On the final day of the wine tour, we visited two wineries in Southern Tassie. The first one was Pooley Wines.

This family business was started in 1985. They have their own winery and two vineyards, apart from producing wine from purchased fruit. The first vineyards is Cooinda Vale, which produces delicate elegant wines.

The second one is Butcher’s Hill (photo above), which is located directly behind the cellar door and produces more powerful wines due to the heavy clay with iron. It has 6 hectares of vines with Chardonnay, Pinot, Pinot Grigio, and Riesling.

The white wines we tasted at Pooley’s were:

• Matilda Sparkling 2020 (purchased fruit from Northern Tassie, 52% Pinot Noir, 41% Chardonnay, 7% Pinot Meunier, second fermentation in the bottle, aged 2.5 years on the lees): green apple, fresh, soft mousse.
• Pinot Grigio 2023 (aged 4-5 months on the lees): pear, easy to drink.
• Riesling 2023: apple, mellow acidity.
• Cooinda Vale Riesling 2023: apple, crisp, structure.
• Butcher’s Hill Riesling 2023: restrained aroma, creamy, and racy acidity.
• Gewurztraminer 2023: although the winemakers got the inspiration to make this wine from Italy, it is in fact not like a Gewurztraminer from Alto Adige, but more like one from Germany with 4 grams of residual sugar, high acidity, and less fragrant than Gewurz from Alto Adige.
• Cooinda Vale Chardonnay 2022 (8 months in French barriques (35% new), 40% malolactic): oak, citrus, fresh, balanced.

The red wines (and one sweet wine) we tasted were:

• Pinot Noir 2022 (11 months in French oak (10% new), 10% whole bunch, fruit from own vineyards and purchased fruit): spicy, red fruit, velvety texture.
• Cooinda Vale Pinot Noir 2022 (11 months in French oak (35% new), 20% whole bunch): red fruit, oak, spicy, structure, ripe tannins.
• Jack Denis Pooley Pinot Noir 2022 (selected fruit from Cooinda Vale, 11 months in French oak barriques (50% new), 20% whole bunch): restrained nose, needs time in the bottle, full bodied, beautiful tannins and balance.
• Butcher’s Hill Cane Cut Riesling 2022 (late harvest, produced by cutting the supply of water to the grapes and thus letting the grapes dry out before harvesting them, no botrytis, pressed three times, moistening the grapes with the juice that came out, 143 grams per litre residual sugar, 9% alcohol): restrained nose, hint of petrol, sweet & sour.

We started our visit to Derwent Estate with a lunch at the estate’s restaurant. The food was nice, although the chef put sugar into almost everything. It included oysters, blue eye travalla (a local fish similar to cod), octopus, and croquettes. The Derwent Chardonnay and Pinot Noir paired well with the food.

The vineyards are at the Derwent river and the view from the estate on the river was very nice. Derwent produces about 144,000 bottles per year.

We tasted these wines at Derwent Estate:

• Sparkling 2019 (50% Chardonnay, 50% Pinot Noir, from a different cooler vineyard, second fermentation in the bottle and aged 3.5 years on the lees): apple, creamy mousse, slightly sweet finish.
• Riesling 2021: petrol, structure, off-dry.
• Sauvignon Blanc 2023 (50% fermented in new oak barriques for 7 days, then transferred to tank; in tank slow ferment at 10C/50F): tropical fruit, structure, vibrant, off-dry.
• Pinot Gris 2023 (24 hours skin contact, fermented 1/3 in quick & warm in oak barrels and 2/3 slow & cool in stainless steel): seems like a rosé, structure, off-dry.
• Chardonnay 2021 (1 year in French oak (25% new), 100% malolactic): tropical fruit, vanilla.
• Calcaire Chardonnay 2019 (from limestone soil, yield reduced 50% by green harvest, 1 year in French oak (50% new and 50% 1-year old), 100% malolactic, unfiltered): vibrant fruit, balanced, crisp, elegant.
• Lime Kiln Pinot 2021 (10% new oak, 15% whole bunch): fresh, ripe tannins, soft texture.
• Pinot Noir 2020 (15% whole bunch, aged 1 year in French oak (25%) new, aged 2 years in bottle, each block and each clone fermented seperately to get more layers of flavor, unfiltered): spicy, beautiful structure.
• Calcaire Pinot Noir 2021 (15% whole bunch, 50% new oak, 50% 1-year old oak): spicy, beautiful body.
• Late Harvest Riesling 2022 (late harvest without botrytis, 60 grams residual sugar): sweet & sour, not creamy.
• Cane Cut Riesling 2019 (late harvest, produced by cutting the supply of water to the grapes and thus letting the grapes dry out before harvesting them, no botrytis, 140 grams residual sugar): petrol, creamy, very sweet.

