Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most...

12
Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH wine and olive oil

Transcript of Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most...

Page 1: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences

Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting

The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Page 2: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

This is a question I am asked at almost every tasting and it’s a hard one to answer as my late wife Dina and I were privileged to share some truly special bottles since I began making wine back in 1979.

Some wines are so magical it’s hard to believe they are made from grape juice, I mean it’s almost incredible that mere grapes made these amazing elixirs. The really great wines of the world, for me, convey the magic and wonder of the universe. They are way beyond just an expression of the soil and the climate and the people who made them.

There are a lot of good wines which do re�ect the soil, the climate, the place and the people that made the wine. There are plenty of those but there is always going to be a shortage and something very special about the really, truly, magical and wondrous wines of the world.

But a special bottle is also enhanced by the people you share it with which is why I have made this a list of my top 10 wine experiences, not just the top 10 wines. It’s wines like these that keep me going in this amazing industry. There really is magic in great wine.

Joe Grilli Primo Estate Owner and Winemaker

Joe, what’s the best wine you’ve ever had?

Page 3: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

1The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Yarra Yering Dry Red No. 1

I bought a case of this wine on its release in 1992, buying it on its reputation. I drank my last bottle about 16 years later and every single bottle throughout its life was just amazing, in not only its wonderful fruit and oak character, but it seemed to age like a great Bordeaux but with a lot more richness than most Bordeaux. It had its own distinct character and it was just an amazing wine to pull out and put in a big glass and really enjoy – when I think back at the wines that I have had in my cellar this is one of my all-time greats and one of the all-time great Australian wines that I have ever tried. It is Cabernet based wine but really it could have been made from anything, it is just a remarkable wine. It was quite a sad day when I drank my last bottle but we had thoroughly enjoyed every drop.

1990Wine experience #10

Page 4: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

2

The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #9Terre del Barolo 1978I found this bottle while fossicking in a liquor store in Adelaide; I was drawn to this dust-covered, very old worldly looking Italian wine that I didn’t really know much about. Dina and I were on our way to a picnic in the Adelaide parklands so we just picked it up and opened it up on the lawn with a couple of crystal glasses and I was completely surprised – wow, I had never tried a wine like it. There was no real fruit in the wine; it seemed as if you lique�ed an antique furniture shop and distilled it into a bottle and poured it into a glass it would smell and taste of the 1978 Terre del Barolo. It was all leather and spice and varnish and it had a really dry �nish with a very light autumn color. A very old fashioned wine but it just completely seduced me and once again it made me think – ‘was this incred-ible wine made from just grapes?’ – then I learnt that it was made from 100% Neb-biolo. My fascination, passion and love for the Nebbiolo grape begain in earnest with this wine.

Page 5: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

3The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #81978 Gaja Barbaresco

I came across this very aristocratic and very expensive wine in a pub in Carlton in the early ‘90s. I was surprised to see it there and my fascination with Nebbiolo wines and Barolo and Barbaresco had already been piqued but I still had not tried the wines which were regarded as the ultimate expression of the grape. When I bought a bottle of this wine for lunch - re�nancing the mortgage on the house to do so – I was expecting great things but I still could not believe just how amazingly this wine showed. It was incredibly powerful, incredibly aromatic, you did not need to be an expert to see the class in this wine, it just kept developing – every time I looked back at the glass over the period of the two hour lunch it was showing something di�erent. I just couldn’t believe how it kept changing and how the tannins and structure was so �ne too. The cliché of �nely grained tannins - I did not really know what that meant until I tried this wine. A great vintage and I have the consolation that, if I ever had to buy a bottle of it now I would probably not be able to a�ord it - even with remortgaging the house.

Page 6: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

4

The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #7Antinori Tignanello1985By the time this wine was released in the late 1980s and had made its way to Australia I had heard of the Super Tuscan movement and this wine was at the forefront. I just bought a six pack of this wine totally on its reputation without ever having tasted one, really just to check out what this whole Super Tuscan scene was about. Being a blend of Sangiovese from Tuscany with the non-Tuscan grape Cabernet Sauvignon made by a completely di�erent approach to red wine making in Italy I didn’t know what to expect. The �rst time I opened a bottle of it, in its youth I thought ‘this is something special’, it seemed to encapsulate all the great Tuscan red wines I’d tried until then crossed with some of the great French wines I’d tried, to be this quite enchanting and very, very convincing style. But as I drank my way through the six bottles over a period of many years (I think I drank my last bottle 15 years later) I also realized that that 1985 vintage of Tignanello was really one of the best red wines I’d ever tried in my life. I just felt so thankful that I had not only tried it once but had drank it six times throughout its life and I have not doubts that if I could get my hands on a bottle now it would be looking fabulous.

