Issue No. 4 - Spring 2005
Welcome to the 4th issue of the Willy Wag - the official Willy Bay Wine Newsletter
We have been very busy since our Autumn issue that we missed sending out a winter issue. So for spring, we have lots of exciting news, some new releases as well as some great wine offers to help you cast off those winter blues and get into the mood for spring.
The Willy Wag Newsletter is available online at our website www.willybay.com.au/latest news.htm.
______________________________________________ In This Issue
We participated for the first time at the WA Fine Wine & Food Festival over the 4-6 June long weekend and what a great response we received to our wines, particularly the Last Fling and Pink Fling.
We also just recently participated in the inaugural Old Bridge Cellars New Producer Wine Expo and, again, Last Fling was a hit and will now be a regular on the shelves!
Our winemaker, Peter had a very busy, and long, 2005 vintage but he still managed to take time to share his experiences...
Time to get into the garden and time to stock up on Willy Bay wine...
Some first timers and your old favourites...
Due to popular demand we are making the Pink Fling Punch recipe available again online. To get to the Pink Fling Punch click here.
See this section to view our current list of retail and restaurant stockists.
Be a Willy Bay Wine Club member and receive our quarterly newsletter, special mailings, priority allocation, 15% off the regular mail order price, free freight and more...
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Latest News
The boys and girls at Willy Bay manned a stand at the WA Wine and Food Festival. This was the biggest wine show we have attended and we were delighted with the reception our wines received from the general public. Over the three days of the show, we conducted over 2,000 tastings of Pink Fling Rosé, Fine Leg Chardonnay, Middle Stump Shiraz and Last Fling Dessert Wine. At one stage on the Sunday (over 8,000 visitors to the festival that day) our little Willy Bay Stand was fighting off a thirsty crowd over 6 deep. The brave Willy’s kept pouring (we were passing fresh bottles to the front as fast as we could break open the boxes) and eventually the crowd died away (with smiles on their faces).
All of our wines were well received, with excellent sales, but by far the stand out success of the show was Last Fling. You will recall (being a Willy Bay aficionado) that Last Fling is a cane-cut cabernet sauvignon. What – you may ask – is a cane cut cab sav? Well, I’m glad you asked. At the time we normally harvest the cab sav grapes, instead of picking the bunches, we cut the canes of the vines, but leave them in the trellis. Over the next few weeks, the grapes dry out in the sun and then we pick these sticky raisined bunches and press out the concentrated sweetness to make Last Fling Dessert Wine. Now, there are other ways that Vignerons dry out their grapes to make a sweet wine, the main one in Australia being to spray the vines with a fungus called Botrytis. This organism literally rots the grapes on the vine (also known as noble rot) and during this process it drinks the water from the grapes and concentrates the sugars. A Botrytis dessert wine is quite tasty, but I have found that although it goes very well with cheese at the end of a meal, it doesn’t really go that well with desserts. Enter Last Fling.
Last Fling is the only cane cut cabernet in Australia (as far as we know) and it goes very well with sweet desserts and especially well with chocolate. So, to prove this at the festival, a clever little Willy decided to put a big bowl of Maltesers next to the Last Fling. Question: What happens with you tell a young lady that a particular wine goes well with chocolate? Answer: She guzzles the wine and chomps on the chocolate and then buys the wine. (Note to self: Never get between a girl and chocolate…)
So, the Last Fling walked out the door and from now on whenever you see Willy Bay at a wine show, you can rest assured that there will be a bowl of Maltesers close by.
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Winemaker's Blurb
This is the time you will find your favourite wine columnist commenting on the quality and quantity of the aforementioned grapepicken season. Like all such columns they are fantastic examples of the sweeping statement, the rash generalisation and the regurgitated hyperbole of large wine company marketers.
Cynical? Me? Very likely, but year after year I see reviews of the vintage we in the trenches have just experienced generalised, hyperbolised, chastised, fantasised and generally spoken of as if the writer in question had followed the weather charts religiously and trodden the rows of numerous vineyards.
In Australia there is no question that our west heading east weather patterns through a lot of the grape growing regions gives us some recurring patterns broadly through the southern regions. This is hardly the whole picture though. So when us winemaker types read that we can expect the 05 reds to be dilute and of lesser quality than the 04’s and 02’s (or whatever) forgive us when we go huh?
