We have just taken delivery of a new wine, the Some Young Punks (SYP) Lust Collides Mataro. Some of you may already know about Some Young Punks. If you haven’t heard about them, please read my old blog post about one of their other wines, The Squid’s Fist. They make great wines with really funky labels.
Lust Collides Mataro is from the Some Young Punks is from the Live and Rare range of wines and the label is a commission from Tomer Hanuka, the award-winning Israeli illustrator and cartoonist, and brother of Asaf Hanuka who designed The Squid’s Fist label. The label depicts a young lady with pink hair frolicking on a bull’s head – I would be glad if anyone can explain it to me.
Lust Collides Mataro is from a single vineyard in the McLaren Vale called the Thomas Block. This is a small vineyard run along biodynamic principles and is composed of loam on clay soils. After harvest and pressing, the wine undergoes fermentation using only indigenous yeast and the wine spends between 14 and 25 days on the skins. After this, the wine is pressed into oak barrels where is undergoes malolactic fermentation and is then matured for 14 months in French oak barriques. Lust Collides is a vegan and vegetarian-friendly wine. Mataro is also known as Mourvedre and Monastrell in various other parts of the world.
Tasting Notes – Dark, savoury and seductive Mataro. Wonderfully textured, layered with dark fruits, a spark in the mid-palate and a smooth, soft finish – more notes to follow.
The Some Young Punks consist of Col McBryde (voted Australia’s Young Gun Winemaker of the Year), Jen Gardner (self-confessed nerdy yeast expert) and thirdly Nic Bourke. Like most amongst the new breed of interesting, young winemakers in Australia they aren’t moved by Port-y Shiraz and seek instead a sense of place and restraint the wines, influenced by the best of the Old World and the New. Col McBryde is as unimpressed by flash-in-the-pan medal-winners that are short on provenance as he is by being hide-bound to the Old World and carving his own niche. Yet being media savvy and having a sense of humour allows this ironically quietly-spoken but earnest bunch to market themselves outrageously and to bring a fresh approach to labelling. Expect to see increasingly alarming labels sported by increasingly interesting and wholly unique wines.
Find out more, and drool over the labels, at the Some Young Punks Website.
