Hurlo’s Rose: fitting tribute to a mate

Delamere Vineyard has released Australia’s most expensive pink wine as a tribute to a sorely missed man.

Fran Austin and Shane Holloway at Delamere Vineyards.

Fran Austin and Shane Holloway from Delamere Vineyard in Tasmania have released Australia’s most expensive pink wine as a tribute to a much-loved and sorely missed man.

The wine is the 2015 Hurlo’s Rose. Made from pinot noir grapes grown on the oldest section of the Delamere block and fermented in French oak barrels, it’s a brilliant drink: just the palest bronze colour in the glass, with enticing floral, gentle berry and woody spice aromas and a rich, creamy, deeply satisfying flavour and texture on the tongue. Only 60 cases were produced and the wine costs $80 a bottle.

The “Hurlo” in question is John Hurlston, a friend of Fran’s family, who sadly died from a rare tumour a couple of years ago, just shy of his 70th birthday.

Generations of Melburnians knew John as the sometimes jovial, oftentimes cantankerous, white-walrus-mustachioed owner of the pharmacy in the Queen Victoria Market, a fixture since the early 1970s. He knew all the stallholders: which of the fishmongers had the best oysters, which butcher sold the most delicious cotechino.

Fran’s father had gone to Pharmacy College with Hurlo back in the day, and the young winemaker would stay with her dad’s mate and his wife, Sandy, at their rambling old house whenever she was in Melbourne, sharing John’s love of wine.

He collected great bottles — old French claret, fine champagne — but also relished more humble, everyday drinks: Tahbilk marsanne was a favourite, as was beaujolais and good dry rose.

Generations of musicians saw another side of John: they knew him as one of this country’s finest collectors of guitars, mandolins, banjoes and other instruments. He had a band himself, back in the 1960s; he travelled to London, saw Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors; worked in a pharmacy in Kilburn — the Rolling Stones were customers. He started buying old, rare and classic instruments during a Greyhound bus trip across the US in the late 60s, and by the time he died almost every room of his house was stuffed with hundreds of them, stacked high in cases.

Not surprisingly, musos would often congregate around the Hurlston kitchen table, jamming late into the night over copious bottles of red. I was lucky enough to score an invitation to one of these sessions a few years ago. Knowing my interest in booze, John insisted on showing me his antique corkscrews (he collected these, too, of course), opening drawer after drawer in a kitchen cabinet looking for a particularly rare opener, and stumbling across a bottle of early 20th-century Chateau Lafite he’d stashed away in one of those drawers years before (don’t ask me which vintage; it was a big night).

Hurlo loved the rose Fran made at Delamere with her partner Shane, and it’s not hard to see why. The “standard” 2016 Delamere Rose (300 cases made, $25 a bottle and also just released) is gently perfumed, with crunchy pink berry flavours, deliciously dry and savoury.

But Hurlo also used to open bottles of more complex, pricier French rose for the young winemakers and gently encourage them — in his distinctive gravelly voice, peering over his half-moon specs — to aspire to greater things with the style.

So they started experimenting, fermenting pale pinot noir juice in old chardonnay barrels, treating it as if it were one of their more serious, more expensive wines, destined for something more than just fresh summer quaffing. A rose that deserves to have Hurlo’s name on the label — even though the man who inspired the wine sadly never got to taste it.

delamerevineyards.com.au