Page 7: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

5The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #61978 This was the �rst Amarone wine I ever drank. In 1984 I was on my �rst ever overseas trip with a young Chester Osbourne (of d’Arenburg) and another young Australian wine lover and retailer, and we’d based ourselves in London before heading out to explore France, Germany and Italy. We found ourselves in wine bars most lunches and dinners and to us young Aussies back then these London wine bars were fantastic; unlike in Australia in London you were able to drink and try the great wines of the world from the four corners of the globe. When the waiter recommended we should try this Amarone style wine from Valpolicella we had no idea what it was. He poured it in some big glasses and one whi� and my eyes just lit up, I thought ‘wow, this is something I’ve never tried before’. I couldn’t believe it, I could smell the raisined fruit and a lot of funky characters that I’d never smelt before in a wine. On the palate it just seemed to go on and on and on with a lusciousness and softness and all sorts of characters that were not from fruit I’d just never seen before in any wine, let alone an Australian wine. The fact that it was about 16.5% abv on a cold London night probably helped the experience along as well! I vowed that night, after trying this amazing wine, to investigate how a wine like that could be made. The waiter explained that it was made from dried grapes and was one of Italy’s greatest red wine styles that aged for many years, almost inde�nitely. All that was �led away in my mind and made a huge impression and really that single wine has changed my life because it sowed the seed of the JOSEPH Moda, our �agship red wine which I now have a 25 year pedigree and lineage with and even though it is not a copy of the style you can very much trace the inspiration for the JOSEPH Moda right back to the 1978 Masi Amarone.

Masi Recioto della Valpoicella Amarone

Page 8: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

This is a question I am asked at almost every tasting and it’s a hard one to answer as my late wife Dina and I were privileged to share some truly special bottles since I began making wine back in 1979.

Some wines are so magical it’s hard to believe they are made from grape juice, I mean it’s almost incredible that mere grapes made these amazing elixirs. The really great wines of the world, for me, convey the magic and wonder of the universe. They are way beyond just an expression of the soil and the climate and the people who made them.

There are a lot of good wines which do re�ect the soil, the climate, the place and the people that made the wine. There are plenty of those but there is always going to be a shortage and something very special about the really, truly, magical and wondrous wines of the world.

But a special bottle is also enhanced by the people you share it with which is why I have made this a list of my top 10 wine experiences, not just the top 10 wines. It’s wines like these that keep me going in this amazing industry. There really is magic in great wine.

Joe Grilli Primo Estate Owner and Winemaker

6

The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #5

Because we were married in 1986, we chased down this bottle of Brunello for our 20th wedding anniversary in 2006. Brunello di Montalcino is one of our favorite wine styles. Biondi Santi was one of the �rst, if not the �rst, producer of Brunello di Montalcino and the one that put this style on the map. Biondi Santi is a little bit of an old fashioned producer and there have been more modern interpretations of the style but Biondi Santi is an oldie but a goodie and we knew we wanted to chase down a bottle of the 1986 without having tried it. We opened it in Positano, on the beautiful Amal� coast south of Naples on our 20th wedding anniversary, paired with steak that we had cooked ourselves over some coals. Brunello di Montalcino is de�nitely one of the best steak wines you can have, so a very special wine in a very special setting, on a very special occasion. Really the only problem was that we wished we’d had three bottles of it because if there were three bottles of it we would have drunk them all. It was just mother’s milk, it was not the richest Brunello we’ve tried, not the most tannic but somehow it had a real �nesse. It was a medium colored wine, very ethereal, very perfumed, we thought we were drinking it at its peak as it was very soft, the tannins had all loosened away and the wine had fully opened up and it was very mellow. When the bottle was empty we thought “oh, we’d only just started”. It is just a lovely memory, overlooking Positano and enjoying that wine.

