A visit to the Hunter Valley

I'd like to report a couple of very successful days visiting parts of the Hunter Valley. It was a fun weekend, with Glenn, Tim, Sherrylee, Kylie, Jim, and young William. It's odd that work would send me to Newcastle, and while there, I managed to meet up with colleagues from Brisbane, Sydney, and Adelaide/Barossa!

On Saturday, three of us (Tim, Glenn, and I) started with a quick look at Newcastle city - a walk along Nobbys Beach and up the Queen's Wharf Tower, and taste-testing some milkshakes on the foreshore. After our drie to the valley, lunch was at Harrigans Irish Pub -- more expensive than the average hamburger joint, but certainly very tasty. I'd go there again, although there are plenty of other places I'd like to try as well.

Tyrrells give tours of the winery every day at 1:30pm. Our Scotch tour guide (no, I mean he came from Scotland) was quite entertaining and made the tour interesting for everyone. At the end, he offered us comparisons of new and aged Semillons, wooded and unwooded Chardonnays, and Hunter, Heathcote, and McLaren Vale Shiraz. Although I'm not particularly into most of those wines, I certainly do like to try them, and to understand the different tastes.

We stopped at Brokenwood, and then decided to visit Cruickshanks - not realising how far the Upper Hunter is from the Valley Bottom (as the Upper folks call it). We didn't quite make it by the official closing time, but we did have the opportunity to taste a couple, and buy a souvenir for our Cruickshank colleague at work.

For dinner, we walked up and down Darby St in Newcastle, and eventually settled on a Thai restaurant with an upstairs balcony. The food was adequate. Dessert at Three Monkeys was certainly more than adequate in terms of quality, but the calories in the Mars Bar Cheesecake probably belong in the non-essential, low-nutrition category. Do I confess to purchasing a half bottle botrytis accompaniment?

By this stage of the evening, there wasn't much energy for the work/technology related discussions that I'd been expecting. It wasn't long before we met up with Sherrylee, Kylie, Jim, and Will on Sunday morning. We split into two cars, and headed back to the Hunter. The serious-wine-tasting carload visited Pepper Tree, De Iuliis, Small Winemaker Centre (where we all caught up for another very pleasant lunch al fresco), Audrey Wilkinson, and finally Gartelmann. Highlights for me were:

• Audrey Wilkinson winery - fantastic views and a beautiful setting. The Lake Shiraz (or whatever the new name is) was soft, subtle, smooth, with some complexity. It didn't have the body or the length that I look for, but the fruit flavours were favourable.
• The Small Winemaker Centre Icon Lounge. Some rather pricey wines available for tasting at a reasonable rate, from a fancy Enomatic machine. The Wilkinson, Andrew Thomas, and Mount Pleasant Maurice O'Shea Shirazes were all rather good.
  
• De Iuliis was a modern place, with a nice looking cafe and a gallery (which we didn't go into). Our server Sam was very friendly.
• Gartelmann had some nice Vintage Port Liquer Shiraz, and their Muscat was good too.

I certainly like the geography of the Hunter, but that short experience didn't really make much of an impact on my palate: I still find most of the wines to be too weak in comparison to the full-bodied Barossa (or other South Australian) reds.

Wynns 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon

I can only assume that a year away from Australia (with a particularly enjoyable focus on Bordeaux left bank!) has opened my palate to the delights of Cabernet Sauvignon. Previously, when tasting the more affordable Wynns wines, I wouldn't have hesitated to reach for the Shiraz, rather than the Cabernet or the more commonly found Cabernet Shiraz Merlot (with that famous red diagonal). Perhaps it's just the vintage, but on the Wynnsday release a couple of months ago of the 2007 range at my local, the Shiraz was about $15, and the Cabernet was $34. While there are occasional bargains, and people do have different tastes, there's usually some truth in "you get what you pay for". (Paul Keating said once that it was better to be an economic rationalist than an economic irrationalist!) I was tempted by a discount, and coming from Coonawarra one can expect greatness from the Cabernet Sauvignon.

I admit I wasn't ready for it. This wine was terrific, and I will be heading back to look for more. From the first sniff of the freshly opened bottle I was confident that I'd chosen well. No need for any breathing - the powerful fruity aroma with chocolatey oak depth was instantly attractive. The mouth feel was very smooth. Not too full bodied, just gentle and delicious, very fruit-driven. The pretentious writer might argue that a better wine (or perhaps one with more bottle age) would last longer on the back palate, and would have a fuller, more complex mouth feel. But I was too busy just enjoying the taste to think such things. It was certainly a good advertisement for Australian wine for our English guest - about to head off to New Zealand before going home.

Unfortunately, as I sit and try to remember enough to do justice to the wine, all I have to jog my memory is the still-mouthwatering scent from the empty bottle. Last night's storm made us contemplate the scented candle raffle prize that might be necessary in the event of a blackout. I have a slight reputation for finding such scents too strong. Now if we could only scent a candle with what's left in the wine bottle! What occasion can I save the next bottles for?

Willows 05 Cabernet Sauvignon and some older wines

Recently (about 6 weeks ago, so watch out for faulty memories) I opened some of the more affordable wines that I have been keeping for a while. In particular, a 2001 BVE Moculta Shiraz, a 2001 Peter Lehmann Shiraz, and a 2002 Church Block (I think). For much of the time I owned them, these wines lived in our laundry, which I like to think was about the most temperature-stable room in the house. And then for nearly 18 months they lived in guaranteed 15.4 degree humidity controlled commercial storage.

