THE WINE FRONT

Running to stand still. Big alcohol and big fruit, but essentially unappealing. Eucalypt, game, plums, fresh leather and cedar, the eucalyptus so strong that it totally dominates the aftertaste. This would have been better as a young wine, but it's not going anywhere fast. Drink: 2007-2011. 85 points.

Opened a bottle of the 1999 - corked. Swung straight then into this: which still shows a lot of coffeed, creamy American oak, but is just now starting to pull through it. Grainy, earthy, plummy fruit, lots of eucalypt, lots of dry, ripe tannin and a then a warm, juicy finish. It is starting to drink very well now - but its drinking peak is still another couple of years away. Good wine. Soft power. Drink: 2009-2015. 92 points.

Lacks a little spark but it's a lovely drink, full of spice and raspberry and coffee, the first signs of maturing leather just starting to show. Drinking very well from now - and probably for another 7-10 years.  Integrated, spicy, regional, with good, earthen, juicy carry on the finish. Drink: 2007-2012. 89 points.

This is humming along now. Cloves, cedar, tea, blackcurrant, aniseed, red earth - it's drinking like a charm. It often surprises me just how good Heathcote cabernet can be - often better than the shiraz. This carries a gorgeous line of tannins too. This is a wine both Varnadown Run, and the Heathcote region, can be proud of. Drink: 2007-2013. 92 points.

I bought a 6-pack of these on release and had almost forgotten that I had them - though as soon as the lamb started roasting my mind turned to them. Tonight's bottle was gentle and fruity, the tannins softened but the curranty fruit still in youthful form, aromas and flavours of red capsicum clear but attractive. Oak is kind of shy, but that's the kind of boy I am. It has some time ahead of it, but probably won't get a lot better from here. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Drink: 2006-2013. 91 points.

Serious money is suddenly being paid for some of the great old Australian wines, and judging by the experience I was lucky enough to be invited to last Saturday night, no bloody wonder. These were stare-into-the-eye-of-beauty wines, wines that took the 'surprised by joy/impatient as the wind' nature of life and made you stop to appreciate the wonder that is the passage of time. These wines were 40 years old, and they were magnificent. This was Australian wine at its crackerjack best.

These three wines were served together, as a flight.

Mount Pleasant Hunter Valley Phillip Shiraz 1966:
It smelled of sweetness, of roses, of red earth, of leather, of a clean old barn, full of hay and wool bales. It didn't have a lot of stuffing on the palate, but it sang sweetly, if softly, its savoury heart still beating soundly. At the end of its run, but a joy to drink. Lovely lovely lovely.

Tulloch Pokolbin Private Bin Dry Red Shiraz 1965:
Incredible. It took a little time to open up, but over the course of an hour it got better and better - complex, silky, earthy, daring, balanced and intriguing. A wine that it was impossible not to keep returning to, over and over. An amazing experience. Long long long. Savoury, spicy, earthen. Watching it over an hour was like a decade-long trek. This is what wine is all about. Good bottles of this will live for another 20 years.

Lindemans Hunter Valley Shiraz Bin 3110 1965:
Some people reckon this is the best Australian wine ever made - or that it's  right up there. I've not tasted a wine better than it. Monumentally good. Complex, savoury, earthen, blackberried, vibrant and interesting and structured and all that - full of heart, of stuff, of nonsense, of cunning, of substance - and then, wrapping all that up, the softest of soft textures, like drinking the neckskin of your first lover. Eat your heart out. This is the gorgeous eye of wine at its most devastating. Good bottles of it will live forever.

It's ghostly here in north-east Victoria. There are bushfires close by and the smoke is thicker than trouble, visibility down to 50 metres at best. The smoke is white, the light orange, the pulse of cars loaded with water cans and containers as constant as concern. The power has gone off twice today, only for an instant each time, but it has - of course - me worried about my coolroom/cellar, which stands alone under trees and is cooled by electricity. I don't want the electricity to go off at the wrong moment. I was ferreting around the coolroom this afternoon and found a couple of bottles of this - I bought them in early 2003, and didn't expect to keep them for long. I thought the wine might be shot. The first bottle was corked, so I had to traipse back to the coolroom and retrieve the last. It was quite staggeringly good, straight up. Violets, roses, meat, blueberry, cherries, pepper - but all blended into one another, so that nothing stood out. Exquisite tannin, as taut and undying as hope. It leaves the mouth like, in the words of the Go-Betweens, lips leaving lips. One day, I will find some more of this wine - leave it alone if you see it, it's mine. It still has many years ahead of it. I don't remember how much the wine cost; but having drunk it, I know its value. Drink: 2006-2012. 93 points.

Sometimes you need to be reminded. Just how impressive Australian wine can be. This wine did that for me. At 15 years, it's still plush and rich and knocked up with dark, syrupy fruit, age having softened the show and added leathery, coffeed aromatics, but taken nothing of its power. There were four friends and a pile of food at the table, and all of us suddenly  stopped and went: Hey, wow, isn't that really something! As if someone beautiful had just walked by.  The bottle went in about two seconds flat, and while it lasted it made us feel young and capable and full of promise again. It made us sad when it was gone; the party broke up shortly after. Drink:  2006-2016.  95 points.  (Special thanks to Rob Geddes MW for sending the bottle down - you got any more Rob?).

I can hardly remember this as a young wine but its quality certainly surprises me - it's a cracking wine. It's also drinking really spiffily right now, and will keep doing so for the next five or so years. Leather, raspberries, a touch of cedar and an elegant, long finish ... this is Australian red wine drinking in very attractive style. Drink: 2005-2012. 94 points.

Found this lurking at the far back of the cellar - a wine I have never tasted before. First things first: it's fresh, bold, largely undeveloped and, if the cork holds up, destined to live for a good 20 or 30 years. That's the good news. The bad news is that it is very much like drinking dry port, with thick, overdone, warm black fruit hammering through the centre of the wine - the oak having been largely soaked up. It's good at what it does. In 2016 it will astound people at how 'youthful' it looks. But it will never be an especially classy drink. Drink: 2008-2021. 88 points.

Rule of thumb is that you shouldn't touch a good-vintage St Henri until it turns ten - time to try this then. It's every bit as good as it promised as a young wine. Deceptive, fine tannin, leathered blueberries, a sense of earthy tobacco-like character and lovely, characteristic, fruity length. I thought that I would need to decant it but it drank well immediately on opening, and will drink well from now on, and for at least the next seven or eight years. 1996 is a great vintage of St Henri. Drink: 2006-2018. 94 points.

This was served from a magnum and it absolutely stunned me. It is a fantastic wine. Mostly merlot but with all of cabernet franc, malbec and cabernet sauvignon blended in, it's rich and luscious yet magnificently tannined too, its bombastic finish worthy of contemplation. A symphony of a wine. Structure, class, fruit. Drink: 2006-2013. 95 points.

Yep, I like this. It's aged well. Lots of dry, fleshy, chewy tannin, lots of nervy acid, lots of meaty, savoury, soured cherries and an aftertaste of leathered ash. This is Chianti, unassuming and unabashed, a drinker's wine if ever there was one. Fully mature. Drink: 2006-2010. 92 points.

Bold, muscular, perfumed. Stick your nose in it and stewy, sickly, rotted-rose smells hit you but you know, they're not that off-putting - especially as the palate is like walking along an old country road, and is just as evocative. Old earth, old asphalt, lifted florals, the merest suggestion of leathered, preserved meats and chocolate, and then tannins that are firm but luscious. Long. Developing, but still strong and rigidly intact. Drinking well now, but it will be better in five or ten or 15 years. Drink: 2008-2022. 95 points.