Brown Brothers 2004 Shiraz Mondeuse & Cabernet

Some things stick with you.


On my first visit to Brown Brothers in January 1980 I ran across this blend with the helpful and very informative bloke in the cellar door giving me the drum on Mondeuse. I'd already let him know I was interested in varietal wines, and Brown Brothers seemed, at the time, like Varietal Central. That's changed a little over thirty years, but the changes have largely taken the form of other people heading down the varietal path rather than Brown Brothers changing direction.


Inquiries as to the possibility of tasting Mondeuse on its own produced an explanation that the variety was far too muscular as a stand alone proposition unless you were going to give it an extended spell in the bottle to settle down, but in a blend it adds intense colour and substantial tannin. I haven't run across this one all that often over the intervening decades, but I managed to fit a bottle into an order placed in May '09 and while it could have sat quietly in the wine fridge for another couple of years,


(a) I needed the room for a Houghton C.W. Ferguson;


(b) It's coming up to seven years, not optimal perhaps but it's had some time; and


(c) I was disinclined to wait much longer.


Brown Brothers 2004 Shiraz Mondeuse & Cabernet (4.5* $40) Deep full-bodied red, complex notes on the nose, focussed, smooth and balanced across the palate with everything playing nicely together. At just over 50% Shiraz, with the other two sharing the rest close to evenly you can taste what the Mondeuse brings to this rather wonderful blend. I would love to have the wherewithal to try one of these at fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years.

Houghton 2007 C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec

We weren't planning on getting to the Swan Valley when we headed west, so visits to Sandalford and Houghton were a bonus. I first encountered this wine in association with a Vinturi, and based on that experience was more or less forced to buy a half-dozen of these. The Vinturi prompted the purchase and the purchase in turn prompted the subsequent acquisition of a Vinturi.


Houghton 2007 C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec (4.5* 19 points $41.25, at least that's what I paid) Deep purple-red colour, Cabernet varietal notes in the nose modified by the Malbec element. Massive. magnificent, still very young and in ten years time may well be rated at 20. Memo to self: There are five bottles left, get them into the wine fridge.