Monday, 17 May 2010
Brown Brothers: 2006 Heathcote Durif
It's always worth keeping track of your wine purchases.
I've been doing that since I stopped work, initially on the grounds that it was a way to ensure that we were keeping things within the $10/bottle provisions of the retirement-era budget. The old budgetary constraints have been loosened, but a glance at the spreadsheet reveals a long term average of $9.54 and also that I bought a bottle of Brown Brothers 2006 Limited Release Heathcote Durif on 22 May 2009.
That's not the only way I keep track of wine that arrives on the doorstep at the Little House of Concrete. I have another document that lists the contents of the wine fridge with, more importantly, a suggested date (taken from Halliday or the winery) by which the bottle should be consumed, a section of the Bento database devoted to what's on the premises, as well as an Archive section of Bento where I can retrieve details of what has done been here and gone (down the gullet).
Around the time I bought a copy of the iWork applications I went as far as putting together a wine list covering what was in the wine rack at the time. If we had more passing visitors dropping in for a drink I might be inclined to keep that up to date, but there are other fish to fry.
It's important to keep track of what's in the wine rack. When you have space for eight dozen, and not many spaces to fill as regular resupplies arrive on the doorstep, it's a good idea to have some sort of stock control policy in place. I use a floats to the top system, so that the single bottles that need to be consumed in the foreseeable future end up in the top shelf as the other bottles that arrived in the box are consumed.
That doesn't always mean that the bottle gets consumed right away. This single bottle of Brown Brothers Durif, having arrived in May last year, made it through winter '09 and the trip down to Southport and back in February 2010 while I waited for an excuse to open it. No way was it going to be left to cook inside a closed house through a NQ wet season. When the survivors of the journey were stacked into the rack it went onto the top shelf as I waited for the weather to turn.
Durif, developed by and named for a botanist at the University of Montpellier looking to develop a variety resistant to powdery mildew turned out to be a fizzer on its home turf, since it failed to produce quality wine but does better in drier climates and, interestingly, there has even been a suggestion from De Bortoli that Durif is better suited to the Riverina than Shiraz.
But for many years Durif Central as far as Australia is concerned has been north-east Victoria with substantial plantings around Rutherglen, producing inky table wines that can handle long term cellaring with alcohol levels around 14-15% and big flavours to match.
The fruit for this version is sourced from their vineyard in Heathcote in central Victoria rather than the more traditional home of the variety here in Oz, and it's a departure from the traditional style, being a lot softer across the palate and nowhere near as assertive as I'd expected.
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