Petaluma Coonawarra Unfiltered 2002
Grape: 51% Cabernet Sauvignon, 49% Merlot
Looks: Bloody brick red.
On the nose: Blackberry leaf, plums, and blackcurrant, hot sauce/sangrita, tar, leather. Medium intensity.
On the palate: Blockbuster of a wine. Dear lord. Easily perceivable alcohol burn despite being 13,5-14%. Smooth, but striking tannins. Rich fruit: Blackberry & Plums. Bell pepper. Chocolate. Hot sauce. A thick, almost syrupy leaf/cedar element. Vanilla, smoke. Long haribo gummy bear finish.
Price point: 59 EUR / 675 NOK
Terningkast: 4/6
I’ve just gotten back from vacation and have tried a lot of great wines from all over Europe, which should be popping up on here over the next few weeks. Because of the baby I didn’t get to try as many new bottles or make as many producer visits as I typically would. My top vacation priority has shifted from exploration to relaxation. However some of what I did get to try was noteworthy, for example this Coonawarra Bordeaux blend.
My mother-in-law and I drove out to see Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire while Julie was at the Sheffield DocFest. Wentworth is England’s “longest house” and has an amazing stately garden with Rhododendrons around every corner. After strolling around the grounds with the baby, we decided to go to a pub in the area for lunch and tried to eat as much of our steak and ale pies as we could. It was grand. Anyway, I’m mentioning all this because, sufficiently satiated, I decided to take a detour to the small wine shop next to the pub, named Lightfoot Wines. This is the type of shop that is easy to romanticize, but rare to actually find: knowledgeable staff, unique wines, great experience. It's not very often that you see a 40m2 shop with a dedicated section for Brazil. There was also a section with what seemed like exclusively bottles purchased from private cellars.
Exploring the rack, with most priced out of the realm of good conscience for a weeknight—even on vacation—I had my eyes on this 2002 Coonawarra, which was reasonable enough at around 50 quid. The shopkeeper told me that this was actually purchased from the former chairman of Bolton Wanderers’ cellar, which cemented the purchase. How could I pass up the wine world equivalent of buying Jon Voight’s car?
If you’re not clued in on Australian wines, Coonawarra is in the middle of nowhere in South Australia, but has become a mecca for Cabernet Sauvignon because of its terrior: brilliant red clay soil on a limestone ridge. This geology is one of the wine wonders of the New World and has led to the area being flocked to for wine production. 2002, though, was a famously bad vintage for the region, with significantly cooler than typical temperatures limiting the amounts of harvestable grapes. This led Petaluma to make significantly fewer bottles than typical and change their blend to 51% Cabernet Sauvignon and 49% Merlot, much more Merlot than you would typically see in one of their bottlings. For the winemaker this is a nightmare, but for a dork like me, it’s an incredible opportunity to taste winemaking pushed to the limit. It’s in these situations where you can really see a producers ingenuity. Do they try to shove a round peg into a square hole, or do they innovate?
Whenever I reflect on a winemakers’ ability to make lemonade from lemons, I think about the genesis of “Lezer” from Foradori. Trentino (northern Italy, at the base of the Dolomites) is an area prone to hail. In 2017 it wiped out 40% of Foradori’s harvest. Instead of feeling sorry for themselves (although I’m sure there was an element of that as well), the winemakers decided to begin to experiment with making short press wines from the fruit of the damaged vines. This was watery, fruit forward, and delicious. Seven years later they are still making “Lezer”, iterating and innovating as they go. It has become one of their most popular wines in the foreign market.
Bad vintages often reveal the best producers.
So did Petaluma rise to the occasion? Yes. Compared to the other wines I’ve had from Coonawarra, this was a lot more interesting and “out there”. It was less chuggable and delicious. Despite being 22 years old, the wine was still insanely concentrated on the palate. It’s really hard to overstate how hard it hit with waves after waves of flavor. Some of the notes were off and vegetal. There was a distinct flavor of hot sauce, or the sangrita thing you drink after taking a shot of tequila. The bottle wasn’t perfect or ethereal by any means, but it was intense and remarkably complex. A wine for thinking more than drinking. Although appreciated, it was maybe not what was needed most after a long day out in the South Yorkshire sun.
