Whitey’s trying to purge his unfair prejudice against varieties that end with O.
Fox Gordon Charlotte’s Web Adelaide Hills Pinot Grigio 2014
$23; 13.2% alcohol; screw cap; 94 points
I’ve probably given too much shit to varieties that end in O over the last few years, but you know, like every other flash in the pan, there are examples that are take-your-pants-off brilliant and the rest are like pizza dribbling down the front of the telly.
Remember Keith Richards’ 1988 comment on music: “The ratio of good stuff to bad stuff doesn’t change. Ninety-seven bad; three good.”
This wine is another of Natasha Mooney’s cooly-considered and perfectly-placed wines from Caj Amadio’s vineyard by the lake and the pines between Williamstown and Kersbrook. This is where a fad can last for centuries. Wines like this can become permanent building blocks of a gastronomic culture if they can funnel their fractals into Keef’s Three Good category.
Then I could grozzle on about it being pointless planting Pinot grigio anywhere you can’t grow really good Pinot noir on account of them being fruit of the same cot, but it’ll take too long.
This is a whip-slick racy wine but solid.
Feints of plantains and lotus petals spook around the hall like angels before you hit the juicy-fruit tropicals. A faint whiff of cool wet mud between the toes. Long slick Dobro steely acid that sits there as a solid hoverin note. Just that exactly perfect amount of carnal flesh. It’s wine that makes you feel like somebody. How cool is that?
Fox Gordon Adelaide Hills Princess Fiano 2014
$23; 13% alcohol; screw cap; 93++ points
Calm. Rich. As full of quiet exotic spices as Guerlain’s Jicky, which is still made to the 1889 recipe. So they reckon, anyway. Send me a bottle for Exmess. But that swoony bit’s almost devoured by really heady jungle fruits tropical like you find where the tigers growl in tiny bits of Malaysia. Carmen Miranda after her third set. Somebody dropped some plates.
The spice is there settling into your gums when you consider this long after it’s swallowed. Take some more and you begin to love its oil. The wine has delicious unction.
It’s one of those rarities in the Keef’s Three Good appellation, and like the Pinot grigio, it sits well up the pointy end of examples of the current Oz obsession with varieties with O at the end.
This can stay. Dance yourself a smart Charleston. Go jiggle that bob.
Like the Pinot grigio, it’s as good a job as this country has yet done of this variety. It’s a helluva lot cheaper than a bottle of Jicky, which the local dullard specialists refuse to stock. You’ll just have to trust me.
And you know what? I don’t give shit about food when I drink a wine like this.
