One of the inevitabilities of being a Bordeaux-focused wine writer is that I have a sideline in ‘Things That Happened in 1855’.
There’s the Burgundy classification of climats put together by Dr Jules Lavalle, which arguably had an even greater long-term impact on its region than the Bordeaux version that was unveiled in the Paris Exposition that same year.
Then there’s the publication of Tennyson’s Hiawatha; the National Theatre production of this was a key moment for me growing up.
The same also saw the death of Charlotte Bronte and the unfolding of the Great Gold Robbery that would be named one of the ‘most audacious crime[s] of the century’.
In a weird (or appropriate) coincidence, the crime took place on a London train bound for Paris on 15 May, the same day that the Exposition Universelle opened on the Champs Elysée that would usher in the Bordeaux wine ranking.
But it was only a few months ago, care of the brilliant Andrew Caillard MW, that I discovered several Australian wines were also awarded medals at the Paris exhibition in 1855.
Among them were Tomago, Irrawang and Camden Wines made by, respectively, Richard Windeyer, James King and William Macarthur.
The last two had their wines served to Napoleon III at the closing ceremony. Macarthur was then 55 years old, and went to Paris to accompany the wine and watch the jury at work with the tastings.
It meant that he was there to witness the wines’ success, writing to King that a judge remarked, ‘We were all perfectly astonished at the quality of the Australian wine… placing them in strength and flavour between the wines of Madeira and those of the Côtes du Rhone.’
Even Queen Victoria stopped by the New South Wales stand and asked Macarthur if she could taste the wines – to which he reports with evident delight replying, ‘certainly your Majesty’.
All of this publicity meant that 25,000 gallons (around 95,000 litres) of Australian wine was imported into Britain in 1855, and two years later The Times newspaper wrote, ‘in a few years we hope to see the names of Camden Park, Irrawang, Tomago (…) rank as high… as Lafitte [sic], Latour, Château Margaux’.
The full list of grape varieties shown is not exactly clear, although fascinating research carried out by JA McIntyre for the University of Sydney suggests they included a Riesling, a Muscat Noir de Frontignac, and something called ‘Scyras’ that was drawn from cuttings from Hermitage in France; irresistibly suggesting it was Syrah.
I’ve been tracing the early history of Cabernet Sauvignon in Australia and California recently, and despite the comparisons to Lafite and Latour from The Times, it seems unlikely that Cabernet Sauvignon was in the Australian wines in Paris back in 1855.
We do know that James Busby imported the grape into Australia in 1832, and other documents I have found show early Australian grower John Fawkner planting Cabernet Sauvignon in the 1840s. I’m still looking for earlier examples, and have loved listening to Caillard’s tales of the swashbuckling early importers.
Coonawarra lays claim to some of the oldest Cabernets in Australia, but it’s in Margaret River, with its slightly cooler maritime climate, that I find some of the most exciting examples.
Cloudburst is one that I always open with joy. And I feel pretty sure that owner Will Berliner would relate to those early growers, who found their way through trial and error, a sense of adventure and a belief in their land.
Margaret River itself was only established as a grape growing region around 70 years ago, with Berliner, a New Yorker by birth (Long Island to be exact) arriving in 2005 with his Australian wife Alison Jobson.
They moved there full-time in 2012, to the farm they had bought together in a remote location surrounded by the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park. The land had never seen chemicals in its soils and is home to, as he says, possums, quokkas, emus, hundreds of birds, lizards and ‘other slithery things’.
He also points out that indigenous people lived in Margaret River for 50,000 years before contact with European settlers, making it one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited areas. Referring to Cloudburst, he said that makes them ‘absolute babies’ in their journey to understanding the land, ‘on the shoulders of everyone else’.
My colleague Stephen Brook was among the first wine critics to take notice of Cloudburst, back in 2013 when a judge at the Margaret River Wine Show, giving its 2010 inaugural vintage the top red wine of the show. He has recently written an excellent profile of Berliner that I thoroughly recommend reading, with tasting notes of the Chardonnay wines.
I met Berliner in Bordeaux in 2018, and again a year later when he returned to the area to look into selling his wine through the Place de Bordeaux, something that happened for the first time in September 2020 with the 2017 vintage.
I tasted the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon a few months ago, giving it 97 points and finding it packed with savoury herbs and creamy blueberries. You can find the full note below.
For this tasting I got the opportunity to go further back, to the 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon, which was just the second vintage, when the vines were around seven years old.
They confirm what an unusually nuanced and complex wine this is, where everything is worked by hand, ‘slow and patient’ as Berliner says, guided by a winemaker who is unusually willing to admit what he doesn’t know, and instead chooses to uphold the spirit of exploration.
See Jane Anson’s Cloudburst Cabernet Sauvignon tasting notes and scores
You may also like
