Vertical tasting of great grenache

Taras Ochota seriously considered pulling the pin on a special tasting a decade in the making.

Ochota Barrels Fugazi Vineyard Grenache 2019.

Taras Ochota seriously considered pulling the pin on a special tasting a decade in the making.

It was last Monday afternoon. Something savage had worked its way into his guts following a wine dinner in Bali the week before, and he felt the need to maintain a visual on his bathroom the way a nervous sailor squints to keep sight of shore.

He shook. He sweated. At one point he swore he saw the ghost of Elvis cooking breakfast.

Sometime late that afternoon he managed to get out of bed, throw on a collection of clothes no more or less dishevelled than if he were in rude health, and to make his way to the Hellbound wine bar in Adelaide’s Rundle Street where waiting for him were several dozen punters and a collection of wines that made a strong statement about who he was as a winemaker and man.

It has been 10 years since Ochota and his wife, Amber, released the first wine from a grenache vineyard in McLaren Vale’s Blewitt Springs district, and a lot has happened in the decade since.

Their Ochota Barrels label is now one of the most celebrated in the country, a leading light in the new Australian wine vanguard.

The label has grown to encompass a suite of wines made across the Adelaide Hills the Ochotas call home, but the grenache from a little farther south in Blewitt Springs, the wine that takes its name from a legendary Washington post-punk band of the 1980s and led to a pattern of edgy musical references across all the Ochota Barrels wines, is really the foundation stone of the whole operation.

Ochota was keen to put on a retrospective tasting of every Fugazi Vineyard Grenache he’d made and the dinner staged to showcase them sold out in hours.

Good thing Lazarus was able to rise up and get down to Hellbound.

Vertical tasting is always an illuminating exercise. Examining the one wine across a series of successive vintages allows you to really understand the wine, to observe how its essential elements can remain consistent through the vagaries of vintage variation.

But this tasting revealed even more. Nobody, not even Ochota, had seen these wines in complete context before and the tasting revealed plenty about the wines and the man who makes them.

The 2008 and 2009 vintages are the slightly clumsy first steps on the journey, products of difficult vintages made even harder by the fact the Ochotas were living in Sweden at the time and racing back at harvest time.

Those vintages are both a bit cumbersome, to be honest, slightly blocky Beta versions of the more polished and finessed style that evolved as Ochota’s understanding of the vineyard and his own winemaking mojo deepened.

It’s in 2010 that the style shifted. This is the Rosetta Stone of Ochota’s winemaking, the moment the code was unlocked and clarity came. The wine is still fresh, delicately poised and fragrant.

The 2011, a mauled and maligned vintage that produced some great McLaren Vale grenache, appears perfectly timed for the evolution of the style, the peppery spice and cooler fruit profile of the vintage helping to nudge the wine further in the direction it was already starting to head.

The 2012 is a spectacular wine, one that more than justifies the hype that had started to swirl around Ochota at the time of its release. It’s sinewy and taut, layered with dried raspberry and wild herb characters and girded by a fine structural frame that less intuitive winemakers can miss in grenache.

It was the year Taras and Amber’s first child was born, their house in Basket Range was bought and the shed at the end of that property’s serpentine driveway was transformed into a small winery.

“How did we make a wine that good in a year that hectic?” Amber Ochota wondered out loud.

From that point on, from 2013 through to the newly released 2019, the template is clearly set. They are a series of wines marked by vibrancy and energy, a lightness of touch without any sacrificing of structure, and an abundance of alluring perfume and supple fruit.

There’s a reason these wines sell out faster than a serious actor offered a part in a Marvel movie.

To say it’s possible to see the winemaker in their wines seems like a nugget of bullshit taken from the darkest corners of wine-writing excess, but when you go through a tasting like this, you actually start to believe it might be true.

These wines could’ve been made by nobody else, and each one of them charts a point on a particular journey.

They have a beauty to them that reflects the heart and mind of the man behind them.

He and his wines are indivisible. That’s rare and precious.

Ochota Barrels Fugazi Vineyard Grenache 2019, Blewitt Springs, $40

Only just released and already almost sold out, this is about as seductive and alluring as grenache gets, a heady swirl of forest berries, souk spices and wild herbs. Beautifully plush and slippery across the palate, tapering nicely with a granular tannin grip. If you can find some, grab it and run.