I was early for my appointment with Dominique, so I started with a spot of lunch in the cellar door, the building is like a little slice of France, reminding me of the farmhouses I used to stay in on family holidays years ago. The food too, was a simple, tasty French salad, just what I was looking for after being so well fed with barbecue the night before. 

This winery is by no means Dominique’s first involvement in wine – he and his brother Bernard learned their trade growing up at Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, one of only five Premier Cru Chateau in the 1855 classifications in Bordeaux. Dominique went on to work for a few years at Bernard’s winery ‘Clos du Val’ in the Napa Valley, California. Moving to Australia in 1976, he became the managing director of Taltarni Vineyards, a position he held for 22 years, among other things developing one of my favourite Australian fizz producers ‘Clover Hill’ in Tasmania. After splitting from Taltarni in 1998 he took a couple of years out in Provence before launching this Yarra Valley winery under his own name (I learned most of this from talking to Tom, a friend at Kemenys where I worked over Christmas in Sydney, who is a friend of Dominique’s son Ben – small world eh!) 

 

Dominique was around the back in the winery, where at the back I spotted a ‘gyro-palette’ a machine used for riddling the sediment in bottle fermented sparkling wine towards the neck of the bottle so that it can be frozen and removed by disgorging, this is part of the ‘Traditional method’ for making sparkling wine (I won’t describe the whole process here, but a friend recently wrote a good overview)

 

The wine that was sitting waiting to be disgorged in the cellar was the Dominique Portet Brut Rosé, I got to try the newly released 2005 which had a delicately perfumed nose and delightfully refreshing dry palate, very much a Champenoise style with nice lively mouthfeel.

 

The only one of Dominique’s wines available from Kemenys was the ‘Fontaine’ Rosé 2007 and it was one of my regular recommendations to customers… Light in colour and more delicate dry style than many Australian rosés – perhaps reflecting Dominique’s time in Provence, although made of Cabernet Merlot and Shiraz, it’s not quite a copycat Provence style. The nose is light and fresh with cranberry fruit, with more delicate cranberry and redcurrant flavours on the palate, dry and restrained leaving a lingering savoury cranberry finish.