Apera’s star rises in the Riverland

December, 2011

With Spanish cuisine surging in popularity, the sea-spray flavours of chilled apera are a perfect match with dishes such as grilled sardines, olives and salsa. Charles Gent reports on our winning wine for 2011/12.

Shakespeare called it Spanish sack, but for the last few centuries we’ve called it sherry, in deference to inept English attempts at pronouncing the name of its hometown of Jerez. Recently, to honour cultural copyright pacts made with the European Union, Australians have agreed to refer to locally made dry sherry as apera.

Will anyone care? Even with the fleeting fad for sherry parties in the 1950s and 1960s, dry sherry has always occupied a tiny, if elegant, niche in Australia’s market for wine.

So when Berri-based 919 Wines won the recent Adelaide Review Hot 100 Wines taste-off with a pale, delicate wine made in the rarified fino style, I was frankly surprised. It turns out that the people who made it were too.

The proprietors and vignerons of 919 Wines, Eric and Jenny Semmler, are both winemakers, and both cut their teeth making fortified wines. While they also make several styles of red and white table wines, it is their crop of palamino, grown from cuttings snatched from a bulldozed vineyard, which inspires them most.

Palamino, along with the other classic sherry cultivar pedro ximinez, was once legion in the Riverland; it is now virtually extinct. It isn’t just the vagaries of fashion that have pushed sherry to the margins; it is the time and effort its creation demands.

Proper sherry-making is an elaborate process – the wine is matured in partially filled barrels under a layer of specialised mould, the flor, disconcertingly reminiscent in appearance to a wooly blanket. The wine is aged in a serried rank of barrels, known as the solera. Wine from each new vintage is added to the top layer as the mature wine is drawn off from the oldest level at the bottom for yet further barrel maturation. Soleras can hold up to seven vintages.

You can almost hear the accountants gibbering.

The expense has seen fortified wine production pensioned off by most major wine companies. For the Semmlers, however, love trumps reason.

“For us it drags down the balance sheet too, but it’s like a wonderland to play in,” Jenny Semmler says.

“They are wonderful wine styles which we couldn’t bear to see disappear off the Australian wine scene.”

She draws inspiration from the wineries of Rutherglen in Victoria, which have made a virtue of a fortified winemaking heritage that extends back to the 19th century.

“Rutherglen has invested a lot of time and effort over the last decade in highlighting how complex, how rich and how wonderful the fortified styles can be,” she said.

919 produces a muscat as well as a fortified wine in the port style, which uses three authentic Portuguese grapes – tourage nacional, tinta cao and tinta roris, with a dash of shiraz and durif – and they are just about to add a fourth to the mix.

The Semmlers are part of a long tradition that can be traced back at least to Peter Lehmann: winemakers whose yearning to recapture the soul that comes from small-scale winemaking drove them to escape the dictates of big company employment. While the Riverland may still harbour a reputation for bladder-pack production from broadacre vineyards, 919 Wines has turned that approach on its head, using minimal drip irrigation and banishing chemicals from the vineyard. The winery’s name is a sly reference to their very specific sense, and pride, of place – 919 is the section number of their land title.

“It’s always been our belief that the Riverland can produce as good a quality as any other region in Australia­ – you’ve just got to do it right,” Jenny said.

To the Semmlers, fino sherry’s change of name to apera presents an opportunity for the style to shake off the stigma that fortifieds acquired when they were made to please a market segment more interested in price than quality. With Spanish cuisine surging in popularity, Jenny is hoping that Australians will take a shine to the sea-spray flavours of chilled apera as a sundowner, and team it with the tapas dishes, such as grilled sardines, olives and salsa, which are its natural partners.

The win in the Hot 100, she said, came as a very pleasant surprise.

“Because some of the big companies have pulled out for economic reasons, it has left that segment open to smaller, passionate players. For us, it’s that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when all the stars are aligned.”