1986 Biondi Santi Brunello di Montalcino

Page 9: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

7The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #41959 There is a lovely story behind this: in 1987, our �rst year of marriage, Dina and I did our �rst overseas trip together and we had a job doing a vintage at Château Canon in Saint-Emilion. We spent a wonderful time there and we weren’t paid for it – they looked after us very well. They gave us the keys to the Château and we had the run of the place and we had just many beautiful experiences there. At the end of our stay, as we were farewelling the Fournier family who owned the Canon back then Eric Fournier, the manager, came up to us – we were in the car virtually backing out of the courtyard, the window was down, waving our �nal goodbyes, it was drizzling in the rain a little bit and as we were backing it out Eric Fournier said, “Wait, wait, one moment” he turned to Dina and said, “When were you born?” Dina said, “1963” and Eric said, “Mm, no”. He turned to me and he said, “When were you born?” “1959”, I said and his eyes lit up and he said, “One moment” and he returned two minutes later with a little wooden box like a pencil box containing two bottles of the 1959 Château Canon. I knew that ’59 was a good vintage and here we were in 1987 so the wine was just under 30 years old. Dina and I resolved to open up one bottle a couple of years later on the wine’s 30th anniversary, so we opened up a bottle of the 1959 Château Canon in 1989 with my sister and brother-in-law. Actually, as it so happens that the Adelaide Hyatt cooked a special dinner for us for that wine and it opened up magni�cently. The experience of the evening with how the wine was given to us and just the sheer quality of the wine meant it was just amazing. We said to each other that we would re-meet and drink the remaining ’59 Château Canon exactly 10 years later; wherever we were in 1999 we would drink the other bottle together. We clearly saw the wine could live until 1999 and a lot longer. We opened it in 1999 in Adelaide. My sister, my brother-in-law and Dina and I got together and drank the second bottle of the ’59 Château Canon and it opened up equally magni�cently. It had developed even more perfume, but we said to ourselves again ‘We could drink this in 2029’ and we had no doubt it would be still be singing, a magni�cent bottle of Bordeaux. We enjoyed both bottles and we felt very privileged to have had two bottles of that wine.

Château Canon, Saint-Emilion Grand Cru

Page 10: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

8

The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #31967Château d'YquemA group of about twelve of us was in Charlie Brown’s wine bar in Hindmarsh, Adelaide in about 1980. The proprietor, Rene Galea, was a mad Francophile and he had a 750ml bottle of the legendary 1967 Chateau d'Yquem in the cellar and on the spot the twelve of us decided to buy it and share it that night. That cost us about $20 each to buy this, so it was about $250 a bottle in 1980 money. I could have put down a deposit on a house with that sort of money back then and just to get really a good half glass each of this amazing elixir. It was just starting to age. It still was very fresh; it’s a legendary vintage of the famously long-lived Château d'Yquem. Once again I couldn’t believe that something that could smell and taste like that actually was made from grapes. It had a magni�cent perfume, just went on and on and on and really cemented the feeling of magic I felt with great botrytis wines. Whether they were top French wines or top German wines I just thought that they were amazing and this wine was the best botrytis sticky that I had ever tried. That bottle de�nitely gave me inspiration to persevere with the idea of experimenting with using botrytis on some fruit in my very early years at Primo Estate, resulting in our JOSEPH La Magia Botrytis Riesling Traminer. I was just so privileged to have had that wine and I have not had it since.

Page 11: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

9The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #21962 Penfolds bin 60a

This red wine is the single best Australian wine I have ever tried. It was tasted in the mid-1980s at Penfold’s Magill Estate when they did a little re-release of some of their legendary wines to a few invited clients. I was friends with a retailer and that was the reason I was there. It certainly was not because I was buying lots of great Penfold's wines at that stage, I couldn't a�ord to. I only realized much later how incredibly special this gathering was because that evening we tried things like the '55 Grange, the 1962 Grange, numerous other Granges but the greatest wine of them all was the 1962 Penfolds bin 60a. It was all in the presence of the retired Max Schubert himself, who was there on hand just to make a few comments. It was a legendary night – Max con�rmed what I had heard amongst the a�cionados that the ’62 Penfolds bin 60a is regarded as better than any of the Granges he made and on the evidence of that night we nodded in approval and we were all able to buy these wines for about $70 a bottle in mid-1980s money which was, again a heck of a lot but it would have been the best investment anyone would have made not only �nancially but in drinking pleasure. I was lucky enough to meet Max a few times before he passed away. Never a more humble and magni�cent gentleman would you ever meet. Lovely to have met a giant among winemakers and a giant among men, just a wonderful memory and wine experience which I treasure.

Page 12: Joe & Dina Grilli’s - Primo Estate€¦ · Joe & Dina Grilli’s Top 10 Wine Experiences Our Most Memorable Wines from 30 years of Winemaking and Globetrotting The home of JOSEPH

10

The home of J O S E P H wine and olive oil

Wine experience #1Château Margaux 1961This is simply the greatest wine that I have tried. I have not tried every single wine in existence but I’ve been lucky enough to have travelled the world and come across many great wines and this is the best wine I have ever tasted. I am lucky enough to have tried it twice; both have been bottles of friends of mine because once again I would not be able to a�ord to be able to buy a whole bottle on my own. It was generously opened twice in private company with a bunch of us – with some lovely wine friends and both bottles opened up magni�cently. When people talk about amazing power, amazing concentration but at the same time amazing elegance and �nesse and tannins and length and aged character and bouquet and fruit, all these wine terms and when people talk about all the components of a wine being in perfect harmony together the one wine that just has got it all coming together that I have ever tried is the 1961 Château Margaux. And isn’t it great to have good friends like that?

I look forward to many more great wine experiences in the vintages to come – please share your great wine experience with us on Facebook or at www.primoestate.com.au

Ciao,Joe & the Primo Team