I bought today’s wine by mistake. I really wanted the ordinary one but the merchant accidentally sent me the fancy version. Normally this would be cause for celebration but not in the case of Tahbilk Marsanne.
Tahbilk, located about 80 miles north of Melbourne, is one of the historic wineries of Australia and has some of the oldest vines in the world, shiraz planted in the 1860s and marsanne in the 1920s. The state of Victoria had a brief flowering as table wine region in the 19th century. In 1899 a wine from Château Tahbilk, as it was called then, won a Diploma of Honour at the Greater London Exhbition. This nascent industry was wiped out by phylloxera, changing tastes, and the might of the South Australian industry which had unfettered access to the Victorian market on Federation in 1901. Château Tahbilk survived, but only just, the Purbrick family who bought the property in 1925 and still own it to this day were reduced to selling their wine out of the back of a truck for 2 cents a litre.
Things improved after World War Two as Australia slowly became a nation of wine drinkers. Château Tahbilk was noted for its ‘chablis’, a dry table wine that was made largely from marsanne, a variety native to the Rhone valley, plus some other varieties. This was made in a peculiarly Australian style not dissimilar to Hunter Valley semillon (which was called Hunter River riesling* at the time) in New South Wales. The grapes were picked early in case of bad weather, vinified in a fairly rudimentary manner usually with lots of oxygen contact and then bottled. Young these wines would have been acidic and one-dimensional but as they aged in bottle, customers noted how they developed all kinds of exotic flavours like honeysuckle, lemon curd and croissant.
In the 1970s Tahbilk swapped ‘chablis’ on the label for ‘marsanne’ and eventually in 2000 dropped the word ‘chateau’, losing the last of its European pretentiouns. It isn’t, however, 100% marsanne, containing small amounts of riesling, chardonnay, roussanne, sauvignon and verdelho. For some reason despite the quality of the wines, they’ve never become fashionable. In fact they remain ridiculously affordable.
You can buy a young Tahbilk Marsanne for £14, it’s not as austere as in the past but I’d recommend buying the Museum Release (2016 available here) where the winery does all the work for you - these only cost a couple of quid more. This is what I intended to buy in 2020 to drink at Christmas. But instead they sent me the 1927 Vines wines, the posh version. It’s made from vines planted in the 1920s, as you can probably guess from the name, and made in the old style, underripe grapes and the juice is allowed to brown with oxygen contact before fermentation (in contrast the everyday wines today are made from younger vines, the grapes are picked riper and handled in a more conventional way). These wines age very very slowly. I opened the 2012 in 2020 and it tasted like it was bottled the week before. I’ve had a bottle every year since and this year I could detect a faint nuttiness to it but really it needs at least another 10 years.
So that’s Château Tahbilk, sorry just Tahbilk: unique and underpriced. If you have the patience, and I mean if you can wait 20 years, buy the 1927 Vines. If not buy the the Musuem Release and revel in the heady exotic flavours of a true Australian original.
*’Claret’ was made from shiraz, ‘port’ from grenache and ‘tokay’ from muscat.