A Leap Forward for Finger Lakes and Fresh Insights from the Grampians: Weekly Tasting Report (June 21-27)

Our latest Weekly Tasting Report covers more than 700 wines and features a few home-spun beauties from the outlying Finger Lakes region of New York and the historic and mountainous Grampians in Western Victoria, Australia. Senior Editor Stuart Pigott spent a few days tasting intensively in Fingers Lakes before attending the FLXcursion riesling conference in the area, and he got a great overview of the 2020, ‘21 and ‘22 vintages there.

Many of the highlights from 2020 were reds released after two years of barrel aging, but the standout wine was a spectacular dry riesling – the intensely flinty Red Newt Cellars Riesling Finger Lakes The Knoll Lahoma Vineyards 2020. It was released so late because the fermentation took two full years.

Kelby Russell, who made the wine for Red Newt, said he was “delighted” with how the riesling turned out  given the long fermentation period, adding, “I think it says everything about the excellent vintage."

The wine is exceptional for other reasons. Its combination of concentration and mineral energy gives it enormous complexity and aging potential. Amid fierce competition, it’s the star dry riesling of this vintage, and it’s also the career high point for Russell, being the most complete expression of the innovative wine style he started developing at Red Newt Cellars a decade ago.

Since the tasting, however, Russell has resigned his position as Red Newt’s winemaker to start a new project, Apollo’s Praise winery.

He and his wife, Julia Hoyle (the winemaker at Hosmer Winery, in Ovid, New York) have purchased the 22-hectare Lahoma Vineyards, on the western bank of Seneca Lake, to pursue the “once-in-a-lifetime chance we had to take.”

The best red of the Fingers Lakes tasting was also a 2020 – the Red Tail Ridge Pinot Noir Seneca Lake RTR Estate Vineyard 2020. It has complex aromas of violets and spice, plus stacks of fine tannins that make the palate build to a serious crescendo at the super-long finish.

Although we have tasted Red Tail Ridge wines for a number of years, this was the first time Red Tail wanted them rated – "a wise decision," Stuart opined.

Read the notes for the wines of Finger Lakes’ 2021 vintage and you will quickly discover how challenging it was for the leading winemakers of the region. However, if these conditions had come along a decade age, then many of the wines would have been barely drinkable. So the results reflect the leap forward in winemaking during that time.

Interestingly, the red Austro-Hungarian blaufrankisch grape coped surprisingly well in Finger Lakes. The star there is the brilliant off-dry Hermann J. Wiemer Riesling Finger Lakes Seneca Lake Josef Vineyard 2021, with its white flower, apricot and exotic fruit aromas that roll over you like a great wave. It is extremely racy with great aromatic finesse. However, the best dry riesling of this vintage in the Finger Lakes is probably the Hillick & Hobbs Riesling Seneca Lake Estate Vineyard Dry 2021. It’s cool and sleek, but remarkably clean and elegant for the vintage.

The first 2022 vintage wines bottled suggest this will be an excellent year for the region’s dry whites and another chance for the leading red winemakers to push the envelope they have been working on since at least 2016. Watch this space for more notes and information as those wines are released.

THE BEST OF BEST'S

Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW continued his tastings of Australian wines, rediscovering his affection for the Grampians ­– a cool-climate region in central western Victoria that offers fresh insights into the country’s greater wine narrative.

“The Grampians is a place of lilting gum trees and yellow plains juxtaposed against the dramatic arches of the eponymous mountains, craggy and iridescent as the sun casts a myriad of hues across their sandstone, quartz and granitic surfaces,” Ned said about the area. “It had been a while since I had tasted any of the region’s wares before a swag of cases, each from well-respected producers, appeared at my depot.”

One of those cases came from Best’s, one of the oldest family-owned, continually operated wineries in Australia. The winery’s large foudres, demi-muids (600-liter oak barrels) and wooden lean-to and red gum-slab tasting room replete with dirt floors in the old underground cellar, Ned said, are a national treasure.

Best’s lies within the Geographical Indicator (GI) of Great Western, a sub-region of the greater Grampians that was granted its own GI in 2007. Great Western, as with the Grampians at large, was first settled by graziers in the 1840s before the discovery of gold and the planting of vines from 1862 as a civilizing agent. The estate’s Concongella Vineyard is home to Henry Best’s original Nursery Block.

“This is a vineyard par extraordinaire, containing everything from ondenc to cinsault,” Ned explained. “Magically, it contains what is ostensibly the oldest own-rootstock-plantings of pinot meunier in the world, dating from 1868.

“While meunier is a softening back burner in a classic Champagne blend, here it makes beguiling, mid-weighted wines of youthful reticence, albeit, with a thrilling capacity for aging,” Ned continued. “Among the best wines I have ever had was the 1969 Best’s Old Vine Pinot Meunier, a gift from patriarch Viv Best when I last visited around 2005. It drank like an incantation of nebbiolo-like spindly tannins and aromas of campfire and sandalwood, melded with pinot noir’s carnal burr of wet forest floor and porcini. I feel that the 2022, just tasted, will wave a similar wand with patience.”

Another wine case Ned dug into was from The Story, a smaller operation in the Grampians GI run by Rhone aficionado Rory Hall, who says he likes to “play at the margins.” While the Grampians’ elevation and granitic patches bear many fine syrah, it was The Story Grenache 2021 that struck an epiphany with its brilliance.

“White pepper and kirsch run the scales of clove-doused freshness,” is how Ned described it. “Far from complex, its drinkability quotient is giddy, and best, its success challenges the precept of the ‘cool climate’ mantle, while auguring positively for a great future for this variety.”

In our Hong Kong office, we tasted the 2009 Billecart-Salmon Champagne Cuvée Louis Salmon, which was released this month. It's a serious blanc de blancs made from chardonnay parcels from the Cote des Blancs grand cru villages of Cramant, Chouilly and Mesnil-sur-Oger, vinified in stainless steel tanks and matured on the lees for almost 14 years. It's still youthful and clearly has great potential for cellaring, but Associate Editor Claire Nesbitt found it open and delicious – structured and creamy at the same time, with fantastic complexity of aromas ranging from almond, frangipani and pastries to salted caramel, and evolving to a fine, chalky minerality at the end.

– Stuart Pigott, Ned Goodwin MW and Claire Nesbitt contributed reporting.