Basket Range: Brodericks’ Bordeaux wine blends

If you like elegant reds made from Bordeaux grape varieties get on to Basket Range Wine, a low-key Adelaide Hills winemaker.

Some of the Broderick family’s Basket Range wines.

If you like drinking elegant reds made from the so-called Bordeaux family of grape varieties — cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit verdot — I have a tip for you: get on to a small producer called Basket Range Wine in the Adelaide Hills.

You have probably never heard of this winery, even though Basket Range winemaker Phillip Broderick first planted his small vineyard there in 1980, and has been selling wine since the late 80s.

It’s a very low-key operation.

The Brodericks — Phillip, his wife Mary and their sons Louis and Sholto — make small quantities for their own label from their 8ha of vines, and sell the rest of the grapes to other winemakers in the region.

I only got to taste the wines because their distributor urged the family to post me a box of samples recently. It was the first time they’d sent wine to a journalist outside South Australia.

“I suppose we’ve been hiding our lights under a bushel a bit,” admits Mary.

“We’re not very good at self-promotion,” adds Phillip.

If you haven’t heard of the winery, you have probably heard of the Basket Range region where the Brodericks have their vineyard.

This crumpled, bushy and beautiful enclave of the Adelaide Hills has risen to prominence among sommeliers, indie retailers and booze hacks in recent years thanks to a mob of interesting winemakers choosing to work and live there — proponents of trendy minimal-intervention winemaking such as Anton van Klopper and Taras Ochota.

The Brodericks have quietly carried on throughout this period of hype, selling grapes to some of their new, wild-haired and beardy neighbours, but also continuing to make the wines their own loyal mailing list customers have come to expect.

The main wine here is a blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and petit verdot.

The current release, the 2014 ($26), is marvellously elegant: medium-weight in the mouth, with perfumed red and black fruit, some hints of cedar, and a touch of oak firmness holding everything in check. The 2013 ($28) has a little more flesh on its bones, a touch more wild fruit and grip, but is still poised and fine.

The Brodericks kindly sent a couple of older vintages to show how well reds from Basket Range develop with cellaring.

The 2007 merlot-dominant blend has picked up some lovely plummy richness and gamy characters over time, while the 2002 (predominantly cabernet sauvignon, blended with cabernet franc, petit verdot, merlot and malbec), from a cooler year, has all the entrancing aromatic hallmarks of bottle-aged “claret” such as dried resinous herbs and dusty earth.

They also sent a bottle of the 2014 straight petit verdot ($32), and it’s a cracker: gorgeous perfumed purple fruit, tightly structured and clearly destined for a long life in the cellar: it was still drinking superbly after being open for six days.

With wines as good as this, the Brodericks won’t be able to hide under that bushel for much longer.

The wines are sold direct from the Brodericks’ vineyard, basketrangewine.com.au, and through their online retailer and distributor, theotherbordeaux.com.au.