Australian sweet fortified over £10

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Grant Burge 20 Year Old Tawny

The 1950s marked the turning point for table wine in Australia as the fortified wine industry, propped up by exports to the UK, went into decline – yet a legacy of ‘ports’ and ‘sherries’ survives.

From the 1890s to the 1950s, the Barossa became a hothouse of fortified wine production thanks to a combination of warm, long, ripening days and grape varieties capable of hanging for higher sugar levels, most notably Grenache and Mourvèdre, but Shiraz too.

The Illaparra Fortified Store, built of ironstone from nearby quarries, was the original fortified winemaking home of Grant Burge, whose ancestors were already well-known as fortified wine specialists in the early 1900s.

Followed the trend towards table wine production in the 1960s, the Burge family retained the tradition of making fortified

wines.

Grant Burge retains a passion for fortified wines and continues to make them using grapes from their own Barossa vineyards and premium, aged fortified stock from his family’s Wilsford Winery. ‘It’s in my blood, and I cannot change that’, says Burge, ‘[and] I also believe in preserving and maintaining our Barossa legacy and tradition’.

Using the larger berries best suited to fortified winemaking, the Grant Burge 20 Year Old Tawny is made and matured in the Grant Burge Cellars from the Barossa’s traditional tawny varieties Grenache, Mourvèdre and Shiraz, blended to an average age of 20 years.

After harvest and crushing, fermentation is initiated in traditional open fermenters and stopped at the requisite sweetness level by the addition of a quality local spirit.

According to winemaker Craig Stansborough their, ‘ability to drive up the road to Tarac to taste and choose excellent spirits for specific styles is a very important part of fortified winemaking’.

The wine is matured in older barriques and hogsheads in a solera-based system and a limited quantity of 20 Year Old Tawny drawn for bottling each year while the barrels are topped up with younger wine.

Written by Anthony Rose

Anthony Rose is the wine correspondent of the Independent and i newspapers and contributes to various other publications, among them Decanter Magazine. He was a solicitor in a previous incarnation but decided it was time to get a steady job. He is co-chair of the Decanter World Wine Awards Australia panel and has won a number of awards for wine writing. In 2014 he published The Tapas Bar Guide (Grub Street, £10.99), co-authored with Isabel Cuevas, a guide to tapas bars in the UK. Anthony spends far too much of his time nosing his way around the world in wine competitions, having judged in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, California, Japan, China and France. He is fascinated by Japanese sake and is co-Chairman of the Sake International Challenge in Tokyo and teaches a consumer course at Sake No Hana in London. Anthony is also a published photographer and a founding member of The Wine Gang at ,. Anthony lives in South London and in what spare time he has, he likes to cook, eat and drink the best wines and sakes he can afford on a wine writer’s budget.