D'Arenberg The Dead Arm

Do you know what one of the best things is about Ciao? You write an opinion and someone makes a comment. Before you know it you’re chatting away between Guest Books about all sorts of things. A couple of weeks ago I wrote an opinion about a supermarket and this provoked a comment about a rather superb wine that they sell. “Ooh” I said “we obviously share a taste in wines!” Then MrDarcy told me about d’Arenberg The Dead Arm Shiraz. “It’s positively ...
...was my daughter’s birthday and we always like to have a special bottle of wine to celebrate and there, on the supermarket shelf was the double-gold-medal-winning bottle I was looking for.

Now sit down. It’s £17.99 a bottle, but as MrDarcy had told me, it would have been £60 a bottle if it had been a French wine. Did I think it was worth it? I thought it was the best money I’d ever spent on wine – and I’ve spent rather a lot of money ... more

Do you know what one of the best things is about Ciao? You write an opinion and someone makes a comment. Before you know it you’re chatting away between Guest Books about all sorts of things. A couple of weeks ago I wrote an opinion about a supermarket and this provoked a comment about a rather superb wine that they sell. “Ooh” I said “we obviously share a taste in wines!” Then MrDarcy told me about d’Arenberg The Dead Arm Shiraz. “It’s positively orgasmic!” he said.

Well, that weekend was my daughter’s birthday and we always like to have a special bottle of wine to celebrate and there, on the supermarket shelf was the double-gold-medal-winning bottle I was looking for.

Now sit down. It’s £17.99 a bottle, but as MrDarcy had told me, it would have been £60 a bottle if it had been a French wine. Did I think it was worth it? I thought it was the best money I’d ever spent on wine – and I’ve spent rather a lot of money on wine over the years!

Four generations of the Osborn family have been at the d’Arenberg vineyards (which date back to the 19th century) since 1912. They’re just north of McLaren Vale in South Australia.

I wondered where the name “Dead Arm” came from – I mean it’s not exactly appetizing, now is it? Well it’s a disease which affects vineyards all over the world and usually vines with the disease are severely pruned, or even abandoned altogether. At d’Arenberg the approach is taken that this is a natural part of vineyard life and although one side of the vine might be brittle and lifeless, the grapes on the other side are stunning. It’s true that the vines are dying, but they’re still producing bunches of small grapes with a very intense flavour.

Each year the Dead Arm grapes are hand-picked separately from the main crop and collected in old kerosene cans. They then begin the gentle, two-year process of being turned into a fine wine. Part of this involves the wine being trodden by foot – but don’t worry, waders are worn! There is a downside to this minimal process and that’s that the wine can produce a fine deposit which generally sticks to the side of the bottle. It does mean too that if the wine is kept for any length of time it should be decanted before serving.

So what’s it like then? We had the wine open for a couple of hours before we planned to drink it and it was comfortably at room temperature. It’s a wine that should be served at between16 and 24 ºC. The aroma (I’d say bouquet, but it sounds like a bunch of flowers) could be smelt around the table as the wine was poured and was an intense combination of blackberry, blueberry and figs. There was another smell there too. I thought it was TCP but it could have been cedar wood or even eucalyptus, although that comes through most strongly when you put your nose into the glass.

This is still a young wine –we had the 1999 vintage - so the colour wasn’t so much red as rich purple, but it was intense.

My husband’s comment was that it was like drinking silk when he sipped the wine. The wine was unbelievably smooth, but so it should be at that price. There’s a slight acidity but it’s very restrained. It’s got blackberry and blackcurrant in there in abundance and a vanilla undertone. You get mocha too and toffee. It was the most incredible wine I’ve ever drunk. At 14.5% alcohol by volume it’s no wimp either.

It’s a wine that’s made to accompany foods with a robust flavour. We had it with roast lamb, but it would be a superb accompaniment to top-quality sausage with mushrooms or a rich casserole. Peter suggested it as accompaniment to fillet steak and it would be perfect.

Most wines that you buy from the supermarket are not worth keeping for any length of time. They’ve been produced in such a way that they want drinking within a year of purchase at the most. The idea of laying a wine down (or “cellaring” it) to drink in the future can’t be applied to the vast majority of these wines. This is one of the exceptions. It can be kept for up to 25 years before it’s getting near its use-by date and will actually improve in the bottle for a good proportion of that time. That’s useful if you’ve got a special anniversary or birthday coming up and you want to have an exceptional wine for the occasion. You could buy it now because you certainly won’t be able to buy it at this price in a few years’ time.

So, do I agree with MrDarcy that it would have cost £60 if it had been a French wine? Actually, I’d go even further and say that I don’t think the French are capable of producing wines of this quality any more. It’s a spectacular Aussie wine and cheap at the price.

I’d only one regret about that birthday meal. It would have been lovely if my daughter could have been there to share her birthday bottle with us.

 

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