PHILIP WHITE | 28 JULY 2015
Langmeil old-vine wines
It’s now four years since Richard and Shirley
Lindner, and their sons Paul and James, took
total ownership of the old Langmeil winery at
Tanunda. One of the many Barossa wineries that
had fallen into disrepair by 1980, it was saved
by cousins Karl and Richard Lindner and the
Bitter family. While its ramble of old ironstone
sheds looked certain to last another century
or two, it was the vineyard that provided the
greatest challenge: a few yellowing scraps of
documentation indicate this was planted in
1843 … could they harness and retrain founder
Christian Auricht’s old Shiraz block?
The vines were an unattended scramble,
with canes spreading across multiple rows, the
old trunks reminding me of tattered warriors
returning broken but stubborn from some great
siege or another.
Not only did those vines, perhaps the world’s
oldest viable Shiraz, respond well to some
viticultural TLC, but within a few years they were
joined on the riverbank by a garden of 300 Shiraz
vines transplanted, one by one, from a 140-year-
old vineyard whose nearby site was developed
for housing by Karl Lindner.
Add these troopers to the ancient Grenache
and Cabernet vines at the family’s Lyndoch
vineyard, and you have an arsenal of traditional
Barossa reds, whose annual release is something
many aficionados observe with the anxious
reverence otherwise reserved for the end of Lent.
Such ancient vines do not necessarily produce
greater flavours. Unless it’s exceptionally healthy
and fit, balanced and fruiting, a century-old vine
is no more likely to provide outstanding flavour
than you’d expect to get in the steak of a 100-yearold cow.
What is significant about healthy oldies is their
stock, their DNA: since phylloxera destroyed the
source vineyards of Europe after these cuttings
were originally imported and propagated in
Australia, these veritable clones no longer survive
in the Old World.
In drinking these wines we keep the vines
alive. Such overwhelming responsibility! So
much left to do!
...2/
93
Fifth Wave
Grenache 2012
vines older than 70 years; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap;
I thought this was all lolly at first: a runny chocolate crème brûlée
with just enough American oak to give it that lamington coconut
aroma.
Those primaries aside, like many of the greatest old-style Barossa
reds, this wine evokes ancient farm kitchen smells, all centred on
the woodfired stove. Poured quite cold – cellar temperature – this
Grenache showed the acrid peat lug reek of the
stone chimney at first, but the iron of the stove
and its pots grew dominant as the whole business
warmed.
Somebody’s stewing black cherries. Take a draught:
syrupy Morello cherry and silky heaven like sweet
black gold heavy in the mouth. Do it again: eeew,
it’s so very shiny and polished, its matte tannin
replaced by solid acid.
Transports of delight: For some reason this all
reminds me of an old motorcycle. Hot engine, oil,
leather … get my deadly drift?
Jackaman’s
+++
Cabernet Sauvignon 2012
94
vines older than 35 years; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap;
This Cabernet’s as Barossa as you can get: the blackberry conserve
with the reek of those tough briary leaves, the smell of the iron
of the stove and the heavy cast pot … split redgum … just a
little marshmallow and caster sugar … these are aromas I would
commonly encounter until the mid-’80s … I haven’t seen them
lately other than at home or in the odd old-style Barossa kitchen.
But the wine gets much more modern when you
drink it: the silky polished sheen of the Grenache
is here like black chrome plating your pipes from
the inside … it’s all very firm and shiny enough
to make it seem faster and lighter than it really
is and I’m back in motorbike dreaming, as if the
blackberries have been flamed in Cognac and fed
into the carburettors to do their magic explosion
before activating that really neat little matte
flange of black tea and juniper tannins on the
way out.
It’s Modesty Blaise sliding across the apron on
her ’52 Vincent Black Lightning, all her leathers
freshly dressed … I wonder if she still likes being
called Princess?
It’s only wine, Philip, I remind myself while I
build up an unseemly dribble for juicy pink lamb.
+
4
9
Orphan Bank
Shiraz 2012
vines older than 70 years; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap;
When Karl Lindner evicted these old vines to plant houses, he
got a tractor and dug up some of the rows, one vine at a time, and
replanted them in a spare patch of ground down the other end of
that long mile beside the creek. This took 18 months. You can see
this transplant operation on the Langmeil website.
The vines are learning to love their new spot. You can feel their
toes wriggling in the sand.
Musk, lavender, Turkish delight, Persian fairy
floss, sandalwood and frankincense are the
pretties this year … real old-fashioned greatgrandma scents.
The wine makes me think of something very
harsh and modern crashing into something
equally fine, old, royal and elegant.
There’s lissom but intense prune and morello
cherry liqueur flavour action and the finest
threadbare carpet of tannin … my suspicion
is these tannins will grow more intense and
complex as the roots of these orphans learn their
way into the ferruginous alluvium which is new
to them. I can’t wait until they show signs of
finally sucking rock, way down beneath all that
easy, convenient loam.
95
The Freedom 1843
Shiraz 2012
vines older than 125 years; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap;
Trippy. Having been blessed to drink from the vintages of this
vineyard for so many years I can tell you that the more of them
there are marching off into the horizon far behind me the more
I see them as a sort of inflammatory essence of the sex glands
of nocturnal cactus flowers from Joshua Tree or Radium Hill or
Earthquake Springs or somewhere, keeping me fed with life from
the vast past dark. Then feeding me to the future. They must be
pollinated by the mysterious Night Parrot.
I reckon instead of just licking it up in the night,
if you could save any of the juice and have a bit
of a look at it in the morning, it’d be a sort of
gun barrel blue-black slime with a trippy paisley
slick on it like transmission oil or squid ink. But
that’s not fair. This bastard will assuage grief. It’s
the best truth drug I know, on account of the
delirious welter of feelings it releases, all fantasy
and fabulous bullshit as you suspect, but lover I
tell you this sure beats television. And it might
surprise you to discover that this is unabashedly
a bed wine that has not one whiff of starchy old
Lutheran linen about it.
This is slippery black silk from the witches
already. That’s the sort of transmission I’m talking
of. Get around here quick. We already lost 172
years.