DRINKS

Cast your mind back to 1984: the Summer Olympics were buzzing in Los Angeles, the artist Prince released his hit album Purple Rain, and Australia introduced the one-dollar coin. But perhaps one of the most significant moments, quietly unfolding in Japan, was the beginning of the ageing process for Hibiki 40 Year Old, now the oldest blended whisky in the history of The House of Suntory.

The renowned pioneer of Japanese whisky, celebrated for its House of Master Blenders and the Art of Blending, is showcasing its finest work with the new release. With only 400 bottles available, this ultra-luxurious whisky features an extraordinary blend of five key types of whisky — Yamazaki, Hakushu Malt, and Chita Grain — sourced from Suntory’s acclaimed distilleries. Each whisky has matured for over 40 years, meticulously combined to create a symphony of flavours and aromas. On the nose, you’ll experience notes of Japanese loquat, dry lemon peel, and clove. The palate reveals rich flavours of pure acacia honey and dry fig, culminating in a beautifully aromatic finish.

Behind this blend is Suntory’s chief blender, Shinji Fukuyo, who notes that the elegance of Hibiki is complemented by a sense of comfort, like that of an old temple, and a wasabi patina because of the long ageing process.

“I would like people to enjoy the pure aroma that has been sharpened over the years … and the nostalgic warm feeling that accompanies them.”

Hibiki 40 Year Old is a culmination of decades of blending expertise, passed down from one master blender to the next. This whisky embodies generations of craftsmanship, and to further add to this testament, the brand has enlisted renowned Japanese washi artist, Eriko Horiki — behind large-scale installations include a stunning three-metre washi piece at the Tokyo Geriatric Hospital and a geometric ceiling at Kyoto Station – to hand craft the washi label on the box. Crafted from kozo (paper mulberry) and mitsumata fieers, the label reflects Horiki’s deep connection to the brand; he also designed the label for Hibiki back in 1989.

The box is made from 12 different types of Japanese wood like pine and zelkova, features 12 faces, symbolising the 12 months of the year. Inside, the crystal glass bottle is a work of art in itself, boasting 30 intricately crafted facets and adorned with traditional makie, mother of pearl inlay, and gold lacquer, paying homage to Japan’s rich heritage.

This exquisite whisky not only honours the legacy of The House of Suntory but also commemorates its recent milestone, as last year it celebrated 100 years of pioneering Japanese spirits.

Hibiki 40 Year Old will be released on October 4 and cost $75,000AUD per bottle, limited to 400 bottles. house.suntory.com

More expert Food and Drinks reporting from T Australia:

• The Art of Whisky: Suntory Unveils Centennial Edition Gift Carton
• The House of Suntory Toasts to a Century of Spirit
• For Its 100th Anniversary, The House of Suntory is Throwing Not One, But Five, Birthday Parties Down Under

Discover more Food & Drink stories from T Australia:

• • Lana’s Ricotta Gnudi with Shiitake Mushrooms will Warm You
  • A Martini Recipe for Aspiring Martini Drinkers
  • Two Pink Cocktails Walked Into a Bar

In a cavernous old warehouse, cool despite the midday sun, hulking wine casks stand in low piles, filmed with dust and seeming to hail from another place and time. This building and others nearby hold the longest-running uninterrupted collection of wine vintages still in cask anywhere in the world. And it’s not in France. Or anywhere in Europe, for that matter. It’s in Australia. 

Seppeltsfield winery in the Barossa has casks full of port-style fortified wine from every vintage dating back to 1878. The estate remains the only winery in the world to release a 100-year-old single-vintage wine every year. While Australian fortifieds, traditionally called sherry and port, have suffered a dramatic decline in popularity over the past 45 years or so, they are complex and intriguing wines that are still an important part of our drinking culture and continue to have outsize influence on everything from mixology to new-wave winemaking and whisky production. (Officially, there is no Australian sherry or port due to international trade regulations instated in 2009, which protect “sherry” as a distinctly Spanish wine and “port” as Portuguese. As such, Australian sherry-style fortified wine is technically “apera” and local port is referred to as “tawny”.)

Talia Baiocchi, the editor-in-chief of the American drinks magazine Punch and the author of “Sherry: A Modern Guide to the Wine World’s Best Kept Secret” (2014), says interest in fortifieds is on the rise, largely driven by the cocktail revival. “Sherry began to boom [in America] in the early 2010s, much of that thanks to bartenders,” she says. “Many historic recipes that called for it became bartender darlings, so sherry found its way back onto wine lists because bartenders created a gateway for consumers. These days any well-regarded cocktail bar in America will have a sherry drink on the list.”

