Tomas’s Intuitive Wine Picks:
Finca Los Moras, DADA No.1, Argentina 2013 around €13 from Jus Du Vine, Portmarnock; Gerrys of Skerries; The Carpenter in Castleknock and good wine shops and Off Licences nationwide
Both our wines today reject the obvious and rational approaches, they are outlying wines and wineries that have decided to take their own path, revelling in the joy of the unexpected and the triumph of intuition. So first up here is the explicitly anti-rationalist red wine from Finca Los Moras in Argentina . This is a wine specifically inspired by the anti-rationalist Art Movement of which Marcel Duchamps was a cornerstone. Duchamps was the artist who exhibited a urinal in Paris in 1917 under the title, Fountain and drew the famous Mona Lisa with moustache. The wine is a hugely attractive rebel yell however rather than a full on revolutionary work it would seem to like to be. The packaging is quite restrained but in Argentina they have been running a mildly DADA-Surrealist ad campaign that hypes the idea of DADA. We happily can concentrate on the wine and here I think they have hit a very nice groove of waywardness by eschewing the easy route of a 100% Malbec wine, the easy sell from Argentina for a blend of leftfield grape variety Bonarda and blending this with Malbec. The result is a luscious, easy drinking wine so opulent and exploding with tones of milk chocolate and spice that all doubts about championing the outsider grape are left in the dust. Indulgent, chocolaty, uber-ripe fruited delight at a fine price.
Tahbilk Winery, Marsanne 2010 around €18.25 down to €16.43 from Wines Direct, Mullingar, nationwide on winesdirect.ie and now in Dublin at Arnotts of Henry Street
This is a wine from one of the oldest and most revered wineries in Australia. Now the immediate thought is, old, and Australia, but of course it is now the case that Australia has been making wine for 3 Centuries, though we can even push back their vineyard history into the late 18th century to a few unsuccessful attempts to start a wine culture. In the beginning, boat and after boat was sent down to Australia from France and latterly Italy and Spain, but there were many failed attempts. The problem was that the vines were uprooted in the Northern hemisphere usually in winter when they were dormant. They were planted into sacks and put in the holds of sailing ships, a few weeks later they were heating up at the equator and arrived in the southern hemisphere just a few weeks later in full summer. The seasons are reversed of course. The vines nearly all died as they woke up expecting a frost December or January in Burgundy and found themselves broiling in Adelaide. Eventually timing the journeys better and picking hardy varieties they did it. One of those early hardy varieties was Marsanne, a robust and fragrant grape from the Southern Rhone that didn’t get to cool even in the winter. This is also the source for the Shiraz or Syrah that was also a transport success. Later Chardonnay took of as the white wine of Australia, largely because the name Burgundy had marketing currency. However, the older wineries, like Chateau Tahbilk, kept faith with these pioneer grapes. They had a wayward vision of an Australian wine scene that would leave fortified wines and big reds to one side eventually. It was a very wayward hunch by the Purbrick family who excavated the cellars in 1875, but the winery was founded in 1861 at ‘tahbilk tabilk’ meaning many waterholes. The wine here is a rich, dense, honeyed wine, with a cut of granny smith, green apple zest, then a vague flicker of nuttiness. A wayward hold out against first big boned Chardonnay, and now the fashion for steely acidic wines. A wayward summer delight.
