By John Rozentals.
Tim Adams: really does care about his long-standing customers.
I write a lot about Tim Adams, a highly regarded Clare Valley winemaker, for several good reasons apart from him being a friend and someone I learnt winemaking with at college.
For a start he works in South Australia’s Clare Valley, which I’ve long held up as one of Australia’s best wine-producing regions. It’s certainly the most beautiful, but that’s irrelevant unless you’re a tourist and headed that way.
Secondly, he’s one of the country’s and indeed the world’s best winemakers, and that most definitely is relevant if you enjoy drinking good wine.
Probably most importantly, though, I think that Tim really does care about his long-standing customers and values them very dearly.
He knows that some of them really stretch their budgets to occasionally be able to drink well, and that some of them save their pennies to share a bottle of his flagship Aberfeldy Shiraz on a very special occasion.
He knows, too, that he could benefit himself, at least in the short-term, by pricing wines such as the Aberfeldy well beyond their reach, and hence deny them one of their life’s great pleasures. But he isn’t like that.
I remember talking with Tim many years ago about the price of the Aberfeldy and what a bargain it represented, compared, say, with Penfolds Grange, to which a reviewer had very favourably drawn a line of comparison quality-wise.
“Tell me,” he asked, “would you rather have a single bottle of Grange or a dozen bottles of the Aberfeldy?”
He came up with an answer himself: “To me the question is a no-brainer.”
And so say all of us, as we raise a glass of the twenty-fifth vintage of Australia’s best-value icon red. For that, I firmly believe, is what the Aberfeldy is.
WINE REVIEWS
Tim Adams 2018 Skilly Ridge Riesling ($30): Made from the quarter-century-old vines that now grow near the home of Tim Adams and his wife Pam Goldsack. The wine shows exactly why Clare Valley riesling is so highly rated and features the district’s hallmark citrus and floral flavours. Varietal purity highlights a fresh, vibrant wine with a long life ahead of it. Drink it with simple, good-quality fresh seafood, or enjoy it on its own as an aperitif.
Angullong 2017 Orange Region Shiraz ($22): The 2017 vintage was a relatively cool one in Orange and followed the very wet winter of 2016, which was highlighted by “a few bogged tractors” in the vineyard. Anyway, the grapes ripened late and the resultant wine is delicately flavoured and quite the antithesis of the much better known ball-tearer shirazes from South Australia’s Barossa Valley or McLaren Vale. Look for spices — and good balance.
WINE OF THE WEEK
Tim Adams 2015 Aberfeldy Shiraz ($65): One of Australia’s most highly regarded red wines is made from fruit harvested from premium, old, dry-grown Clare vineyards, with this wine coming from a comparatively cool vintage. Tim and his fellow winemaker Brett Schutz risk a fair deal of wrath by describing it as a ‘more-feminine’ wine than some vintages of Aberfeldy, but I know what they mean. It certainly shows the coolness of the vintage through its elegance, structure and flavour. A fitting wine to mark the twenty-fifth release of what I regard as Australia’s best-value icon red.
