Brown Brothers Patricia Cabernet Sauvignon 2004

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At the moment, I’m in the middle of teaching a WSET Level 2 course. Although it’s three very long Saturdays it’s also a lot of fun. One of the best bits of running the course is choosing the wines beforehand. The WSET issues guidelines about the wines we should show, so I don’t have carte blanche, but the suggestions are broad enough to allow lots of diversity for me.

When wines are working well, I will use them repeatedly (hello, Georges duBoeuf Beaujolais Villages!) but sometimes a wine doesn’t show well or, for some of the more premium wines in particular, I struggle with availability.

One wine that changes almost every course is the premium New World Cabernet Sauvignon. Naturally I ALWAYS show an Australian wine and I always try to choose a wine with a bit of age on it. A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have a few bottles of 1996 and 1997 Wynns John Riddoch in my cellar. Using them in a course is a great way to actually open them (rather than sitting around waiting for the perfect moment) and hopefully it is also a treat for the students. This no doubt says something about South Australian palates … but these wines are always amongst the best received in the whole course.

Anyway, with no gems left in the cellar, I had to buy. I chose the Brown Brothers 2004 Patricia on a bit of a whim. It had some age and I have a lot of respect for the wines that Brown Brothers produces across their range. Don’t take this as meaning I unilaterally love everything that the company produces, but overall they are amongst my ‘safe’ picks.

The Patricia wines are Brown Brothers’ flagship wines and are named after the family’s matriarch, Patricia Brown, who died in 2004. Brown Brothers doesn’t release these wines every vintage and the wines get the best treatment. So you expect something good.

And my goodness me – this wine totally over delivers on that promise. It might be almost 11 years old (the back label says its cellaring potential is 6-10 years) but it is an unbelievably vibrant and youthful wine. In a word – it is DELICIOUS. And absolutely worth every penny of its $59 price tag. I only wish I were wealthy enough to drink this kind of wine on a very regular basis.

It was also extremely handy that the current class has someone from a (well known) winery who had tasted that winery’s back vintage Cabernet Sauvignons the day before. Apparently the Patricia put a lot of those wines firmly in the shade so I am not alone in my admiration for this wine.

The wine

In the glass, it is ruby and very deeply & intensely coloured. Even at 10+ years, it is looking young.

The nose is pronounced and the fresh fruit is starting to drop off, being replaced with a very attractive cedar, tobacco and worn leather character, there is also some warm spice such as clove or nutmeg.

The palate is positively bursting with fresh fruit, there is good acidity and the tannins are very firm but pleasantly chalky, rather than mouth strippingly drying, fresh blackcurrant, blackcurrant jubes, some vanilla, touch of baked black fruit, and some milk chocolate.

I wrote this tasting note on the second day and it was still showing such vibrant, fresh fruit – an absolutely beautiful wine.

Purchased from the Ed Cellars, $59.
Cork.
13.5% abv.

Brown Brothers Patricia Pinot Noir Chardonnay Brut 2006

As it’s getting close to the weekend it’s time to think about celebratory, weekend wine and for me that means bubbles! I’ve had my tasting note for the Brown Bros Patricia hanging around for a while so I figured it was time to commit it to the internet.

Patricia Brown was the matriarch of the Brown family and the wines that bear her name are the winery’s flagship wines. The sparkling Pinot Noir Chardonnay comes from the winery’s Whitlands vineyard in Victoria’s King Valley. The 2006 is 79% Pinot and 21% Chardonnay and was made the same way that Champagne is made (you’ll see this on bottles as méthode traditionelle or méthode champenoise). Amongst other things, this means that the wine has spent its entire life in the bottle you pick off the shelf – including the five years it has spent on lees.

This time on lees, where the sparkling wine lies in the bottle with the dead and dying yeast (oh, right – that sounds so attractive) is what gives good sparkling wines from around the world their complexity. As the yeast runs out of sugar in the wine it starts to eat itself and this process, known as autolysis, gives vintage sparkling wines their characteristic yeasty, bready notes.

With vintage sparkling wine it’s important to remember a few things. Firstly, it will usually cost more than a non vintage because it’s taken more time to put together, and often uses better fruit and production techniques. The wine is much more likely to be savoury than its non vintage counterpart. If you’re not a fan of yeasty, bready, nutty and perhaps even Vegemite like characters in your sparkling wine then proceed with caution. But because of this savouriness, vintage bubbles often work brilliantly with food.

In the glass, this wine is pale gold in colour and I note comparatively few bubbles (although this depends so much on the glass that I’m almost reluctant to write that down!). The nose is all about toasted brioche and bread and butter pudding with a touch of vanilla.

On the palate, the Patricia is very savoury. There’s very good acidity which is softly persistent. There’s a little bit of lemon that comes through, and a slight nuttiness, but this wine is really all about those savoury characters – it’s yeasty, brioche like and has a slightly meaty flavour which is perhaps best described as umami or Vegemite (think just a hint of Vegemite smeared on buttered white toast, rather than slathered on!).

I enjoyed this wine – this style of bubbles is definitely my thing. If you’re interested in exploring vintage sparkling wine this also represents a reasonable, and reasonably priced, introduction before you start delving into the considerably more expensive Champagne.

Jeremy, over at Wine Will Eat Itself, also enjoyed this wine, back in May.

This wine was purchased from Dan Murphy’s (Marion), $40.
Closure: cork.