Michael Hall Sang de Pigeon Blanc 2019
- 90
- $27
- Drink by: 2020 - 2024
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Whoa!
This is not your ordinary ‘blanc.’ It’s neo rather than trad. Definitely not your usual colour, either, for a 2019 release white. It’s golden rather than neutral.
Barossa Valley-based winemaker, Michael Hall, tries his hand at a skin-contact white and ends up with something that gets people like me talking and, yes, drinking. Aforementioned golden in colour (imagine a 15-year old white aged under cork with the cork itself bringing a degree of colour) with grapey aromatics, big spice, lantana, baked apple and green bean herbals.
Fermentation on skins can, at worse, often disguise varietal recognition (don’t know how many times I write ‘cider’ as a descriptor for some of these wines). Let’s face it, how many of us could pick the mix of grapes contained here anyway: Muscat a Petits Grains, Riesling, Crouchen and Verdelho with 20% of Barossa Valley Roussanne thrown into the mix.
The big trade-off is flavour, a tonne of it. It fills the mouth, rolls around for ages and then it stays on and on. If this is your first introduction to the phenolic world of skin contact white wines, you are in for a treat.
NOTE: Sang de Pidgeon means ‘blood of the pidgeon’ and is a reference to the winemaker, Michael Hall, who worked in Switzerland valuing jewels and the term was used for the reddest of rubies.
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.
