These Para Vintage Tawnies are really, really rare wines because they have lasted 100 years and they still exist after another century. You know, you can buy bottles of Claret or Burgundy that might be 100 years old, but you don't ever quite know how they're going to be. Now, some of those are lasting and they can be magnificent, but one of the things about fortified wine, and particularly about this particular style of wine, is they're being aged in such a way that they still have the freshness and… and the complexity and the flavours and all that kind of stuff that are just so compelling and interesting.
You are listening to Andrew Caillard and this podcast is about the Seppeltsfield 1920 Para Vintage Tawny.
The 1920s Seppeltsfield 100-year-old Para Vintage Tawny is one of the enduring traditions of the Australian wine industry. It was first inaugurated in 1878 when Benno Seppelt, one of the great 19th century visionaries of the South Australian wine industry, decided that he would put down a barrel every year, that would not be bottled for 100 years. One of the things that's so extraordinary about this wine is the fact that it has survived that vision, because Seppeltsfield has had a number of owners since that family, and that whole idea could have crashed. But I think that everybody who has ever been involved in this project sees a real value in creating or keeping alive such an extraordinary vision. And so these Para Vintage Tawnies represent some of the rarest contiguous bottlings of wine in the world.
There are a number of other wineries in the world that have got wines that go back even into the 18th century, but there are very, very few wineries that actually have contiguous vintages, i.e., every single vintage ever made from the very beginning. And Seppeltsfield is one of those rare wineries.
These 100-year-old Tawnies are based on Mataro, Shiraz, and Grenache, traditional varieties that are being grown in the Barossa Valley for a very, very long time. And after fermentation, the wines are fortified and then they are barrelled up. And when they're very young they're very callow and quite light, and it takes 100 years for them to concentrate and during this time the wine would evaporate - the angels’ share is the evaporation of alcohol and water that takes place over a very long, long period of time. So, the angels that kind of hang around these cellars must be extremely fat, because they've enjoyed probably more than their angels’ share over the years.
And so by, after 100 years, it's almost like treacle. And there's a particular character about the wine that develops which… it’s a kind of magical thing that happens with maturation and where, and you can only get it in wines the very, very old, this kind of beautiful character which is called, rancio.
You know, rancio is almost like a sensory patina. If you can think of how brass goes green over a period of time, you know, where there's this loveliness that happens through age and an exposure to air and to the elements. And it's something you just don't get, certainly in table wines, you don't get it. It's only something you can get and beautifully aged, particularly vintage Tawny particular styles. And then you also get these other characters, these leathery note, spices and raisins and prunes and dark chocolate. And some people describe these old wines a bit like liquid Christmas pudding.
I think one of the things that makes these things really remarkable is that, when you taste the wine, you kind of know that the wines were picked by people in 1920, and then barrelled up by people in 1920, and so you can't help think about what was happening. And also, you know, what the ambition was in those days and how this wine has kind of traveled itself over a period of time.
So, one can't help thinking about what people were doing in 1920. And one has to remember that Australia had a very, very difficult war, as in the First World War, which had finished in 1918. And some of the… some of the impact of the Treaty of Versailles, which really, rather than ending the War of All Wars, actually created antebellum and a period of peace, but not long lasting peace for all the reasons that many people know.
So, you know, in some respects, you can say, “Well, there was a normality of life,” but it was a normality of life in the sense that… that it was a… it was peace, but it was also a depression. It wasn't… it wasn't so much a financial depression, but it was certainly a depression, the hangover from a terrible, terrible war. But nonetheless, there were quite a lot of things happening. And 100 years ago, of course, is a hell of a long time ago. It really was more or less around the time that the Soviet Union began, although it officially began in 1922 and ended in 1991, that experiment. So, you know, compared to some kind of political aspirations and such stuff, you know, this wine has outlasted, you know, all sorts of different tyrannies and hopefully, it will outlast any other tyrannies that happen as they come along.
There was the League of Nations was created, which was really a kind of precursor to the United Nations, and would continue to be what that was until the foundation of the United Nations in the 1940s.
There were a number of immigrants starting to come into Australia to build their lives. There was quite a lot of infrastructure that was starting to be built, the Princess Highway which linked Sydney to Adelaide via the coast through the States of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. You know, in the sky for instance, there was more aviation happening with the first successful flight from Melbourne to Perth was completed. And there was really kind of some great ambition about connecting Australia to the rest of the world.
But perhaps one of the most important things that happened in 1920 in Australia was the creation of the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited, which became known as Q a n t a s. And of course, Australians being Australians call it Qantas. And it was a business that was registered in Winton in the outback of Queensland, and was created by 2 entrepreneurial aviators, Hudson Fysh and Paul McGuinness, who had come up with the idea of creating this business in 1919, when they drove 2247 kilometres from Longreach in Queensland, to Darwin in the Northern Territory, as part of the great air race to connect the UK and Australia.
But I think what's really quite interesting about the success of Qantas and kind of framing it with Seppeltsfield in that they're both kind of enduring Australian marks is that they both kind of draw on the aspirations of people who really believed and loved their country so much. You know, we all hear about things like determination, vision, innovation, you know, and then all these clichés like the willingness to go further, you know, all those kind of stuff. But I think in the end, great countries have people who look at things beyond them. And it's not about them, it's about us. It's about creating something that is meaningful and will take communities to another level - provide jobs, provide futures for other people.
We need to remember that Australia always thinks of itself as a really young country compared to everywhere else, and to some degree it is. But all those ambitions of our 19th Century forefathers and early 20th Century forefathers were incredibly visionary and the things that they did were well in advance of what was happening in Europe or the US. And I think that is what makes Australia such a remarkable country to have so many stories to show how much Australians punch above their weight in the world.
For more information on the Seppeltsfield 1920 100 Year Old Para Vintage Tawny and other vintages from the Centennial Collection, visit seppeltsfield.com.au
