A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [48]
FINESSING THE FRUIT BOMBS
When they shoved a metal tray with his dinner through a slot in the door of his room, Benjamin Hammerschlag was beginning to think that he’d probably made a big mistake and that he’d be going back to his day job in a Seattle grocery store. He was staying in what passed for a hotel in the Franklin River region of Western Australia, “a pub full of misshapen humanity, pretty much the end of the earth,” as he describes it, while seeking out premium wines to import into the States. A week later, with only two prospects in his sights, he woke toward dawn in yet another crummy hotel room, this one in the Barossa Valley, to find the walls literally seething with millipedes. “By this time I was pretty depressed,” he says. Fortunately, winemaking in both regions was more advanced than the hospitality industry, and Hammerschlag is a persistent and highly competitive son of a bitch with a very good palate. Over the past five years he has assembled a portfolio, Epicurean Wines, that represents something of a new wave in the Australian invasion.
At the time of his unpromising first visit, Hammerschlag was working as a wine buyer for the QFC supermarket chain in Bellevue, a wealthy suburb of Seattle. In a few years he almost doubled QFC’s wine business, deciding in the process that he had a “popular palate.” Among the most crowd-pleasing wines he discovered for his clients were old-vine Shi-razes from Australia’s Barossa Valley, which had just begun to trickle into this country, thanks to a few boutique importers like John Larchet’s Australian Premium Wine Collection and Dan Philips’s Grateful Palate. “It was a style of wine that Americans loved,” Hammerschlag says, “rich and powerful and generous and all about instant gratification.” Some Aussies, according to Hammerschlag, refer to these big Barossa Shirazes as “leg spreaders” or, when they are feeling more politically correct, as “T & A” wines. However, given the sheer size and power of these behemoths, stereotypically masculine metaphors seem more appropriate to me; high-octane reds like Kaesler’s Old Bastard Shiraz remind me more of a muscle car like a Dodge Charger or a Viper than of a starlet, more of Russell Crowe than Naomi Watts.
The only problem with these South Australian reds, it seemed to Hammerschlag, was that they were pretty hard to find. Potions like Elderton’s Command Shiraz or Clarendon Hills’ Astralis were made in small quantities from vines, including Shiraz and Grenache, planted in the early twentieth century. (Old vines, it’s generally conceded, make more intense and powerful wines than younger ones.)
Although Grange, Penfolds’s prototype for premium Australian Shiraz, dates back to 1951, when Penfolds’s chief wine-maker, Max Schubert, came home from a visit to Bordeaux determined to make a world-class wine, it remained something of a one-off until the 1980s, when others began making big, rich Barossa Shirazes. In just a couple of decades, Australia has become a winemaking superpower, and Australian winemakers circumnavigate the globe spreading their fruity, high-tech gospel.
Much as Hammerschlag loved the big, badass Barossa Shi-razes, he was presumptuous enough to believe that there was room for some finesse and more of a specific sense of place in the wines (Grange uses grapes from all over South Australia) and that he could coax even better wines from the country if he could find the right talent. “I consider myself a talent agent,” he says. Upon his arrival in Adelaide in ′99, he made the rounds of the wine stores and accumulated thirty-six bottles of the