Old Bastard Rumbles On With a Fresh Vineyard Twist

I recently visited Kaesler Wines in the Barossa to taste every release of their flagship shiraz Old Bastard with winemaker and co-proprietor Reid Bosward. The 20-vintage vertical to 2018 coincided with the 1893 Old Bastard Vineyard reaching 125 years of age, which also saw the vineyard classified as “Ancestor Vine” – the highest threshold of vine age, according to the Barossa Old Vine Charter.

The tasting spanned from the first release, 1998, to the just-released 2018 with a preview of the yet-to-be-bottled 2019 and 2020 wines. The 2011 vintage was tasted but not released. “Our mission was to get to a 20-year tasting and have no gaps,” Bosward said. This was a brave goal laid bare via a comprehensively brave tasting. Nothing omitted, full disclosure.

Looking at the way these wines have aged is as interesting as it is impressive, and it says much about the pedigree of this old-vine parcel. Bosward and his business partner, Ed Peter, bought the place in 1999. Bosward had been making wine from all 24 acres of the Kaesler property while he was working at Cellarmasters. He had walked the rows, called the harvest and fermented every berry. He knew the place well.

A portion of shiraz from these oldest vines was returned to the owner and so it came to be that barrels full of the 1998 and 1999 vintage were included in the sale. “I’d fermented these wines and so I tidied them up for bottling,” Bosward recalled. “Ed had this cartoon by Ralph Steadman and the first Old Bastard was released from vintage 1998,” he said, referring to the Old Bastard logo drawn by Steadman, the British illustrator best known for his collaboration with American writer Hunter S. Thompson.

A fortuitous beginning. The 1998 vintage was a much-celebrated one, but the 1999 vintage was even better, a fact that was missed by most critics and observers when these vintages were released. “1999 is clearly the best, not just from us, but from anyone,” Bosward said. Both ’98 and ’99 showed well in this tasting, and I put this down to the vineyard pedigree and vine age as much as the overlay of strong vintages.

2001 also asserts itself as a standout here – a warm and balanced vintage with depth of flavor and balance. 2002 shows the sort of focus, acidity and more trimmed-in structure of a cool vintage. 2003 is from an extremely dry and hot season and yet the wine has resilience in a mode that is comparable to an aged nebbiolo, with an escarpment of firmly set tannins defining the finish. 2004 normalized in terms of weather, yields were healthy and the vines rejoiced with high quality and good balance. These wines look good in a classically full-bodied style. Age has been kind to them.

But 2005 was an outlier in this tasting and, at 16.5% alcohol, was the Everest of ripeness in the lineup. “We got caught working against our own philosophy in 2005,” Bosward admitted. “We drifted into a place we really didn’t want to be, a style that was garnering the biggest scores with influential American critics at the time. We were still learning the vineyard and we took our eye off the prize.” The 2005 scored highly with U.S. critic Robert Parker on release and sold out in record time, but the wine is now exhausted and has, in every respect, run its race.

From 2006, the wines build in a steady trajectory of improving quality, and much of this is aligned to the work in the vineyard and aligning things in the winery. Even the 2007, a notoriously frail and often underwhelming vintage for full-bodied reds in the Barossa, is a wine that impresses with purity and length, while bearing the weathered patina of this vintage.

There’s a real pinnacle of quality in 2010, followed by the unreleased wine from the waterlogged 2011 harvest. 2012 is a reserved vintage and perhaps not the standout that 2013 is, with concentration and depth of fruit clearly expressed. Bosward compared the 2010 with the just-released 2018 and sees both as “quintessentially great Barossa vintages.”

He cites the work done in the vineyard during the 15-year tenure of viticulturist Nigel van der Zande as the key difference in this past decade. Organic farming methods are in place and the ripening path has adjusted toward harvesting healthy and balanced grapes.

Skins are thicker and more pliable; the wines are just as deep but less opaque to taste and there’s a growing sense of liveliness in the younger vintages. There’s a plushness to the tannin that isn’t there in the older vintages. Never was.

Yet many of the older vintages showed well in this tasting, probably better than expected, and I put that down to the pedigree of site and the age of the vines. There’s an undeniable resilience to these wines and it emerges with time. But the younger wines are better versions.

The site remains the same and the old vines are a given, but the reinvigorated health of the vineyard and the attention to detail there, as well as in the winery, now underpin a much more focused quality in the wines being made today. They drink impressively in their youth and will deliver every bit as much down the track in another 20 years. This Old Bastard has never looked better!

– Nick Stock, Contributing Editor