Small Triumphs

Article by Huon Hooke in Good Drinking

The winery may be boutique, but its wines are big, bold and beautiful.

Moss Wood is one of our icon wineries, no doubt about it. Having remained a family owned, independent, boutique winery, it has however moved ahead in many subtle ways.

First in the number of wines it produces when Bill and Sandra Pannell sold Moss Wood to Keith and Clare Mugford in 1984, the 19 hectare property at Wilyabrup produced just four wines, cabernet sauvignon, semillon, chardonnay and pinot noir. Now it has 10 wines – seven from vineyards the Mugfords own, the rest from other people’s vineyards.

Second, all the wines are good to excellent in quality, with a serendipitous variety of styles.

There are for instance, two chardonnay’s, the Moss Wood estate and the Lefroy Brook Vineyard, each with a distinct personality. The Moss Wood estate ($55) is full bodied, rich and complex. Key flavours are nuts, smoke, butter, vanilla and peach. Lefroy Brook ($35), from the Pemberton region, south of Margaret River, a substantially cooler location – makes a distinctive cool climate style. It is more fruit-driven and evokes flavours of grapefruit, lime, herbs and subtle hints of the nutty, butter characters of oak and malolactic fermentation.

In the 2003 vintage, released in 2004, both are fascinating but there’s no doubt the estate wine is the grandest. Let it breathe for a few hours, let the temperature rise a bit, and you’ll find a wonderfully complex, decadent wine. I have often found this wine too oaky at first taste, which usually means straight out of someone’s fridge. That’s too cold for most chardonnays and one such as this, matured in 100 per cent new oak, will be more disadvantaged than most. Give it time, or give it air and don’t over chill, and it’s a ripper.

A similar contrast is found with the three cabernet based red and it’s cabernet on which Moss Wood’s fame primarily rests. The last release estate cabernet, the 2001 ($88 cellar door more than $100 retail) is likely to go down as one of the winery’s best. It’s rich, bold, concentrated wine, not overripe but flirting with the spectrum of flavours and certainly 14.5 per cent alcohol suggests it’s no wallflower. Keith Mugford recently told a group of tasters at Vintage Cellars Double Bay that “2001 was a great year for cabernet. I can’t recall ever having a better wine in the cellar than this”.

That’s no sales pitch because unhappily if you haven’t got any, the wine long ago sold out. (The good news is that the 2002, while a very different wine from a touch cooler year – refined elegant and more classic – is to be released on July 1). The Moss Wood estate cabernet style is fleshy, concentrated but smooth with supple, fully ripe tannins. Key flavours are cassis, coffee bean and tobacco, sending cigar boxy with a little age. It seldom has any of the herbaceous characters common to the region. Ask why and Keith humbly replies that the vines are unirragated and the soils are such that the vines are sustained, even through the region’s typically dry summers. Yields are low, averaging 8.5 tonnes per hectare. It’s the site. In other words terroir.

In contrast the Amy’s Vineyard Cabernet, which is grown on production manager Ian Bell’s family vineyard, Glenmore at Yallingup, the northern end of Margaret River has a more herbaceous style and can be a trifle green some years.

Grand Plans

In the 1990s, Keith and Clare Mugford decided Moss Wood had to expand to cater for its growing (and increasingly frustrated) customer list. The chance was to buy land and plant another vineyard, or buy an existing one; they bought John James’s Ribbon Vale Vineyard in Wilyabrup in 2000. The same unirrigated, hand-pruned, hand picked approach applies; the grape varieties comoplement Moss Wood’s with sauvignon blanc, merlot and a different clone of cabernet sauvignon. Since 2000 the wines have appeared under the Moss Wood label.