The third and final part of my Recent Wines for October contains two very different Australian wines, one a multi-regional blend and one from a single site in the old Hunter Valley. Both very different but both exceptionally good. To accompany those, we have a Piemontese (my last selection from the Waitrose Loved & Found range), a serious Welschriesling from Moravia, and a very nice Austrian Furmint. Again, there are just five wines, as in Parts 1 and 2, but it has given me the chance to be slightly less succinct. I hope you enjoy my enthusiasm.

These Recent Wines may seem to have appeared quite early for regular readers, but there are some autumn tastings coming up here in Scotland, all small importers coming up to Edinburgh, and they will provide the bulk of my articles for the next couple of weeks. Last year I found some real gems.

Albarossa 2020, Waitrose Loved & Found (Piemonte, Italy)

My wine obsessions vary, as do places I neglect. I had noticed I have been neglecting Italy over the past year or so, but I have drunk a few wines, this being one, which have reminded me that there is such value to be found in Italy outside the so-called greats.

This wine is part of an excellent initiative by UK supermarket, Waitrose, to highlight the lesser (once again, so-called) grape varieties, and a good few of those elusive wines were sourced in Italy. Many of the varieties highlighted are not even “second string”, and some wouldn’t even qualify as “third string”. Albarossa is certainly in that category.

Albarossa was created in 1938 as a cross between Barbera and a French variety from the Ardèche which I had never heard of, Chatus. Chatus was originally grown in the Vivarais and most was uprooted after phylloxera as it was labour-intensive to manage and very tannic. I’m not really sure why it ended up as a cross with Barbera in Piemonte.

It was named after perhaps Piemonte’s most beautiful town, Alba. When I said this isn’t even a third string variety, well there are only ten hectares of Albarossa planted anywhere. The wine is apparently made for Waitrose by the large Mondodelvino Group, whose web site has a lot of information, but nothing I could find of any relevance to their access to Albarossa grapes.

No worries. The bouquet here is actually quite lovely, ripe cherry with a little blackcurrant. On the palate the fruit is sweet, though the wine is dry. If it lacks anything, the mid-palate is a little hollow, but don’t let that put you off. It has that Barbera bitter finish on what is otherwise a smooth wine. Of course, I have no idea how it was made, but you can probably assume it is not a natural wine. What it does have going for it is price and value for money.

This isn’t a wine to really go over the top about, but you do get a genuinely interesting wine for £8.99, that is if you can find any. I was surprised to get all of the Loved & Found cuvées I ordered back in the summer, but I have yet to see any of them on the shelves in a Waitrose store. Definitely worth a look if you are after something inexpensive yet better than just drinkable.

Ryzlink Vlašský 2019, Richard Stavek (Moravia, Czechia)

Stavek is one of the fathers of Moravian natural wine. Working out of Nemcicky he farms fifteen hectares, but only a third of his land is for cultivating vines. But I won’t bore you with too much background information, having only written about him as one of three important Czech winemakers in an article published on 26 October.

What I will repeat here is what a revelation visiting him in August 2022 was. Seeing his cellars, vineyards and house (where we had the tasting) were so informative, putting the wines in context with the surroundings. I felt as if I was able to delve into the soul of the wines, something which does happen from time to time, but certainly not always, when visiting a producer.

The majority of wines Richard makes are field blends. Varieties are harvested together in a way traditional throughout much of Central Europe, and the grapes are usually fermented together too. However, he does make single varietal wines and this is a gem. The grape on the label is the local synonym for Welschriesling. A closer synonym is Laški Rizling and those of us around in the 1970s may know the infamous Lutomer brand, from the former Yugoslavia, which was drunk by my parents quite regularly. I believe it is still available in some supermarkets today, but I’m sure that quality has increased and sulphur additions decreased.

Stavek’s version could not be more different. You will find very nice Welschriesling today, especially from Burgenland in Austria, no great distance from Moravia, but you will be hard pressed to find a more serious version than we have here. The vines were planted back in 1974, before Richard took over the vineyard. The soils are loess. Whole bunches went into open-top fermenting vats for a ten-day maceration. They were then foot trodden and the wine aged for just ten months in barrels made from local acacia wood, a favourite here at Stavek’s. No sulphur was added (of course Richard is very much committed to natural wine).

