"The Dark Horse"

09 Jan 12

Campbell Mattinson describes Mataro in the February March 2012 edition of James Halliday's new Wine Companion magazine. Here is an excerpt.

"... Mourvedre (usually pronouced 'moor-ved-ruh', though in some circles you'll hear it called 'move-over-dear') is the dark (work) horse of Australian wine. It's been growing here since the 1830s but until fairly recently, it had never been bottled as a stand-alone single variety.
Its more familiar role is as a blender.
Its grapes have thick skins, so it's hard to get them to ripen until the very end of the season, which means they often make for grippy, tannic and sometimes spicy wines. But a dollop of mourvedre in a soft fleshy shiraz? You have yourself a more complete wine. In other words, mourvedre's been saving the bacon of the better known wine varieties for decades.
The first time I noticed exactly how good and effective the mourvedre grape is I was standing in a cellar with Barossa winemaker Rolf Binder. It was hot and we were swatting at flies as we tasted from rich, inky-dark barrel to rich, inky-dark barrel. All the wines in the barrels tasted good but the wine in one particular barrel tasted sensational. I singled it out to Rolf and he beamed. "That's the one with mataro in it", he said. Not surprisingly, Rolf refers to himself as a 'confirmed mataro nut'.
Rolf is an early mataro/mourvedre adopter - he's been on its case longer than most. "The Bulls Blood (a Rolf Binder wine) we make has always been based on shiraz and mataro", he says. "In 1984, I experimented and made a barrel of mataro pressings, which convinced me of the uniqueness of the variety. I still remember the wine for its purity of flavour, but mostly for the wine's long pure finish. Since then I've been hooked", Rolf says.
"To me, winemaking now is very much about the tannins in the wine and the tannic structure of wines. The more I work with mataro, the more I like the fruit flavours it has, and more importantly, its long firm but subtle tannins. It's great to tame shiraz or to bring out some mid-palate weight that can be lacking in, say, grenache."
And there's a reason for the sudden buzz in Australia over mourvedre. It's no longer the domain of a few old-timers; it's branched out. It has plenty of differences - it's a bugger to get ripe, it's hard to keep the alcohol down, it's not as black-dense as shiraz and it's more naturally acidic. But these are starting to be celebrated rather than hidden. From the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale to Central Victoria, the Swan Valley and across to the Hunter Valley, winemakers are asking whether this unassuming and unrewarded grape finally deserves it's moment in the sun.