Whitey goes to Clare to discover a forthcoming quartet that plays with unfashionably classical rigour and clarity.
O’Leary Walker Watervale Riesling 2015
$25; 12% alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
Having reviewed the Polish Hill River twin of this wine back in May, I’ve not had the pleasure to taste it again since, but recall it with sufficient joy to suggest the gap between these two wines has rarely been wider. Where that had all the gentle, comforting tropical fruits the very old rocks of Polish Valley offer in the best years, this dude, from the calcrete and terra rosa of Watervale, is pure unblemished austerity. It’s all granny smith and nashi pear juice and crunch, with a lineal acid structure that takes no prisoners.
In the very long term – like 15 years – it’ll become an elegant and winsome thing for the hardcore Riesling aficionado. Right now, it’s a testy bridge too far for the serious clarified cider perve who’s intending to find their way into a new level of gastronomic intelligence. Cross it happily, and you’re a goner: a Riesling obsessive for life. Elegant, tight, crunchy, unforgiving and bracing. The wine, I mean. But watch yourself! Fresh Coffin Bay oysters please.
O’Leary Walker Clare Valley Shiraz 2013
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 88+++ points
Dry tones of coffee and mocha from seasoned and smoked oak add spicy mood and sultry sass to the ooze of blackberry fruit and pickled kalamata juice that starts this wine. Like the above Riesling, it’s an austere schlück without compromise, and without the softening McLaren Vale component that often comes in O’L-W Shiraz. So we have an example of the best Clare Shiraz showing the olivine austerity the variety displays there in good years. Right now, this wine is a cool bistro/brasserie slurper for the drinker more than the thinker. The latter mob will have their pleasure with it when it blooms over the next decade.
O’Leary Walker Clare Valley Cabernet Malbec 2013
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 91+++ points
Traditional Australian claret in the classic sense, this blend, like both the above, is pristine, ruggedly individualistic Clare at its classic extreme. Very vaguely, it goes like this: if you want soft black cherries, pickled to varying degrees, go McLaren Vale. You want cherries with some blackberry and leather and a dollop of jam? Go Barossa. Want less of that jam and cherry, and more of the tighter, more savoury and adult kalamata pickle, go Clare.
In another sense, I feel a reassuring confirmation of wine science and clarity here, in the face of the declining wash of murky hippy wines some bits of Australia for some reason still award a passing tolerance. In that sense, the hippies among you might best regard this as a Penfolds style of red, made unabashedly in the best of that form, but coming from the hard old rocks of Clare, perhaps even further down that brittle line than Penfolds are usually game to go. So, unless you’re buying it for your Dad, stay away, even though this price beats Penfolds.
Everyone else? Send it down. Five years without parole. Or give it one helluva sploosh into a jug and drink it from big balloon glasses with a dribbly roast. Those with patience will be the big winners here.
O’Leary Walker Clare Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2013
$25; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Ew Lordy. Here’s a Cabernet of the lonely classic style, as solitary and as distinctively hewn from pure stone as the glory of Venus de Milo.
Over that dark well of intense blacksmithed essence of Kalamata, Morello and juniper dance tantalising facets of wintergreen, lemon verbena and bergamot. There is no cushy comfort for the couch potato here. This Cabernet’s provocative, not reassuring. It is bone dry claret of the highest order.
Slender, angular, certainly more Euclid than Sappho, it challenges the critic to envisage its most avid fan. The male model would be rather crisp and dull for this hillbilly hetero. The female? A test. I could share the bottle without spilling a drop, keeping the linen sharp and crisp while we discussed the magic number e or the best algorhythms yet written in Switzerland, dead certain that there will be no lipstick on the stemware at bottle’s end.
Which would serve only to bolster one’s confidence in the direction of a contrasting blowsy burgundy and a certain dishevelment before choosing bed as the best location to move on to the eroticism of astrophysics as applied to the composition of your actual human.
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