John Schuts was the last winemaker of this trip to be inaugurated into the Confrérie de Trancheurs de Fromage Hollandais.

We took a little detour on our way back to Hobart to watch the beautiful views from the Rosny Hill Lookout.

Our bus driver in Tassie was Mark, who entertained us with his jokes and interesting historical facts about Tasmania (“everything on Tasmania is built by convicts”).

Our farewell dinner was at Aloft Restaurant in Hobart, with a beautiful view of the harbor. We had the chef’s meinu with beverage match.

The appetizers came in two sets of three. The first one consisted of wallaby tartare with sichuan pepper on a crispy tapioca cracker…

…oysters with house mignonette…

…and master stock lamp dumpling witjh a black vinaigrette, and was paired with a Bellebonne Sparkling Rosé 2020 from Pipers River, Tasmania.

The second set comprised crispy chilli eggplant…

…kingfish sashimi with buttermilk and anise…

…and a scallop with nasturtium leaf nam jim jaew. This was paired with a Willie Smiths ‘Pet Nat’ Cider 2023 from the Huon Valley, Tasmania. In both sets the flavor intensity was quite different between the three appetizers, which made the pairing with the wine work better with some appetizers than with others.

The next course was blue eye trevalla with crispy skin on a macadamia puree with lemon, and grilled broccolini (called brassica in Australia). The macadamia puree was quite salty but the whole dish worked great together as a combination of flavors and textures. It was paired with a Stoney Rise Savignin 2023 from the Tamar Valley, Tasmania, which was a great pairing. The Savignin was not at all like Savignin from the Jura (which can be high acidity and/or in an oxidized style) but was full bodied with enough fruit intensity to handle the bold flavors of the dish. The best dish and wine pairing of the menu.

Next was Koji pork with spring pea, curd, a horseradish sauce, and thinly sliced zucchini. The horseradish sauce was quite piquant, but the dish did work well with the Sonnen ‘Plenty Red’ Pinot Noir 2022 from Derwent Valley. Tasmania. For this wine was 5% Riesling cofermented with the Riesling, which had given the wine some aromatic and acidic lift. The wine was better with the dish than without it.

The dessert was spiced apple with buttermilk icecream and salted caramel, paired with a Mio Sparkling Sake from Hyogo, Japan. This sake was slightly sweet (12.6 grams residual sugar, 5% alcohol) and a bit simple, but did work well as a pairing.

These were all the wines of the pairing, plus a Stefano Lubiana Grande Vintage 2011 sparkling from Tasmania that we had as an aperitif (50% Chardonnay, 50% Pinot Noir, second fermentation in the bottle, aged 10 years on the lees).

This farewell dinner concluded our 13-day wine tour in Australia, in which we visited 26 wineries in 4 states, tasting over 400 wines.

Cees van Casteren MW went through great lengths to make this the best tour possible. He prepared a notebook for each participant of over 200 pages that listed all of the wines we were going to taste, which was a great help to keep track of all the wines we tasted. Thanks to him we visited the best wineries in the wine regions we visited, and so the wines we tasted are not reflective of the Australian wines you may encounter in the supermarket. Most were smaller producers that do not even export — in Tasmania even selling the wine in Australia outside of Tasmania is considered ‘export’ (and 70% of the wine produced in Tassie stays there). But this tour has certainly broadened my view of Australian wine. I am personally not a fan of most of the Rieslings (with some exceptions), but we have tasted some great Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Shiraz from cooler regions in Australia that can certainly compete with the best of the world. The wine world has trends. The trend in Australia used to be big bold fruity wines, and now at some producers the trend seems to have reversed to value acidity perhaps a bit more than it should be. After all, balance is one of the most important factors of wine quality. Luckily that trend seems to be less in Tasmania, which is a small but quickly growing and very promising wine region (apart from having a beautiful landscape and great food). I’ve thought about what I thought was the highlight of this tour, and I can’t decide as there were too many highlights and mentioning one would not be fair to the others. Perhaps the main highlight was the great group that we had on this tour and our great tour guides Cees and Ruud.

Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far. I’m finishing up with a weekend in Adelaide visiting friends that may or may not lead to some restaurant reviews. After that it will be back to the regular stuff of sous vide and other recipes. There will also be few dishes from this trip for which I will develop my own recipes, and of course I will share those on the blog.