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Made From: Old vine Chenin Blanc and Crouchen
Aromas and Flavours: Preserved lemon, powdered ginger, pear, salinity; textural and savoury
Drink if you like: Texture, savoury characters and complexity
Awards: 95 Halliday, 94 Wine Front
The Wine Front's Hot Take: This is a wickedly good, fancy-feeling wine. Right on. Ludicrous value.
Old vine Barossa Chenin and Crouchen are co-fermented and matured in barrel. Complex, savoury, slippery and saline, this offers preserved lemon, pear, salinity, and plenty of freshness to offset the engaging texture. Food friendly but also slurpable by itself.
On any purchase of a dozen or more
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Ollin, aka Jaysen Collins and his daughter Fin, make incredible wines, Fin recently finished her winemaking degree and has a superb palate. Jaysen founded Massena and is a consultant for some exceptional Barossa producers, inc one who makes a slew of Shiraz and Grenache wines at prices north of $200 a bottle - he’s an absolute gun.
Notorious hard markers, the Wine Front, had the following to say of the new venture…
On the Winery: A new project is born. And what a thunderous start.
Of the Oleta White: This is a wickedly good, fancy-feeling wine. Right on. Ludicrous value
Of the Balto Shiraz Grenache: Far out. This is outrageously delicious. Almost an Italianate feel to elements in the wine, as a positive. It should turn anyone on looking for dark fruited, proper Barossa red wine of vitality, drinkability and charm.
Of the Shiraz: This is Outstanding. Lavish scents and flavours … lusty, gnarly older vine depth and then energetic and vibrant in the same breath. The bottle went, mea culpa.
These are incredible wines made in tiny quantities.
There is nothing better than a cooler evening, a bowl of Wild Mushroom Risotto and a bottle of pinot in hand. Well, the glass in hand but the bottle pretty close to hand too. It's a cracking match. This week thanks to my buddy Dan at winedirect.com.au, I am sipping a Picardy Pinot Noir. This Pinot comes out of Pemberton in WA. In fact, it's my first Pinot from WA. Thanks Dan, you gave me my first.
Recipe provided by:
Chenin blanc (known also as Pineau de la Loire among other names), is a white wine grape variety from the Loire valley of France. Its high acidity means it can be used to make everything from sparkling wines to well-balanced dessert wines, although it can produce very bland, neutral wines if the vine's natural vigor is not controlled. Outside the Loire it is found in most of the New World wine regions; it is the most widely planted variety in South Africa, where it is also known as Steen.
The grape may have been one of the first to be grown in South Africa by Jan van Riebeeck in 1655, or it may have come to that country with Huguenots fleeing France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Chenin Blanc was often misidentified in Australia as well, so tracing its early history in the country is not easy. It may have been introduced in James Busby's collection of 1832, but C. Waterhouse was growing Steen at Highercombe in Houghton, South Australia by 1862.
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