This one was a Paulett Polish Hill River under screwcap. It only took a sip for the objections to disappear.
Mind you, while those perceptions are being killed off prices for premium Riesling strike me as very reasonable indeed. The fact that you can buy stellar examples of the Clare or Watervale take on the variety for under twenty dollars never ceases to amaze me.
Then there’s the matter of the screwcap enclosure you’ll find on your bottle of Australian Riesling (most of them, anyway).
They were already debating the pros and cons of screwcaps when I was becoming interested in wine in the seventies, and we were standing in the tasting room at Bimbadgen in the Hunter at the end of 2005 when we were told that before too long virtually every wine produced in Australia would be coming out under screwcap.
But, Madam remarked, there’s something romantic about uncorking a bottle.
The response was devastating.
There’s nothing romantic about wine that’s gone off because of the cork, (or words to that effect).
The key decision that swung the issue was the decision by around fifteen of Clare’s premium Riesling producers to make the change. Put like that it doesn’t seem that remarkable. You’d guess the decision was made, everyone switched and everything was hunky-dory.
Apparently it wasn’t as simple as that.
I mightn’t have all the details right, but the story goes like this.
The winemakers in Clare decided they’d like to change and went to their bottle suppliers, only to be told that they didn’t make the bottles we’re accustomed to seeing our Riesling in with a screwcap top (or words to that effect) and it was a case of ordering a special bottle made in France.
At that point a further technicality raised its ugly head. If they wanted such a bottle they were going to have to order a quarter of a million of them....
There must have been an awfully strong temptation to shrug the shoulders say, Guess we’ll have to do something else then, and settle for a different shape.
Thankfully, it didn’t work out that way. After all, if you do that and notice the sales figures aren’t quite what you’d hoped the next move is more than likely to decide that the consumer isn’t quite ready for screwcaps and head back to the vagaries of the Cork Gods. Fortunately, determination to do the right thing by the wine meant they stuck to their guns, something that deserves the average wine lover’s heartfelt thanks.
Grosset probably wasn’t the only one who pushed the matter through to its eventual conclusion, but in a situation where there’s a temptation to throw your hands in the air and give up someone needed to keep the project on the rails and he seems to pick up most of the credit....
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