Lovers of all things Italian are invited to a unique wine event dubbed Sip Your Modo: Australian Flavours, Italian Style where Australian winemakers will pour some of their best expressions of Italy’s food-friendly and enchanting wine styles. The event will be held in Sydney, at the Global Gallery in Paddington on Sunday 22nd April (2-5pm). It’s part of the three week A+ Australian Wine Celebration and will be hosted by online drinks publication Sip Your Style.
It will be a relaxed and intimate affair with wines from only eight of Australia’s Italian wine producers. These include: Brown Brothers, Crittenden Estate, Dal Zotto, De Bortoli, Di Lusso Estate, Oliver’s Taranga, Pizzini and Tintilla Estate. Varitals include Sagrantino, Vermentino, Prosecco, Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, Moscato, Arneis and Pinot Grigio.
Tickets are $30 and include entry, wine samples and food samples. For more information see http://sipyourstyle.com.au/?p=2834
The Ventana Fiesta is to be held from January – March 2012 at the Frankston Arts Centre.
Crittenden Estate is a Proud supporter of Ventana Fiesta 2012
Ventana is an accessible community event, suitable for the whole family. Promising a vibrant display of Latin American, Portuguese and Spanish cultures with must do activities stretching over part of February and March, this is a celebration not to be missed! Download the full program
The 2010 Zumma Pinot Noir has finally been released. After exemplary accolades and reviews our ’09 sold out last September and many of its fans have been waiting ever since. Rollo, however, wouldn’t be hurried. He believes that those who have been patient will be rewarded….the 2010 Zumma Pinot Noir is said to be, in fact, the vintage of the decade! Our Single Vineyard Zumma Pinot Noir is from vines planted in 1987. Biological viticultural practices and multi clonal vineyard plantings provide the foundation, whilst exemplary conditions that occured on the Peninsula in 2010 combined with traditional Burgundian winemaking practices have produced a truly great wine. Available at $49.50 per bottle online or at our cellar door now. Click here to read more or purchase.
The Zumma 2010 Pinot Noir has been “pre-released” and is now available at the cellar door. As of December 15th you are able to purchase this long anticipated wine but ONLY at the cellar door. The Zumma 2009 Pinot Noir was a huge success and sold out well ahead of time. Please not that the wine is not yet available on line. For Cellar Door details please click here.
Rollo and Linda recently took one year old Oscar for a trip to Spain and France. Visiting wineries, eating tapas and enjoying the local wine (not Oscar) was all part of it but of course there was an element of business to do in the UK on the way home. That is, if you could call participating in “round table” wine tastings in what was once a monastery work. To read a third party account of this, written by Stuart George of Langton’s, click here.
Click on the link to see a video interview with Garry and Rollo, conducted by a wine commentator from the UK. The video was for use primarily in the UK wine market. http://youtu.be/mFmA3cl1g50
by Garry Crittenden
In September 1982, along with a small group of friends, I planted four acres of Cabernet Sauvignon at our newly prepared block at Harrisons Rd in Dromana. Rollo who was six years old and Zoe who was eight helped. We also planted half an acre of Merlot and a quarter acre each of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. As far as could be ascertained, we doubled the then aggregate plantings of vines on the Mornington Peninsula from 5 to 10 acres on this one weekend. Today there are in excess of 2500 acres (1000 hectares).
My earlier cimatic survey of the region using Dick Smart’s methodology and based on long term weather data from the nearby Mornington Post Office was clearly biased towards cabernet. And anyway, what was this interloper called Pinot Noir? The years went by, our vines thrived and the wines achieved success, but in 2007 when Rollo came back to the family farm he began to question my sense of allegiance to this out of fashion variety.
I once met Elio Altare in Piedmont who told me the following remarkable story of how he asserted his authority in the family business. According to Elio he waited for his father to go away on a holiday and while he was absent took a chain saw to all the big volume Botte in the cellar, replacing them with small French oak. Elio was a modernist and his father a traditionalist. He says his father didn’t speak to him for years. (personally, I’ve always taken this story to be rather apocryphal) It would be wryly amusing to tell you that when I was away onetime Rollo took a chainsaw to our entire four acres of Cabernet and greeted me on my return with a defiant grin. The truth is far more prosaic; we sat down and discussed the issue and I meekly agreed to a grafting program with the most up to date clones of Pinot Noir.
Which brings us to October 2011. The change over took place in the winter of 2009 after what turned out to be the final vintage of Cabernet from our family vineyard. This marks, for us at least after 26 consecutive vintages, the end of an era, and for all I know the end of an era for the Peninsula. The wine of course was made by Rollo. Read the tasting notes or buy some Les Adieux here.
Stillwater, our on site restaurant, has a new website. Well worth checking out!
http://www.stillwateratcrittenden.com.au/
We are pleased to announce that The Zumma Pinot Noir 2009 performed rather credibly in the Five Nations Wine Challenge. You will recall that I posted news of our being selected by Huon Hooke in July for this presitigous competition where seven wines are selected for each category from five different countries. The results were announced on 9th September and The Zumma received a gold medal. Australia on the whole performed very well and particular congratulations go to our neighbour, Paringa Estate, for winning a Trophy for their 2009 Estate Pinot Noir.
To say we were pretty pleased with the reviews we got in Halliday’s 2012 edition of the Wine Companion would be an understatement. Both of the Zumma wines scored 95 points and the 2009 Crittenden Chardonnay 94. A further five of our wines were reviewed with scores between 88 and 90. Crittenden Estate was rated a 5 star winery and most exciting, named as one of 10 dark horses for 2012. We’ve collated our results onto an easy-to-read document that you can view here. I’ve also included information on what being a dark horse means!
