Down the Road from Adelaide
Paul Hotker, Bleasdale’s senior winemaker
If you were to head out of
Adelaide, Australia’s fifth-largest city and drive with the thundering traffic
on to the South Eastern Freeway, you’d find yourself passing close to places
with reassuring and wholesome Olde Worlde names like Bridgewater, Totnes and
Littlehampton. After a while, you could turn off to the quieter B37 through the
thriving city of Mount Barker and on to the old town of Strathalbyn, lying on
the banks of the modest River Angas. Turn left on to the B45, and you’re on
Langhorne Creek Road and in a completely different world. There are oceans of
vineyards and rows of trees pretty well as far as the eye can see. Driving along
this quiet country road you’ll eventually arrive in the hamlet of Langhorne
Creek. It’s a small place, but it’s the home to several world-class wineries and
the centre of a vibrant grape-growing and winemaking community which regularly
wins national and international awards. It sounds like we’ve come a long way
from Adelaide but the journey down here to Langhorne Creek on the Fleurieu
Peninsula takes less than an hour.
In the 1840s, Frank Potts
was in these parts too. He was a young Englishman living in Adelaide who decided
to leave his boat-building trade and head for the country. He saw the potential
of the region and was convinced that the tall red gum trees promised fertile
soils. He bought the first parcels of land on the meandering, tree-lined Bremer
River at Langhorne Creek and planted his first vines in 1858. By all account,
Potts was a practical man with extensive skills in carpentry. He designed and
built his own irrigation pump and aqueduct out of the wood from gum trees. He
used the same wood to construct wine vats, barrels and casks. He even used it to
make a five-seat communal lavatory which must have caused a great deal of
merriment among the vineyard workers.
Perhaps his greatest
achievement was a wine press, constructed in 1862 using a massive gum tree
weighing several tons as a lever. A gum tree, by the way, is a kind of
eucalyptus, so called because it exudes copious sap from any breaks in the bark.
You may be interested to know that the same wood is used to make that
odd-sounding honking thing known as the didgeridoo, a traditional
Aboriginal wind instrument.
Frank Potts gave his wines
the name “Bleasdale” possibly because he liked the preaching of a Reverend John
Ignatius Bleasdale who advocated a “sober, wine drinking community in South
Australia which excluded ardent spirits”. In the 1870s he handed the winery over
to his son to resume his old profession of boat building, constructing paddle
steamers and barges which plied the River Murray until after the turn of the
century. For a long time, much of the region’s wines went into multi-regional
blends. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a small group of long-term family growers
started promoting Langhorne Creek wines, known best for Cabernet Sauvignon and
Shiraz. Both these Bleasdale wines are imported by Foodland and so you won’t
find them on sale anywhere else.
Bleasdale Bremerview
Shiraz 2012 (red), Australia (Bt. 659 @ Foodland only)
The Bremerview vineyard
lies on the banks of the Bremer River that flows just outside the town of
Langhorne Creek. As you might expect from a Shiraz, this is a rich and very dark
red with hints of purple. It has a lovely peppery, black-olive aroma with dark
fruit, brambly spices and tangy hints of menthol and aniseed. Well, at least
that’s what my nose picked up. This complex aroma is a sure sign of an
outstanding wine even before you get around to tasting it.
The wine is perfectly dry
with a sumptuously soft mouth-feel and there’s a perfect balance between the
rich black fruit and the firm tannins. You might notice a touch of spice and oak
on the palate too and the rich fruit gives a slight impression of sweetness. I
suppose you could describe it as medium-to-full bodied. The wine comes at 14%
alcohol content which is pretty well at the top of the tree for red table wines.
I’d guess it go well with most rich red meat dishes and because of Shiraz’s
spicy, peppery qualities the wine would make a perfect partner for red meat
that’s been grilled, stewed, smoked or roasted. This is Shiraz with class, I can
tell you.
Bleasdale Mulberry
Tree Cabernet Sauvignon 2011 (red),
Australia (Bt. 659 @ Foodland only)
The aroma alone reveals
that this wine is a good deal better than most of the crowd-pleasers that line
the supermarket shelves around here. Now I’d better mention that I don’t have
anything against crowd-pleasers, especially if they encourage people to
eventually move on to more interesting things. The problem with many commercial
wines is that they’re so predictable. They just don’t have anything interesting
to say.
This elegant wine couldn’t
be more different. There’s a lovely delicate aroma of red fruit, strawberries,
hints of dark minty chocolate and somewhere far in the background a delicate
smell of moist tobacco. When I was a child, my father used to smoke a pipe which
at the time was a fashionable custom, at least for men. He used to buy shiny
green and gold tins of fresh tobacco and I loved to stick my nose into the moist
leaves and enjoy the smell. Curiously, this habit never encouraged me to set
fire to the leaves and breathe in the smoke, but it does lend weight to my
belief that in a previous life I was once a dog.
The wine has a superbly
soft mouth-feel. Tasting the two wines side by side, it seems to be a shade
fuller than the Shiraz. It’s very dry but just half a degree away from the
proverbial bone. It has quite a full body with rich dark fruit on the palate as
well as a touch of oaky spice but the winemakers have sensibly kept the fruit
under control. The tannins are smooth yet firm and they carry through on to the
long, dry finish. This is a terrific wine which smells and tastes a lot more
expensive than it actually is. At 13.5% you may prefer to enjoy this wine with
food and rich, red meat dishes would work well. Oh, and in case you’re
wondering, the wine is named after an ancient mulberry tree that grows in the
middle of the vineyard. It won a Silver Medal at the 2013 Adelaide Wine Show.
The wine I mean, not the tree.