Every delineated region has it’s subregions and every subregion has it’s special pockets of dirt and mesoclimate. So in this challenging year, where it rained in places, in volumes and at times we haven’t experienced in my working lifetime it would be nice to see some honesty, some specific realities and some intelligent comment not driven by the ethos of keeping the shareholders happy or by the “talking it up” style winery press releases that get relayed to the public.
The truth is it pissed down on a number of occasions and we also had an unprecedented cold snap in mid to late vintage. These conditions are rare in the Margaret River, Geographe and regions further north. Our colleagues in other states are much more accustomed to it. Many thought it was a wine quality disaster. So by the the end of the harvest I had seen vineyards, grapes and wines that defied my expectations both good and bad. A couple of my favourite pockets of gravely Geographe loam were picked as usual pre rain and a particularly good southern vineyard achieved sugar and flavour ripeness a good 2 to 3 weeks before it’s neighbours and a mere day before the first big downpour. The result is great wine from a great year. I then saw the ravages of rapidly spreading botrytis, penicillium mould, black rot and every other moisture related ailment known to man. And to add insult to injury, the back to back rain storms washed away the abundant redgum blossom and turned a relatively bird problem free year into a silver eye frenzy. For those of us who sat and watched it all hoping for the traditional lengthy indian summer to take hold it was a shock.
It took 2 to 3 weeks for some red grapes to regain their pre-rain sugar levels. And in doing so ran the gauntlet of all of the above.
And how were the wines at the end of all that? Well I thought surprisingly good.
The quality whites were generally unaffected and some rained on reds turned out to be as good as or better than other dry years. The reasons for this are related to the complexities of careful irrigation, the astute managers response to a wet season, the individual vineyards’ ability to drain water away rapidly and the timing of the grape harvest.
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Special Spring Offer
20% discount as well as a further 15% Club discount for members!
For the rest of Spring, if you order a case of Middle Stump Shiraz, or Fine Leg Chardonnay, Last Fling or French Cut Semillon Sauvignon Blanc, you will receive a 20% discount on any additional cases of wine you order in the same delivery. And to our club members, you still get your 15% discount off the whole lot!
To Order
To obtain a Mail Order Form click the Print Order Form button below.
Orders may be mailed to Willy Bay at 19 Third Avenue, Mt Lawley WA 6050 or Fax to 08 92717771 or phone your orders to June on 0417 965 686.
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New Releases in 2005
Hot off the press! Pink Fling 2005 has been released for spring and what a corker it is! Luscious berry flavours with hints of muscatel and a surprising crisp finish. Our first Chardonnay, called Fine Leg, was released in March and has been marching out the door ever since. And, also hot off the press, and a Willy Bay first, we have released our first Semillon Sauvignon Blanc called French Cut and it is 100% Margaret River fruit. (The next time you serve it to your friends, ask them to work out how many references to the French Revolution are on the back label...)
So our 2005 line up is:
2005 Pink Fling Cabernet Sauvignon Rose (some back vintage available)
2005 French Cut Semillon Sauvignon Blanc
2004 Fine Leg Chardonnay
2003 Middle Stump Shiraz
2003 Last Fling Cane Cut Cabernet Sauvignon
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Back by Popular Demand
We printed a recipe for a Pink Fling Punch recipe in our summer issue which proved to be very popular. By request it is being made available again via a link from this newsletter. To access the recipe to print it out just click here.
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Stockists
Retail Outlets
Old Bridge Cellars, 221 Queen Victoria Street, North Fremantle
The Wine Store, 48 George Street, Fremantle
The Re Store, 231 Oxford Street, Leederville
Hale Road Tavern, 64 Hale Road, Forrestfield
Liquor Barons, 12 Ashton Avenue, Claremont
Restaurants
Duende Restaurant, 662 Newcastle Street, Leederville
Verve Restaurant, Woodside Plaza, 7/240 St George's Terrace, Perth
Refer to our website www.willybay.com.au for an up to date list of Stockists
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Become a Member of the Willy Bay Wine Club
Getting into the club is easy. Once you have purchased three cases of any Willy Bay wine within a 12 month period, you are in the club! When you are in the club you get:
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15% off the normal mail order price of any Willy Bay wine (when ordering by the case)
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Free freight anywhere in Australia (when ordering by the case)
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Automatic inclusion into all our special offers
All cases purchased from July 2004 qualify for club membership.
For all other terms and conditions of vouchers, club membership, our privacy policy and other boring bits, please see the Policy section on our website at www.willybay.com.au (you'll find this information at the bottom of the "How to Buy" page).
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