Ned Goodwin MW explores the rise of Crittenden Estate Savagnin
Savagnin, Jura’s spiritual cultivar, has an ignominious history in Australia. It was introduced circa 1989 as albarino, before genetic testing by the lab-coat brigade in 2009 indicated that Spanish authorities had supplied erroneous material to the Australian authorities. The variety was none other than savagnin. Most Australians who had planted it simply ripped it up and licked their wounds. The more perspicacious, however, had other ideas.
Matt Campbell, assistant winemaker at Crittenden Estate on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, had returned from the Jura at a propitious point between the French region’s fallow inauspiciousness, and the incendiary fashionability that has made the likes of Jura producers Tissot and Ganevat, common names in the world’s fine wine circles. Crittenden Estate had retained its savagnin plantings and Campbell, with a handle on the potential for great wine rather than the ‘bang it in and out’ styles of innocuous dry white that those who had clung to their savagnin were making, furtively stuck a barrel behind closed doors. He left it under ullage, as with oxidative styles in the Jura, and pulled it out after a year or so with his typically laconic grin. The naturally occurring surface yeast known as flor had its way and a modern-day Australian classic was born!
This is a wine style defined by aldehydic complexities of curry powder, washed rind, chamomile and walnut husk, over obvious fruit; by phenolics as much as freshness, that elicits squawks from the jaded or the myopic, unable to see past mainstream varieties. Master of Wine at Langtons, Ned Goodwin MW, strongly suggests that the purview of Crittenden Estate Cri de Coeur Savagnin is ‘redefining what constitutes great wine, glimpsed through a more contemporary viewfinder.’ Ned was fortunate enough to taste through a near-vertical of each vintage made.
The inaugural 2011 whets the appetite. Nothing more. The lathering of flor is gentler than the more complex vintages to come later. There is more obvious primary fruit, concurring with head winemaker Rollo Crittenden’s exhortation that ‘we were so happy with what we had, we just wanted to bottle it!’ There was no 2012 made due to lousy conditions, but by 2013 this startling cuvée begins to hit a groove of cool climate fidelity, a saline wisp and a more confident embrace of flor’s complex inflections. While there is an autolytic note of brûlée to the wine, not dissimilar to aged Champagne, hints of curry powder and brown spice segue to a moreish nuttiness. Better, the 2015 is perhaps the greatest triumph to date! From a warmer year, the wine boasts a panoply of ‘mushroom broth, washed rind and curry powder…held together by what feels like a highly strung bow of freshness despite the wine's obvious heft.’ Umami in spades!
Ned found the 2016 and 2018 to be brethren, each showcasing a rancio degree of complexity that is considered a high qualitative trait when it comes to oxidative styles of wine. Ned describes rancio as a ‘je ne said quoi note of walnut, blue cheese and polished timber’, with the 2018 akin to ‘a precarious thrill ride of white-knuckle intensity across the palate’, capping a wondrous tasting as the festive season hits full swing.