Thursday, 7 October 2010
We’d already visited most of the major landmarks on the Rutherglen Muscat Trail and having spent several minutes waiting to be noticed among the crowd in the tasting room at All Saints I was quite happy to retreat to the motel room, rest and recuperate for a bit and wander into downtown Rutherglen for something to eat a little later on.
We still had plenty of time on our hands, so when Madam asked where we were headed, I suggested that we might head down Distillery Road and call in to this little winery called Pfeiffer Wines that had an interesting bridge across Sunday Creek. We pulled into the car park somewhere around three-thirty, and once we’d taken a stroll across the bridge, she suggested that we might as well wander into the tasting room and sample the wares on offer.
When we wandered out an hour or so later we’d signed up for the Wine Club after one of the most pleasant spells I’ve had in a winery anywhere.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of visiting a tasting room, apart from the obvious attraction of the samples on offer, is the opportunity to have a chat to whoever’s in attendance, and you often pick up all sorts of interesting information in the process, particularly if you’re talking to someone who’s been closely involved with the production of the wines.
That’ll only happen, of course, if the place isn’t teeming with tourists when you walk in.
And in this case the area was largely uninhabited when we entered and we ended up sampling everything on offer as we chatted to the winemaker’s wife.
But regardless of the company, no amount of interesting conversation is going to overcome your reservations if you don’t enjoy what you’re tasting, and Pfeiffers produced a couple of wines that genuinely stood out from the crowd.
One of them was the Gamay, produced from the grape variety associated with the Beaujolais region in France. I’ve written elsewhere on the never-ending search for a summer red. These days my fridge always contains at least one bottle of the current vintage Pfeiffer Gamay.
Prior to visiting Rutherglen, we’d had a couple of days in the Yarra Valley, and wherever we’d gone we’d tried the Pinot Noir. In almost every case I’d been disappointed.
Pinot Noir is, to quote the Wikipedia a difficult variety to cultivate and transform into wine and usually does best in cool climates. The Pfeiffer version comes from grapes grown on site, which I find mildly bemusing given the fact that Rutherglen doesn’t exactly fit the cool climate profile. The wine itself was, alongside the Coldstream Hills, my favourite out of the Pinots I’d tasted up till then.
We didn’t finish with the Auslese Tokay (recently relabelled as Late Harvest Muscadelle) since there was a selection of fortifieds on offer, but this very nice dessert style was enough to finish off the process of persuasion. We ordered a mixed dozen, signed up for the Wine Club and left with something to look forward to when we returned to base.
We signed up for the twice-yearly version of the Wine Club, with deliveries in April and October. There’s a three delivery option as well, with the extra consignment coming in July, and while I’ve regularly been tempted...