Brown Brothers Patricia Brut 2015

Ever wondered about the transformation in sparkling wines that comes with extended time on yeast lees? Yes? Then this is a wine to satisfy your curiosity. Smell the yeasty brioche, roasted nuts, take in the shortbread scents and then the freshness of stone fruits, lemon and melon. These are the kind of complex aromas that come with six years on lees. What follows takes you further down the wine tasting road, to a creamy mouth feel filled with fruit and nuts and a dry, intriguing pithiness, like sucking on grapefruit, that refreshes. It’s all entwined in delicious bright, zesty acidity. That’s the kind of transformation that occurs, and in the 2015 Patricia sparkling it makes for a mighty good bubbly.

Jeni Port

Wine critic at Winepilot

Jeni Port is one of Australia’s top wine communicators. Based in Melbourne, Jeni created the first wine column in the (then) Sun News-Pictorial before moving over to The Age and becoming that paper’s longest-serving wine writer. Over the years she has written for most Australian wine magazines and these days calls WinePilot home. She is also a Tasting Panel member on the Halliday Wine Companion. She was named Wine Communicator of the Year and Legend of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in 2014 and in 2018 Legend of the Vine. She is a founding board member of Australian Women In Wine and is the co-deputy chair of Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards and China’s Wine List of the Year Awards.

Wine writer and critic