Konpira Maru Wine Company Vermentino

Konpira Maru Wine Company make a Vermentino, but the company is new to me. The website says 'Wines made in Melbourne, true to variety and the ground in which they're grown'. But the website does not tell you where 'Konpira Maru' comes from. The young men featured on the site, Sam Cook and Alastair Reid, are the winemakers, helped by our local Jared Dixon. Like most of Dixon's not-interfered-with white wines, the Konpira Maru V for Vermentino is a cloudy gold in colour, being unfiltered and unfined. Nuts, citrus and butter feature in the aroma, and the well-judged, mid-length palate is creamy with green apple. If I wanted to say what Vermentino is, this is it … as well as the Yalumba Vermentio. There's no year on the bottle, but the label is black, with grape in white and company in red. The detail of winemaking includes 'batonage', an old wine-making technique: stirring the wine-in-barrels with a baton.

2016 Jilly Field Blend

As I write, I have just opened Jared Dixon's green-waxed and corked bottle of 2016 Jilly Field Blend the label of which features a greyscale, alert hare, the type you see, like wallabies for example, sitting up, ears vertical, scanning and ready to bound off in the opposite direction from what they are perceiving. The list of grape varieties in this Field Blend is like the chants of the Catholic liturgy for Easter: the reds being Nebbiolo, Shiraz, Tempranillo, Tannat, Pinotage, Tinta Cao, Touriga, Barbera, and the whites being Gewurtzraminer, Chardonnay, Viognier and Petit Manseng. Dixon took the grapes of the first rows of Mark Kirkby's Topper's Mountain 'fruit-salad' vine plantings, which are usually under attack from birds in the nearby bush. Dixon's hand-made wines are made from what it to hand. He whole-bunch pressed and fermented with the abundant wild yeast of New England and the Northern Rivers. The Field Blend's subtle, mixed perfume is of calamine lotion, vanilla and orange peel. In colour, it's really a deepish ruby-crimson, and that's because, despite those whites, many of the reds are big red-wine grapes. Its palate is, not unexpectedly, surprising: at the very end is the citrus of the whites; before that is, briefly, Turkish delight; in the middle, some musk sticks; toward the end, some orange peel again; and at the beginning is citrus, where the whites are very strong. So it is wine that glides across borders.

2016 Jilly Dick Dixon New England Shiraz Nebbiolo

Appropriately, given the chaos-based nature of living/life, Jared Dixon, the NSW Northern Rivers young, local, emerging wine-maker, has subtitled his 2016 Jilly Dick Dixon New England Shiraz Nebbiolo ‘addicted to the unknown’. It’s a deep, deep ruby red with an aroma of chocolate, tobacco and wood smoke. On the palate it is mostly savoury with a rough edge. It would be a beautiful wine with food, likely to enhance roast chicken or meatballs. A dedication to a Dick Dixon is emblematic of the intra-family association, not uncommon in wine-making.