The result has texture, depth, fruit, a darkish hue, and it is savoury and saline. In fact, it has everything. It’s a soulful wine, almost hedonistic as well, but definitely (for me, its maker might disagree) intellectual at the same time. A serious wine from a magician/alchemist. It also evolves over time in the glass, as the best wines do. This sounds terrible, perhaps elitist, and it isn’t meant to, but it won’t be a wine for everyone, perhaps in the way that the fine Sherries of Equipo Navazos aren’t. It reminds me of them. Not in taste of course, but in the way you need to commit to them, to make an effort to crack the code. Not that it’s hard. This is just not a superficial wine. But I love it.

Purchased from Basket Press Wines but you may now have to wait for the next vintage.

Piggy Pop 2022, Tim Wildman Wines (Multi-Regional, Australia)

Some may have discovered the wines of English Master of Wine Tim Wildman, via his recent project to make sparkling wine in England from so-called English Heritage Varieties, many being crossings planted in the 1970s, or earlier, grape varieties suited to the wet and chilly (pre-climate chaos) climate of England and Wales. His work resulted in a petnet called Frolic, which harks back to a time when varieties like (inter alia) Huxelrebe, Reichensteiner, Madelaine Angevine and Gutenborner were the prevalent grape varieties of British viticulture, rather than Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. His “Lost Vineyard” project is important, creditable, and the wine is good (if not cheap).

Tim actually honed his winemaking skills long before he made Frolic, making ancestral method sparkling wine under the Astro Bunny and Piggy Pop labels in Australia. The 2022 version of Piggy Pop is just perfect. I don’t mean it’s the greatest wine on earth, but for what it is, and what it is meant to be, it could not be bettered.

Well, what is it? Piggy Pop is a pink petnat blended from five (I think) varieties from three sources. There is Zibibbo (aka Muscat of Alexandria) from Riverland, where incidentally Brad Hickey sources the same variety for his Brash Higgins amphora Zibibbo. Zibibbo is often underrated, but it is one of the oldest, genetically unmodified, varieties we have and when taken seriously can produce very interesting wines. Added to this Riverland fruit we have Lagrein and Arneis from the Adelaide Hills, and Nero d’Avola and Mataro (aka Mourvèdre) from the warmer McLaren Vale.

As a side note, these are often what the Aussies like to call “alternative varieties”, but as I’ve heard both Tim and Aussie wine writer Max Allen intimate, these are not “alternative” varieties but “appropriate” varieties for their terroir and it’s good to see more emphasis on these and less on the Shiraz/Cabernet/Merlot/Chardonnay crowd which used to dominate Australian viticulture to the exclusion of all else.

What we have is a great label, a beautiful pink colour, a wine scented like pure, unadulterated, raspberry and cherry juice, and tasting of pretty much the same except for the lick of liquorice as the palate tails off.  It is bone dry, and gently fizzy, and although it packs 13% abv (high for sparkling wine, perhaps thanks to the McLaren Vale element) it is so well balanced and so easy to drink, you’d never guess.

Versatile as many petnats are, we drank this as a BYO at our Sri Lankan vegan popup, for which we have to walk five minutes and pay £15/head approximately once a month. The importer suggests charcuterie, pizza and dark chocolate but I’d drink this with literally anything going. Tim really is a master not only of wine, but of the petnat style, and every single person I have ever poured this wine for (quite a few) have loved it. From someone who drinks little wine at all to someone who owns a wine shop and now sells it.

My bottle came from Lymington’s The Solent Cellar (c£26), but it is reasonably widely available at indie merchants via UK importer Indigo Wine.

Furmint 2019, Heidi Schröck & Söhne (Burgenland, Austria)

Okay, I have written about this very wine before, but that was almost exactly a year ago, and it has evolved enough to justify a second plug. Heidi was the first Burgenland producer I ever visited, and her warmth and generosity with her time left as much of a mark as her wines, which I already knew quite well. I was sure I had drunk a Furmint from her before that visit but she wasn’t making one at the time.

That was in 2015, which seems a lifetime away, and in many respects, it was, although thankfully I was in Rust again last year during my third and most recent Burgenland trip. Rust isn’t too far from Vienna, although unlike villages further north around the Neusiedlersee, you need to drive or catch a bus (easy enough to do) because there’s no train. The effort is well worth it because the town is beautiful and beautifully located. If you like to cycle and go on boats it’s worth several days of your itinerary.

Despite that proximity to Vienna, Rust is historically speaking a Hungarian town. It was granted a charter as a free city by the Hungarian Crown in 1681, and this was retained when Burgenland became part of Austria in 1921. Despite having only a couple of thousand inhabitants, Rust is Austria’s smallest administrative district, with a whole load of rights and responsibilities which come with it.

