Brisbane shocks with wine list of the year award

SHOWCASING Queensland’s best has helped a Brisbane restaurant win the wine list of the year accolade.

Aria sommelier Ian Trinkle who has won the Australian Wine List of the Year Award. Picture: Christian Gilles

QUEENSLAND, it seems, is suddenly a significant player in the Australian wine industry, with Aria restaurant winning the wine list of the year awards.

Peter Forrestal, the chairman of the judging panel, said Aria had 740 bottles (29 by the glass) in 2011. Such is the demand for fine wine in Brisbane that Aria’s list had expanded to 1040 (39 by the glass) by 2018.

Aria’s head sommelier Ian Trinkle was named the nation’s top sommelier for assembling an outstanding selection of varieties from all corners of the globe. Trinkle tells me he has added to that tally since the awards and now has around 1200 vintages on offer.

Judges noted Aria’s support for the “fledgling” Queensland industry. That made me laugh.

Queensland has been making wine in commercial quantities for at least 158 years.

German immigrants Jacob and Elisabetha Kircher planted Assmanshausen Vineyard at Sandy Creek, near Warwick on the southern Darling Downs, in the 1860s. Their wines (I’m guessing they were fortifieds) won medals at local shows and some were even exported to Europe.

Robyn Henderson from Ballandean Estate on the Granite Belt is likewise amused by terms such as “fledgling” and “emerging” being applied to Queensland wines, pointing out that there was a roaring export trade to the UK in the 1890s. “When are you no longer ‘emerging’? That’s what I’d like to know,” she says.

Sommelier Ian Trinkle and chef Ben Russell at Aria Brisbane

The same night Aria won the gong for best wine list, Cru Bar + Cellar in Fortitude Valley was honoured for its outstanding range of champagnes. It stocks
a substantial number of styles, from a Charles Heidsieck 1995 Blanc des Millenaires ($370; heady notes of beeswax and nougat) to a statuesque Dom Perignon 1971 Oenotheque ($2399).

And I was especially interested to see Brisbane’s Blackbird restaurant receive the award for the best Queensland wine list. Executive chef Jake Nicolson and the firm’s group sommelier, Penny Grant, have gone one better. They have created a five-course Queensland degustation menu ($95; add $45 for wine). It teams Bundaberg figs with the attractively aromatic 2017
Le Petite Mort VMR, Darling Downs Murray cod with 2017 Witches Falls Wild Ferment Chardonnay, South Burnett suckling pig with the rose petal and tar notes of Symphony Hill 2014 Reserve Nebbiolo, Oakey hanger beef with 2016 Ravens Croft Tempranillo and, lastly, Queensland strawberries with a fragrant 2016 Ballandean Estate Viognier. I can’t think of a better way to honour the state’s food or wine.

Grant has been close to vineyards all her life. She hails from Benalla in Victoria’s Rutherglen district and worked on her uncle’s vineyard there in her teens. She has worked in wine in some of the nation’s leading restaurants, and arrived at Brisbane’s Stokehouse in 2015. When she began, there were 250 wines on the list. Now there are 600. “We had
one page of shiraz,” Grant says. “Now there are two.”

Shiraz is a crowd favourite, no doubt, because of the strong lineup of branded beef on the menu.