The palate is quite spicy (peppercorn, juniper), which perhaps comes from the alcohol (17.5%). I can imagine this with sticky toffee pudding, one of my favourite desserts.   ✪✪✪✪✪

 

Pedro Ximénez

As intense, dense, and sweet as the wines of Rutherglen are, those made from the white Pedro Ximénez grape are even more so. Although most of the wines are produced in the sherry region, the majority of the grapes come from neighbouring Montilla-Moriles where it's drier and disease-prone Pedro Ximénez escapes rot. After the grapes are picked, they are laid out in the sun to dry and turn into raisins. The sugar is so concentrated that the juice can only be fermented to around 5%, before being fortified and aged in a solera system. The wines are a dark brown, sometimes mahogany colour, and are intensely sweet, as much as 450g/l of residual sugar. They are so sweet that they can be difficult to drink on their own but make the ideal accompaniment to the sweetest of desserts. There is nothing more indulgent than pouring a PX - as the wines are usually abbreviated to - over vanilla ice cream.

Gonzalez Byass Nectar NV ($30; 750ml)

A characteristically brown colour, with a deceptively restrained nose that slowly opens up to a wonderful array of dried fruits - figs and prunes and blueberries - cloves and anise, coffee, leather, and tobacco, and oxidative aromas of toffee and caramel. The wine is intensely sweet, at 370g/l of residual sugar; the sweetness is intensified further by a low acidity (sherry is one of the few wines that can get away with low acidity because of the viscous acetaldehyde). The alcohol is relatively low at 15%, which lightens the wine a little. Those complex aromas from the nose are matched on the palate, with some ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon to add. A complex, expressive wine that's as good as PX gets. ✪✪✪✪✪✪✪

Eiswein

Yet another way of making a wine sweet requires a great deal of labour and dedication. For an Eiswein (Icewine in English), the grapes are left on the vine into the cold winter until they are frozen. They have to remain healthy and the varieties used must be ones with such a naturally high acidity they will retain it until November or December. The grapes are generally picked in the dead of night when temperatures are -8˚C or below. To ensure the grapes don't thaw, they are often pressed on site before returning to the winery. When pressed, all the water in the grapes is frozen and the juice which comes out is a sugary syrup, which leads to intensely sweet wines. This is a labour of love.

Rosenhof Orion Eiswein 2012 ($29; 350ml)

Rosenhof Blaufränkisch Eiswein 2012 ($37; 350ml)

The grape most commonly associated with quality Eiswein, due to its aromatic complexity and high acidity, is Riesling. It was interesting, therefore, to taste two Eisweins made from varieties not usually associated with the style. The Orion is from Grüner Veltliner, Austria's signature white grape and which is high in acidity. It has a rich, honeyed nose, with cooked apricots and peaches, honeysuckle, orange blossom, and orange rind, with white pepper - characteristically associated with Grüner - and ginger notes on the palate. ✪✪✪✪✪ Even more unusually, the Austrian producer also make an Eiswein from Blaufränkisch, a black grape. It looks, smells, and tastes like a high-quality sweet rosé: a vibrant, light, yet intense orange colour, with perfumed floral aromas of rose petals and violets and ripe red fruit aromas of cranberries, pomegranates, strawberries, and raspberries. The acidity isn't quite as high as the Grüner, but nonetheless a refreshing, sweet wine. ✪✪✪✪ The Grüner I would enjoy with apple strudel, the Blaufränkisch with strawberry shortcake. Food is where sweet wines come into their own: they make desserts even better.