Crawford River Wines celebrates 40th anniversary
Crawford River has been renowned for its exceptional, age-worthy dry riesling for so many years now.
In the rush to write about the new and the obscure, we wine hacks sometimes overlook the old and familiar. Which can be unfair, both to those well-established producers who are making better wine than ever (often at reasonable prices, thanks to their under-the-radar status) and to you, the wine-loving reader, who deserves to be told about great bottles regardless of how trendy they are.
Take Crawford River Wines, founded in 1975 when John and Cathy Thomson planted a vineyard on a gentle slope of their century-old family sheep farm in the wonderful wide-screen country of southwestern Victoria.
Crawford River has been renowned for its exceptional, age-worthy dry riesling for so many years now that it’s become part of the Australian wine furniture, so to speak: a classic wine from a classic vineyard.
The Thomson family — older daughter Belinda is now the winemaker, younger daughter Fiona is in charge of sales and marketing — celebrated the vineyard’s 40th anniversary recently by opening a clutch of old and new wines. Not surprisingly, the rieslings were superb: if you like ’em young, the 2014 is a joyful mouthful of lemon-drizzled white grape pulp and mineral refreshment right now; if you like riesling with some bottle age, the 2008 Museum Release is all finesse and orange blossom perfumed complexity. Both are now available from the winery, for $40 and $66 respectively; the 2014 can also be found in many good independent wine shops for between $40 and $50, and on restaurant wine lists for about $100.
But at the anniversary tasting I was also blown away by the quality of Crawford River’s cabernet sauvignon, an unfashionable, late ripening grape that can produce rather green and mean wines in cool, marginal areas like Victoria’s far southwest, but clearly flourishes on the Thomson farm.
Memories of the first time I visited Crawford River in the late 1990s came flooding back: as dusk fell, I was invited to pick asparagus in the family’s garden and stay for a supper of farm-raised roast lamb — and it wasn’t the riesling I remember drinking that evening, it was a cabernet: a classic, refined, elegant red wine.
Fast forward to now and the 2008 Crawford River Cabernet Sauvignon seduces me all over again with its youthful red and purple berry fruit, its fine, powdery tannin grip and its medium-bodied but intense elegance. Delicious now, it’s in no hurry to mature; the Thomsons also opened a 1993 for the anniversary tasting that was drinking superbly well.
The 2008 cabernet sauvignon is now available from the winery for $46, and can be found for up to $60 in retail outlets. I think that even at the higher price — but especially at the lower — this is good value; I rank Crawford River among Australia’s greatest cellar-friendly cabernets, most of which sell for two or three times the price.
Even more astounding value is found in Crawford River’s sweet wine (another decidedly untrendy wine style), the 2010 Nektar.
Made from sauvignon blanc and semillon grapes infected late in the growing season with Botrytis cinerea — “noble rot” — this is an utterly exquisite sticky, with multilayered characters of honeysuckle and jasmine and fresh meadow honey, lusciously sweet yellow stone fruit sweetness and super-refreshing balancing citrus acidity.
Again, this is easily one of Australia’s best sweet wines, and would stand tall in the company of great European sweet wines such as Sauternes or Barsac — which makes its $40 price tag (for a 375ml bottle) seem relatively inexpensive.
http://www.crawfordriverwines.com/