While the property, now entirely run by Goode since the retirement of her father John in 2015, still supports a significant commercial cattle business, wine has become increasingly important focus at Wangolina Station. Her family has run Wangolina Station at Mount Benson in South Australia for nigh on a century, the cattle and sheep side of the property supplemented by wine when vineyards were planted in 1999, and Goode completed winemaking studies in 2001.

Goode is a winemaker whose tenacity and drive I’ve admired for some time. I have no idea if Anita Goode is a ZZ Top fan, but I do know she has produced a Lagrein that is absolutely swinging. It’s all too easy to substitute the name of the grape for the name of the titular Texas town immortalised by ZZ Top’s infectious boogie.Īnd there’s something appropriate about a variety that, at its best, is alluringly perfumed, satin textured and just a little bit decadent, bringing to mind a classic song about a wildly popular bordello. It’s not really that hard to find the causal link between the grape variety Lagrein and the mighty Texan Trio’s classic, La Grange. Its howl still not loud enough to drown out the ghostly screams that echo down its corridors.Īnd there’s a variety best known in alpine Italy but getting a foothold here that always drops a needle in the groove of ZZ Top’s most propulsive riff. Pinot Gris sounds like a cold wind racing down through an abandoned asylum.

AC/DC’s Back in Black is the soundtrack to many a bottle of Barossa Shiraz. When drinking retro-styled chardonnay, those big, buttery wines with shoulder pads on them, the theme to Dynasty rings in my ears. Certain wines press play on certain tracks when I taste them. Smell is the most nostalgic of our senses and a suggestion of a scent detected in a wine cab pull us through a portal to a time long since passed, when that aroma was imprinted on our olfactory memory.īut the way a wine can get musical in the mid is a far more mysterious thing. Of the myriad wonders lurking in a glass of wine, perhaps the most amazing is the way a wine can go rummaging through the more chaotic cupboards of memory. Nick Ryan, The Australian September 10th 2019 11 September 2019 | Nick Ryan Making a Goode home for Lagrein

Raise Your Glass by John Goode