Time out at Bill's place

CHEERS: Barton on Wine

To hell with Tom Jones, who scared the birds and charmed the ladies at this year's Taste of Rutherglen Festival in Australia.

I was more interested on my visit last weekend to Rutherglen, in Victoria's north-east, to taste the fabulous fortified wines for which the region is famous, and to see another bloke – a homegrown Aussie winemaking legend by the name of Bill Chambers.

The Chambers Rosewood winery is on Barkly St, just outside town and just past an old brick building used in the 1800s as a distillery and purchased in the early 1900s by AJ Vidal (as in Vidals of Hawke's Bay).

In fact it is still known, all these years later, as Vidals Cellars.

Bill's place is far less imposing – basically a tin shed built around the brick cellar in which Anton Ruche, the German who planted vineyards here in the 1800s matured his wines.

It still contains at least one of Ruche's original barrels and others, in which fortifieds are still stored.

The Chambers family took over the place around 150 years ago and Bill joined the business in 1958 after studying at Roseworthy, South Australia's university of wine.

When he took over he saw no reason to make wholesale changes, though the range and varieties of wines has since been expanded, as it has been over the years by other wineries in the region.

But it is the fortified wines, particularly the unique rich and decadent fortified muscats and tokays, for which the Rutherglen (and Chambers) remain best known.

The influential United States wine critic Robert Parker, for instance, gave two of Bill's wines 100 out of 100 in 2001 and included Chambers as one of only seven Australian wineries in his book The World's Greatest Wine Estate.

One of those wines, the heavenly, treacly, toffeed non-vintage Rare Muscadelle, is still available, so far as I know, at Scenic Cellars in Taupo. The only catch is that it costs around $300 a bottle – as it should.

It's pretty classy stuff given Bill's no-nonsense, no frills approach to the business – "no fancy buildings, bottles and bullsh**".

And there is certainly nothing fancy about Bill's modest colonial home across the road, which is set among gardens created and maintained by his wife Wendy and surrounded by 100-year-old vines growing in red dirt peppered with stone and chunks of quartz.

It is from vines such as this that the semi-raisined grapes that produce some of Australia's most memorable nectars are picked.

They are then partly fermented and the wine fortified with grape spirit, which raises the alcohol level to around 17/18 per cent. The fortified wine is then consigned to barrels and blended , in the case of the youngest wines, 12 to 15 years later.

The result are these unimaginably rich and complex wines that smack (smack being the operative word) of raisins, malted molasses, nuts. and can be a perfect accompaniment to anything from chocolate cake to Christmas pud.

Or bordering on orgasmic, taken alone.

They are the sort of wines you will find only in wine shops and some of them are surprisingly cheap, bargains in fact, given their quality.

Look especially for those now made by Bill's son Stephen, a sixth generation Chambers, and others produced by Campbell's and Morris.

They range from about $25 to around $70 a bottle (often a 375ml bottle) with the rarest ... well, thanks to Robert Parker and others who truly appreciate Chambers' handiwork, the sky's the limit.

Bill, by the way, has been honoured by the government of Australia for his contribution to the wine industry, which includes judging for nearly 40 years. I was honoured just to meet the man who has given me/us such great pleasure and will, I hope, continue through his son, to do so.

- © Fairfax NZ News