Wine a Day

A cellar door some fifteen minutes walk from the busy centre of Melbourne? Sounds very implausible, but it can only happen in North Melbourne and can only feature Keith Brien and his Silverwings wines.

You know the cellar door is open if the barrel is on the footpath. From the outside it looks just like any other three storey dwelling that has been architecturally designed from an old factory in the middle of an old industrial area.

Keith gave up flying with Ansett when they disbanded in the 19980s and set up a winery in Lancefield in the Macedon region. The wines were superb and the old mansion, Cleveland, was lovingly restored. I can still vividly remember tasting a chardonnay there before the ABC campaign began and it was mind blowingly French in style. It was a 1991 with intense butterscotch flavours, something I’ve been trying to find in chardonnays ever since with very limited success. Experts told me that’s what Chablis should taste like, not the overoaked varieties that scandalised winemaking in Australia for two decades.

As Lancefield is very prone to frost, Cabernet in particular was hard to ripen. Another stand out from the Cleveland days was the Minus 5, a cab-merlot blend, getting it’s name because it was usually picked at that temperature. Keith saved the last vintage, a 1998, as a reserve as he thought it the best he’d produced. You can buy this at $25 a bottle at cellar door but there’s a catch. When he started drinking some a few months ago, he discovered that there was one bottle in each dozen with cork taint. He can’t guarantee you will get twelve to the dozen that are potable.

But you can pick up stunning bargains from now until August. There are some sparkling wines. The Macedon vignerons decide to call their sparklings Macedon to ward off the French “Champagne nazis”. Keith has a Brut Rose for $27 and a 1993 vintage XO Brut with added cognac for $50. Unfortunately, the 1998 Brut sold out on the first day of his winter tasting when I bought the last case at $29 a bottle. The full list of wines to sell before the next pallets of wine come in are listed on the website www.silverwingswines.com.

Some of the wines made for the American market, a Riesling sourced from the Margaret river and a Grenache, Shiraz, Mouvedre blend are absolute steals. The Silverwings flagship wine is a Shiraz-Mouvedre from the Goulburn valley, made from the fruit from old vines planted in the 1950s. The 2008 will be released shortly and will be last of the blend as Keith moves on again to another winery on the slopes of Mount Macedon – not quite full circle.

Coming up soon, after a mandatory trip back to France, Keith will host a tasting where he will rerelease the 1999 Cleveland Pinot Noir pitted against some Burgundies. The 1999 was another wine with a story. I tasted a barrel sample at the winery and was literally blown away. It was huge. Not a timid watery Pinot but a monster with so much alcohol I had to sit down for an hour after the taste. It was a limited release in dozen lots to valued customers as there was precious little produced because of the drought conditions and bird strike. Keith says it is drinking beautifully now, so it might be time to take the cork out of one of the untouched dozen. I am a bit afraid it might still bite me although the label says 14% alcohol, I’m sure it is much bigger than that.

By Michael Metcalfe