The glass that made me believe in vintage

I am becoming a permanently Grumpy Old Woman (GOW). 

As evidence, here is one of my latest, and I have to say most pathetic given the world’s problems, complaints: Why don’t café/restaurant wine lists have the year next to individual items? 

As a GOW, I am heartlessly unconcerned about the time and energy required of a service person to get me the vintage of the wine offered by the glass. Yes, I have taken to incessantly asking for the vintage if it is not noted. 

I learnt the importance of the vintage when I drank a glass of Morgan and Gill’s 2017 Verdelho, far, far away in Brisbane, a long, long time ago in 2018. Because I so loved that Morgan and Gill Verdelho, I ordered more online, but only the 2018 was available. It was not as good. Something had happened in those two successive vintage years.

Years matter. For wine, one 12 months could be full of smoke from fires, another lacking rain, another abundant in disease. Remember Queen Elizabeth’s anus horribilis? 

Verdelho is not grown anywhere in Tasmania. Yet surely Verdelho can withstand a cool or cold climate, as it grows in the Granite Belt in Queensland in high altitude that gets winters so cold there are regular frosts. 

It’s almost impossible to get an interstate Verdelho in a Tasmanian bottle shop. And of the many aphorisms that I have voiced in a protest march or worn on a t-shirt or badge, such as ‘Don’t grow nuclear plants’, I could add ‘Grow Verdelho!’

Enough of Verdelho. Let’s move back to GOW. (BTW: if you want to know about ageing Australian women, read Helen Garner’s essay ‘The Insults of Age’ in Everywhere I Look.)

I was in Launceston recently in GOW mode and happened to try a ‘pink wine’ in a wine bar. I had to ask what that was. It was a Rosé. And an Utzinger wine, a company I had never heard of, despite the fact that I am now into my three-and-a half-years’ residency in Tasmania. Utzinger is in Legana, just outside of Launceston, so it’s a Tamar Valley vineyard and within the North/Launceston region. 

The Utzinger Rosé, probably the 2024 vintage, hardly had any aroma. But like many wines, its flavour deepened as it warmed; then it became juicy and a little sweet. In colour, it was a copper pink. 

So after drinking, I went up to the young woman behind the bar, who asked what I thought of the Rosé, since I was clearly holding the glass up to the light, smelling it and writing notes after I sipped. I commenced speaking to her as if she was a wine ingénue when she was clearly, in further conversation, a budding if not certified sommelier. I noted that Utzinger also produces a Fumé Blanc, to which she then replied ‘Yes, I love a Fumé Blanc.’ Who wouldn’t, given that mellifluous nomenclature! 

Utzinger Is a finalist in the 2025 Young Gun of Wine awards. And they plan on introducing alternative varieties. 

And the Rosé? I said that Small Wonder Wines, also in the northern region of Tasmania, made a very good one which I had tasted when the vineyard was known as Goaty Hill.  

And my GOW status? I am certified.