Can you imagine drinking the produce of a vineyard planted in 1853? Wonder no longer. You can acquire a bottle of this wine for as little as around £12 or $20 by buying six at a time from the Australian Wine Centre in Adelaide according to www.winesearcher.com. This is one of Australia’s treasures, grown on a vineyard that, with its deep sandy soils might not yield the red of a lifetime if planted afresh but is now home to bushvines so old that yields have been restricted to seemly levels by Old Father Time himself. Old Garden is frequently the last vineyard to be picked in the Barossa.
Dean Hewitson, who worked many years for Petaluma and did a masters degree at UC Davis, has long been an advocate of old-vine Rhoneish reds and this is his finest. Almost incredibly the Mourvedre vines at Rowland Flat, planted by Friedrich Koch when Queen Victoria was still in the first flush of her wedded bliss with Albert and called the Old Garden Vineyard for the last 120 years, are still tended by his descendants. This seems an ideal blend of continuity in the vineyard and technical expertise in the cellar.
I should say however that I am recommending this wine purely on how delicious it tastes and discovered the extraordinary story behind it only while researching this. The wine is very rich and dense – spicy without the reduced stink so often associated with Mourvedre, not least in its Bandol homeland. The tannins have been beautifully managed so that I can quite believe Dean H’s claim that the wine will last another 10 years but there is none of the exaggerated tannin and acidity to be found in many an Australian red. Not sweet, but full, perfumed and layered. Bravo!
The winery has an excellent website which appears to be kept well up to date and has a first-rate resource on international stockists and distributors. Start at www.hewitson.com.au/index.asp
Lowest price in the UK appears to be £14.50 at Peter Watkins Wine (see the directory) although you can also find it at Andrew Chapman Fine Wines and Noel Young, and even Berry Bros & Rudd offer it more cheaply than the least expensive retailer in Australia identified by www.winesearcher.com. Stockists are also listed in Holland and Canada, and since one of many rave reviews of this wine published on Hewitson’s website is by Robert Parker, the wine is also presumably available in the US too. Take a look at that Hewitson website for details.
