This Margaret River winery produces some of the nation’s most surprising wines
In an age when so much wine is rushed to market in order to quickly claw back costs, the Umamu offerings are a rare treat.
Umamu is a wine label of uncommon origins and quixotic intentions, born one night at a table in Sydney’s Regent Hotel in its ’80s heyday. Charmaine Saw tells the story of that night every time she’s asked how a woman raised in the plantations of Malaysia and schooled in England before graduating in Natural Sciences from Cambridge came to be running a vineyard in Margaret River. Her late parents, Mac and Ann, were regulars to Sydney, always marking the occasion with dinner at the Regent and a bottle of their favourite white wine, Château de Meursault.
One day a sheepish sommelier informed them he’d run out, and asked if they would accept something Australian he believed could take its place. Mac and Ann, who shared a deep interest in wine, were fiercely Francophilic. But from that substitute bottle poured a whole new world. The wine was Leeuwin Estate’s Art Series chardonnay and it, and the frequent trips to Margaret River it inspired, led to the purchase of a vineyard there in 1997.
To the original 1978 plantings of cabernet, shiraz and sauvignon blanc, the family added chardonnay, merlot and cabernet franc in recognition of their great friendship with May-Éliane de Lencquesaing, the legendary former proprietor of Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac, Bordeaux.
It has always been the intention that Umamu wines would be released with bottle age, at the moment when Charmaine Saw believes they are good and ready. In an age when so much wine is rushed to market in order to quickly claw back costs, the Umamu offerings are a rare treat. With no traditional distribution model, Saw is free to move the wines through a website that is a digital treasure trove. This may be one of Australian wine’s best kept secrets.
UMAMU CHARDONNAY 2014
$96
Grilled nuts and preserved lemon. A fragrant and remarkably fresh core of nectarine. The faintest suggestion of bees wax and crème brulée indicating emergent maturity. Some crushed rock and flint etching its edges. Fullness without flab, development without tiring. A wine entering its second decade with the confident expectation of a third. 13.4% alcohol, 95 points
UMAMU CABERNET FRANC 2016
$48
Beautifully svelte and sinewy, a wine that slots neatly into the medium-bodied mould of what once were called “luncheon clarets”. Violets in abundance, both flowers and leaves, mulberries and a bit of pipe tobacco. Some dried sage, crushed mint and, when you really dig deep, the piquancy of guts-in game. Defined by demure and dusty tannins. 13% alcohol, 93 points
UMAMU CABERNET SAUVIGNON 2011
$108
While winemakers in other parts of the country shudder when they think back to 2011, those in Margaret River get misty eyed at the memory of one of the great seasons. They all stocked their cellars at the time; now you can, too. Cassis and bay leaf characters are still clearly defined in this wine; some fennel seed, too. A friable earthiness at its heart, and fine, fully resolved tannins tapering the finish. 14% alcohol, 93 points