Australian cocktail bars have followed suit, many of them inspired by the current trend towards low- and no-alcohol drinking. At the Spanish-inspired rooftop bar Bomba in Melbourne’s CBD, sherry and other fortified wines get top billing, often mixed into fun, approachable cocktails. Compared with other wines, fortifieds are packed with flavour and texture, while also being lower in alcohol than spirits.

“Sherry is such a diverse category that it can be best friends with anything,” says  Cara Devine, the bar manager at Bomba. “Fino and manzanilla love gin, while amontillado and oloroso are great with darker spirits like rum and whisky. That said, it can definitely hold its own. We use it for spritz-style drinks for ultimate low-alcohol refreshment.”

Sherry and port were once ubiquitous in Australia but unlike gin and whisky — old-school spirits booming in popularity among today’s drinkers — sherry has seen a multigenerational slump. “Fortified wines are not on the top of drinkers’ minds in Australia,” says Sharon Romeo, the director of the Fino restaurant group in South Australia. “Gen X might remember their grandparents drinking sherry and port, but Gen Zs and millennials are likely to know very little about them at all.” Romeo is among the hospitality professionals trying to revive appreciation for these excellent wines. “Since Fino first opened back in 2006, I have always championed sherry and Australian fortifieds, encouraging people to try them with our food.”

Modern Australian winemakers are also looking to fortified wines for inspiration to create new styles and flavours. Brodie Comer, of the up-and-coming Victorian wine producer Yūgen, has experimented extensively with ageing non-fortified white wines under flor — a traditional sherry technique in which a layer of yeast is allowed to develop on certain styles like manzanilla during maturation, which prevents oxidation and lends its own unique character to the wine. 

“The first wine we made under flor was a gewürztraminer,” says Comer. “It ended up toning down some of the intense perfume that can be a bit of a turn-off with this variety and brought out softer florals and spice along with a beautiful savoury element.” The winemakers enjoyed it so much that Yūgen now makes wine under flor every vintage. “We’re currently using chardonnay, which without oak can be a pretty boring variety,” says Comer, “but the addition of flor gives us so much more character.”

Even in the world of whisky, fortified wines continue to play a decisive role, with the empty casks used to mature some of the world’s most popular styles of single malt. “Since the mid-19th century, wines like sherry and port have been fundamental to the flavour profile of Scottish whisky,” says the Australian whisky expert and author Luke McCarthy. He says it’s hard to overstate the influence Australia’s fortified wine industry has had on the development of Australian whisky. “Many of our most highly awarded whiskies have been matured in casks that previously held Aussie fortifieds,” he says. “The rich flavours these casks contribute have become a signature of Australia’s most recognisable whiskies, like Sullivans Cove, Lark and Starward.”

With everything from your favourite whisky to the cocktails at your local bar influenced and improved by fortifieds, these styles are well worth getting to know. As Baiocchi says: “If you’re a fan of flavour, I can’t see why you wouldn’t be a fan of fortified wines.”

Perhaps best of all, they can be had for an absolute steal. Most solid mid-tier fortified wines — both local and imported — run at about $20 to $30 for a 375ml bottle, and many high-end labels sell for well under $100. Our advice is to get stuck in before everyone else figures it out.

5 Brilliant Fortified Wines To Add To Your Cellar

Pennyweight La Serena Oloroso

$32/375ml 

Oloroso is a variety of fortified wine produced by oxidative ageing. The wine is exposed to air during maturation and becomes darker and stronger over time. This Australian version is a rich, amber-coloured wine with a depth of sweetness on the middle palate and a lingering dry finish. Serve at cellar temperature as an aperitif.

Equipo Navazos “I Think” Manzanilla 

$30/375ml

“Manzanilla” means “chamomile” in Spanish. This style of wine is aged under flor and named for its light, dry, floral and saline character. This bottle is wonderfully potent and briny with a deep, silky texture and plenty of sustained, tangy drive. 

Cayetano del Pino Almacenista Palo Cortado

$75/750ml

Palo cortado is a rare variety of sherry that is initially aged under flor to become a fino or amontillado but inexplicably loses its
veil of flor and begins ageing oxidatively as an oloroso. The result is a wine with some of the richness of oloroso and some of the crispness of amontillado. With an average age of 20 years, this wine is nutty with fine timber aromatics, cheese rind, balsamic
and oranges. Light, slightly creamy palate then a fresh, nippy finish. 

