Brycefield Il Dottore Pecorino 2022
After years of neglect, Newcastle orthopaedic surgeon Bruce Caldwell and partner, Australia’s leading mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble, snapped up the beautiful Brycefield Estate in 2017. The dynamic duo set to restoring the Lovedale vineyad properly, engaging top Hunter Valley viticulturalist Liz Riley and award winning winemaker Suzanne Little.
The decision was made to replace one of the blocks, 3 acres of dead verdelho, with pecorino.
If you’re like me, when you hear pecorino, you think of cheese, but it’s also a grape variety native to central Italy, most notably Marche and Abruzzo. Ian D’Agata’s terrific book Native Wine Grapes of Italy has quite a spiel on the variety, suggesting the variety’s name came from “sheepherders who ate the grapes while accompanying their flocks up and down the valley in searching of food.” D’Agata also notes that “pecorino is not just a great grape variety, it is also one of Italy’s biggest wine success stories of the twenty-first century.”
This ancient variety went from being virtually extinct to being a fixture on every Italian wine list, surging from 70ha to 2,500ha in the first 15 years of this century. The incredible resurgence was due to two men, Guido Cocci-Grifoni of the Cocci Grifoni estate in the Marche and Luigi Cataldi Madonna of the Cataldi Madonna estate in Abruzzo.
The reason for the popularity - everyone loved the wine! Fresh, aromatic and acid-driven, the Oxford Companion to Wine says it’s “made a varietal comeback because of its firm, dry, minerally white wine”. D’Agata provides a little more detail with “in general pecorino wines are usually delicate herbal (sage, thyme mint), with balsamic nuances to the crisp apple and pear aromas and flavours”. I like the crisp citrus/lemon line you find in Australian expressions.
Back at Brycefield, Bruce had a love of pecorino from his trips to Italy and some quick research suggested it could be ideal for the site. Aside from producing delicious wine, as the encyclopaedic tome by Jancis Robinson, Wine Grapes, notes pecorino is early ripening, with good resistance to powdery and downy mildews. Perfect for the Hunter! And so, the first commercial plantings of pecorino in Australia were planted by at Brycefield in 2018.
At the 2023 Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show Suzanne’s expertise shone through. In Class 5: Pecorino, the top-rated wine was none other than Brycefield’s Il Dottore Pecorino 2022.
“Lime leaf, jasmine. lemon zest. Nice concentration on the palate. Good power and texture, lemon balm, preserved lemon, cinnamon... A structured finish of length and vibrancy.”
“Fresh fruit salad, complex and bright lots of flavour hidden, deliciously flavoursome.”
Judges comments.
92 points, Silver Medal and highest rated pecorino.
Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show 2023.
| SKU | 2BRYIDPEC22 |
| Brand | Brycefield |
| Shipping Weight | 1.5000kg |
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