Oliver’s Taranga Fiano 2022
- 92
- $27
- Drink by: 2022-2025
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Fiano is perhaps the most exciting of the new white varieties we are seeing from Italy and abroad. From the Campania region of Italy, this grape is all about texture. To enhance that, the team use indigenous yeasts and have started to include small portions matured in old French oak. The team also have a habit of including a different statement about the year on each wine in the Small Batch range, though these sometimes seem more like inside jokes than worldly wisdom. For this year’s Fiano, ‘the year that we got a golf cart called Ollie to take tours around Taranga Vineyard’. Make of it what you will.
This is a really good example of the variety. Pale lemon in colour, there is some early complexity and yet the wine remains fresh and crisp, with notes of nuts, herbs, apples and pears. A hint of stonefruit. Really well constructed, there is power on the palate and impressive length. And of course, that seductive texture. This will drink beautifully for two to three years, likely longer, and may even rate a notch higher in that time. Lots to like here. Loved the 2021 – this is just as good.
Ken was born and bred in Brisbane, Queensland. He had a non-trendy, perfectly happy childhood, in a family convinced alcohol meant instant condemnation to Hades. But a break fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, and some good wine, started a serious obsession that eventually took over. It did not stop Ken being chastised later for drinking Pol champagne, disgusted he’d drink anything made by a Cambodian dictator. Now, Ken mostly writes on wine, champagne and spirits for various newspapers, magazines and books, but is perhaps best known for his work in The Courier Mail. He also has a little sideline writing on cigars, fishing, travel and food. When not writing, fly-fishing for trout in NZ or bonefish on the flats of Cuba, travelling or smoking cigars, he is no doubt following a variety of sporting teams – the occasionally glorious Queensland Reds rugby, the dysfunctional Washington Redskins, the dodgy Arsenal and especially revels in the world restored to its proper axis with the return of the Ashes to their rightful home.
