Monday, 21 June 2010
2008 Riesling
2006 Shiraz Mataro
2005 BHV MMS
2006 Second Six
2006 The Olssen Six
As noted in the travelogue about our South Australian trip it'd be easy to be put off visiting Olssens of Watervale, but if you were to do so, you'd be missing something special.
Since we weren't going to be able to go everywhere, I'd done my homework prior to the trip, limiting us (as far as possible) to those establishments rated with five Halliday stars, but that still left more than a dozen that were open to the public - rather a lot to cover in two days - and it was a case of fitting things in around lunch at Skillogalee. That made for an interesting rather hectic Thursday morning visiting Jim Barry, Sevenhill, Neagle's Rock and Mitchell before lunch, and Kilikanoon and Olssen slated in for afters as well as Crabtree (pencilled in because the view across Watervale was reputedly rather nice).
Under other circumstances, faced with a dirt road that got rougher with each passing kilometre, we could have been persuaded to turn back and head on to whatever was next, but with nothing more than an if we've got time on the agenda we kept going. Halliday's reference to unusual varieties such as carmenere had a lot to do with that.
Arriving at the cellar door, we were somewhat surprised to find it located inside a wing of what appeared to be the family home, and further bemused by the arrival of a young Norwegian bloke who'd dropped in to have a taste en route between Darwin and Adelaide, but then Halliday does note exports to that part of the world.
After we'd worked our way through what was on offer and enjoyed a chat about teaching and related matters I left with Olssen added to the I'll be ordering from here list, and if it's taken more than eighteen months that's hardly surprising. For a start, there's no website, but I seemed to recall filling out a card to go on the mailing list, and put off making a purchase until the current price list lobbed in the PO Box.
Lack of a website (a situation that applied to Rockford until recently) suggested a family-owned operation in the happy position of being able to sell most of the 4000 or so cases they produce, so I sat back and waited. It wasn't as if there was any shortage of alternatives. By the time the twelve-months-since-the-visit mark had passed, I decided I'd better give them a phone call and ask for a price list but, as noted elsewhere, I kept getting phone calls from other places that seemed to coincide with room in the rack for what was being offered and it wasn't till early June 2010 that I got around to making the call.
The cellar door only opens Thursday to Sunday, so I figured that the best option was to give them a call on a Sunday, some time around closing time. That didn't quite work out as expected since I got the answering machine, but a call back resulted from owner/winemaker Kevin delivered a price list to the email address, and a quick consultation with the on-line Halliday helped clarify my thinking.
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