Campbells of Rutherglen Muscat

$22/375ml

This uniquely Australian style of dessert wine was developed in the Rutherglen region of Victoria when early winemakers found the muscat à petits grains rouge grape produced wonderfully complex wines in the area’s long, dry growing season. This classic example from Campbells has an incredibly rich aged characteristic, with great sugar that tastes of raisins and powerful acid through the finish.

Seppeltsfield 1922 Para Vintage Tawny 

$1,500/100ml 

A true piece of wine history and one of the few 100-year-old wines available anywhere in the world, this has great intensity harnessed by citrusy acid and notes of sun-dried stone fruit. It’s nutty and spicy with terrific length.

Apera cocktails to make at home

Adonis

A perfect classic-style, lower-alcohol drink for Manhattan and martini lovers.

45ml manzanilla- or fino-style apera or sherry
45ml sweet vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir over ice until chilled and diluted, strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of orange peel.

Bomba’s “Passion Project” Cocktail

Adapted from a recipe by Bomba’s senior bartender Ryan Casley, this refreshing drink incorporates passionfruit, Australian cane spirit and amontillado-style sherry.

40ml Australian white cane spirit or white rum
20ml passionfruit pulp
20ml amontillado-style apera or sherry
20ml lemon juice
10ml simple syrup

Add ingredients to a large highball glass, fill halfway with crushed ice, churn, top with more crushed ice and garnish with a sprig of mint.

“Agave spirits like tequila and mescal are the fastest growing category in the world,” says Reaburn. “And while Australia only has a small population, we’re the world’s biggest consumer of those spirits after the USA and Mexico. I’ve also been lucky enough to make every other kind of spirit in my career, so something made from agave was like a final frontier for me as a distiller.”

Unlike tequila, rum has a long history here. As a former British colony, Australia tends to make rums that are similar in style to those produced in former British colonies of the Caribbean, such as Barbados and Jamaica. That is, rums that use molasses as their raw material and have a big, funky, rubbery quality.

But on the French-speaking island of Martinique, a different kind of rum, known as rhum agricole, is the norm. Not often seen outside their homeland and France, agricole rums are produced from fresh cane juice rather than molasses and have a brighter, grassier and drier flavour profile than their cousins.

At Husk Distillers in the hinterland of New South Wales’ Northern Rivers region, the Martiniquais expat distiller Quentin Brival is bringing an agricole-style “cane spirit” to Australia (according to an outdated law, cane spirits in Australia can only be called “rum” if they have been aged for a minimum of two years). “Australia is one of the biggest sugar cane producers in the world,” he says, “so it makes perfect sense to make rum here. But when I arrived, I was struck by the fact that it’s just one style, and no-one had thought to make rum the way we do in Martinique.”

All cane used in Husk’s Cultivated Cane Spirit range is grown and processed on site. “We’re farmers as well as distillers,” says Brival. “We call our spirit Cultivated because, like the term ‘agricole’, it means it came from an actual agricultural operation.” The cane grown at Husk is distinct from the kinds most commonly used for white sugar production. “It’s short, dark and thick, and the taste is completely different,” says Brival. “You can taste the terroir in this style of rum because it’s not overly processed. We wanted to create a truly Australian version and not just a copy.” The distillery, which runs tours to introduce drinkers to the spirit, recommends mixing the product in a ti punch, the preferred way to drink agricole rum in Martinique.

From Chinese-style sorghum spirits (baijiu) to regional European brandies, like rakia and grappa, as well as Scandinavian aquavit and American-style corn and rye whiskies, Australia’s craft spirits speak every language like a boozy Tower of Babel. These transportive products reflect Australia’s bowerbird-like penchant for taking flavours and techniques from far-flung lands and reconstructing them in our own image. They are also evidence of the country’s incredible diversity of climate zones. From apples and barley grown in the south to mangoes and sugar cane from the north, local distillers have a world’s worth of flavours at their fingertips.

And it speaks to Australia’s fundamental multiculturalism; it’s a place where people and ideas from all over can flourish. We are all the richer — if not slightly more inebriated — for it.

A version of this article appears in print in our fifth edition, Page 58 of T Australia with the headline:
“Spirited Away”
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