All of that is a long-winded way of suggesting why you will find a few growers who have Furmint in their Rust vineyards, and in fact a few who are actively re-introducing this traditional variety, as indeed are producers over on the eastern shore, which equally has a Hungarian heritage.

Johanne and Georg are the söhne in question, having joined their mother at this family domaine. They will have big shoes to fill when Heidi retires. Burgenland must have a very special water…there are quite a number of very talented women winemakers who live and work around the shores of this shallow lake famous for its nesting storks. Austria has many star winemakers who happen to be female, counter-intuitively for a country which outside of Vienna can seem very conservative, yet I do not know of anywhere that has quite the same concentration as Burgenland.

Let’s get back to the wine. The grapes come off complex soils of loam, sand, lake gravels and quartz. Fermentation and ageing is carried out in large acacia casks. The intense minerality of a year ago is still perhaps 80% in evidence, but the wine has put on a little weight. Right now, there’s excellent balance between the fruit, of which there is more than in some Furmints, and acidity. It is still fresh and clean, and it has certainly developed positively since I last drank it.

I’m not sure who is the agent for this particular wine, though it could be Liberty Wines. I have bought Heidi Schröck’s wines in the past from Alpine Wines, but they seem to have mainly older vintages of hers with her older labels (albeit including a different 2011 Furmint). This wine, sporting a label design I’ve not seen except for on this cuvée, but which seems to appear on her other wines as well now, came from Lockett Brothers, in North Berwick, and cost £19. It’s kind of sad that they still have this 2019 left, to be honest as it ought to have sold out, though as I suggest it is still drinking nicely. It’s a lovely wine at a good price.

Kiss Shiraz 2013, Andrew Thomas/Thomas Wines (NSW, Australia)

This is a limited release museum wine which I was lucky enough to purchase on my last visit to the Hunter Valley in 2019. It was the first time I had been back to the Hunter since 1989 and it has changed a great deal in that time. Aside from many more wineries present, we saw first a fall in the region’s popularity, one that was once at the heart of Australian viticulture, and exports in the 1980s, to a rebirth in recent years.

Old estates have been rejuvenated by new blood, but more importantly many new winemakers have come to what is still the closest major viticulture to Sydney. Among these new names are the stars who have pulled this beast, with its far from ideal climate for grape growing, back from the brink and towards a once-more bright future.

Andrew Thomas is at the forefront of this renaissance for the Hunter. Every wine guide under the sun uses language like “shining light”. Qantas Magazine actually called him “The superstar of the Hunter Valley”. Andrew grew up in South Australia’s McLaren Vale as part of a wine family, and went to study at Roseworthy. He began working for the late, legendary, Murray Tyrell (who may even have been not quite legendary when I was privileged to meet him in the 1980s). He did harvests overseas (USA, Italy and France), but because he wanted to make great single vineyard Shiraz, he chose Hunter Valley’s Pokolbin. This was the epicentre for historic Shiraz in Australia.

Andrew Thomas wasn’t trying to copy the old school, though. Those wines, especially with their “sweaty saddle” aromas (Brettanomyces, aka Brett) were long out of fashion. He may have felt there is no better Shiraz dirt on the continent, but he knew he could add something, a modern twist. His flagship red, Kiss Shiraz (which sits with his Braemore Semillon at the apex of his range) is a thoroughly modern wine with an aura of heritage.

The vineyard Kiss comes from, near Pokolbin, is clay and loam. The vines, planted in 1969, give very low yields now, but great care is taken of them. The grapes underwent a cold soak for 48 hours before being fermented on skins for seven days. Ageing is 16 months in French oak with bottling of the 2013 in July 2014. The wine was held until May 2015 for release. This flagship red is packed with red and darker fruits, especially blueberries, with savoury and spicy elements to the fore as well. The tannins are just beautifully integrated. At a decade old this wine is really only at the start of its drinking window and will go on for another decade, for sure. Wonderful now, but it will definitely shine even more brightly. Sadly, my suitcase only contained the one bottle.

Andrew Thomas is rightly acknowledged among Australia’s finest winemaking talents, yet I’m not sure how well known he is in the UK? I’m not sure that the Hunter Valley renaissance has reached our shores. This wine isn’t cheap. I think I paid a little less than the £75 it has been listed at currently (closer to £50, I think), but it is a remarkable wine that if I were at his winery again, I would be certain to buy in whatever vintage was available.

Andrew Thomas Wines has a very good tasting room and should definitely be on anyone’s Hunter Valley itinerary. My visit is recounted in an article published here on 18 December 2019, which you can find by typing Andrew Thomas into the search box.