Ansted & Osicka 1970 Block Balgownie Cabernet Sauvignon 2022: review
Wine is at its best when there’s both history and freshness involved. The history adds a depth; the freshness adds a glint. Whether we like it or not, we’re all drawn back ceaselessly into the past, and yet we’re all here in the present, as fresh as we can manage. If wine was a bike, it would be a tandem. It pairs to food and to land but it also pairs us to the past, to a partner, to a comrade, to a time.
Ansted & Osicka is a new wine venture but the people behind it – Tobias Ansted and Simon Osicka – are seasoned, and are friends. Tobias for a time was the winemaker at Balgownie Estate. The founding winemaker at Balgownie Estate, which was founded itself in 1969, was Stuart Anderson. Stuart Anderson is his own kind of legend of Australian wine. Stuart is a legend for the best of reasons – for the elegant, long-lived, magical wines that he both created and indeed pioneered – and for yet a better reason again: for the people he’s helped, and for the wines he’s inspired.
Tobias Ansted was the winemaker at Balgownie Estate between 2001 and 2008, a position he now describes as “a privilege”. I met him there one hot day a long time ago. When I walked into the winery he was sitting on a basic chair in the middle of a concrete floor, with a tray of eggs and eggshells in front of him, which he was cracking and separating for fining. We talked openly, not on eggshells. He was a young man then with all his best wines ahead of him. Simon Osicka, likewise, has known the vineyards and people of central Victoria all his life. His father Paul Osicka started a winery in 1955, the first in the Heathcote wine region. Simon now runs it and makes it. Simon Osicka, I always like to note, is a person who had the wider world and certainly the wider Australia at his winemaking feet but who, instead, decided to turn back and re-invest in his roots.
These, in short, are good wine people.
Tobias and Simon hang out in Heathcote and chat about wine. Tobias makes the wines at Tellurian now. They reckoned, over a glass, that they’d make a pretty good tandem. If you have to stop and think about pretty much anything in life, then you probably shouldn’t do it. When Tobias and Simon heard that there were some grapes available from Balgownie’s 1970 Block of Cabernet Sauvignon, they didn’t have to stop and think.
Some vineyards, to the right kind of wine people, are as exciting as a toy shop.
“We started without any real plan beyond that this would be an excuse to hang out and talk about wine some more,” Tobias says.
The wine they have created together is a gorgeous example of history and freshness, in a bottle, ready for the glass. It’s one of those ‘if you know, you know’ things, but suffice to say that the Balgownie 1970 Block of Cabernet Sauvignon is a vineyard that is historically important to Victorian, and to Australian, wine. The fact that some of its grapes fell into the hands of two people who get its value, deep down and long term, is just one of those things that makes you want to sit down, and say an agnostic prayer of thanks.
Sometimes, out there in the wine lands, with no one much there to see, a bright light is turned on. If we’re lucky, we get to sit in the fall of that light, and drink it.
Ansted & Osicka 1970 Block Balgownie Cabernet Sauvignon 2022 is a balanced wine, well composed, quite minty, a little raisiny perhaps and yet through the length of it the fruit feels berried and fresh, like an old oar in water. This wine will cellar beautifully and, indeed, is beautiful now.
RRP is AU $60.
Kudos to Balgownie Estate for allowing this to take place.
Links:
Formal review and score of this wine on The Winefront site.
Ansted & Osicka
Balgownie Estate