I would have to admit that these aren't wines that you buy to keep in the cellar. But having tasted some particularly scrumptious aged Barossa shiraz in the past, I have been quite happy to leave all sorts of wines sitting in their racks, hoping - or perhaps expecting - that they would all be getting better. You can tell there's a sad ending coming, can't you. And you're right, at least in part. The Moculta was well and truly gone. I don't want to say too many bad things about it, because I think it's a great value wine: I'll buy it again for sure. But I'll drink it sooner rather than later. More happily, though, I want to note that the PL Shiraz and Church Block (yes I know it's McLaren Vale, not Barossa) were still quite good. I can't say categorically that they were better than in their infancy: they were probably a bit thinner with less fruit, but smoother and more integrated. I won't leave wines like these that long again, I don't think, but two out of three isn't too bad, I suppose.

Now it just so happens that I'm on a work trip to Canberra, and I fortuitously ended up at a table for one in one of my favourite steak restaurants, the Charcoal Grill. Let me just mention that if you normally ask for your steak "medium rare", you should consider ordering a "medium" at this boutique establishment. Anyway, to the wines: they do have a few wines by the glass, but none particularly captured my imagination. I can't remember (I know what you're thinking) ever having ordered a bottle when dining alone before, but at a place like this, it's worth doing things properly. I normally choose shiraz with beef, but it was clear that this was a cabernet sauvignon house. I selected a Willows 2005, and even with the restaurant markup, am quite satisfied with the value. I have two or three bottles of 2005 Willows at home, including a Bonesetter and a shiraz magnum, that I bought at the cellar door with Jim once. I probably tasted the cabernet, but didn't buy it. Well I'm pleased to report that it was a good choice. The first sniff had me a little worried, with a hint of acetone, but that seemed to disappear by the taste test. And it opened up well during the wait for, and course of, my meal. The eucalyptus flavours promised on the label weren't as evident as the mint, and we could argue about whether there was too much acid imbalance, but the palate had quite a good length with a delicious oaky finish with some complex textures. I've saved most of the bottle for future consumption, so I might be able to offer more comments later.

Spring and GWT Servlet Instantiation

I'm another person who wants to make a web application that uses Spring (dependency injection) and GWT (RPC and UI rendering).


GWT recommends setting up a servlet to do the RPC by declaring it in web.xml like this.

 <!-- Servlets -->
 <servlet>
    <servlet-name>stockPriceServiceImpl</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.google.gwt.sample.stockwatcher.server.StockPriceServiceImpl</servlet-class>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>stockPriceServiceImpl</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/stockwatcher/stockPrices</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

That way, the web-app container (eg. Tomcat) will construct the servlet object.

Now I want my servlet object to have Spring context beans injected into it.

I could write special Spring-specific code to put in my servlet to do get the Spring application context and find all the beans it needs, but that's cumbersome, and can't take advantage of Spring's autowiring.

I happened to watch Ben Alex, of Spring Security, give a great Introduction to Spring Security talk, where he mentioned that it's hard to give up Dependency Injection just to fit in with the web-app container. So instead of letting the web-app container create the Spring Security filter that one could declare in web.xml, he declares (at around 9'10") a DelegatingFilterProxy in web.xml, and gives it a name "springSecurityFilterChain". The clever DelegatingFilterProxy, when it is started by the container, loads the spring context, finds the bean with that name (ie. the bean called springSecurityFilterChain), and uses it as the actual filter.

I want to do the same thing, but instead of filters, I want to do it for the servlet itself. Luckily, Spring provides a class to do that: org.springframework.web.context.support.HttpRequestHandlerServlet. All I have to do is replace the servlet-class line in the web.xml above with that HttpRequestHandlerServlet. Then, when the servlet is required, the HttpRequestHandlerServlet will look in the application context for a bean called "stockPriceServiceImpl". To make sure we have one of those, the applicationContext.xml needs to include something like:

<bean id="stockPriceServiceImpl" class="com.google.gwt.sample.stockwatcher.server.StockPriceServiceImpl"/>

There are two problems with this. The first one is that the HtpRequestHandlerServlet can only hand requests to HttpRequestHandler objects. Now we know that the stockPriceServiceImpl is a servlet, and it can handle these requests, but it doesn't use the right method names. Now I should really make a new version of the HttpRequestHandlerServlet that can hand off requests to a javax.servlet.HttpServlet or even to a javax.servlet.GenericServlet. The GWT RemoteServiceServlet extends these two standard java classes. But that's for another day. For today, I simply made my StockPriceServiceImpl class implement HttpRequestHandler and added the following method:

@Override
public void handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) 
                         throws ServletException, IOException {
  service(request, response);
}

Now, spring is able to construct the stockPriceServiceImpl, but it still doesn't work. There's a NullPointerException that happens. I delved around in the source, and discovered that the stockPriceServiceImpl needed to locate its servletContext, so that it could load various serialization files. When the web-app constructs a servlet, it initialises it with the appropriate context. When Spring initialises it, it doesn't - by default. But, we can tell spring that we want it to do so, if the object implements ServletContextAware. So, I added that as an interface that the stockPriceServiceImpl implements, and then had to implement the setServletContext method. Unfortunately, the ServletContext object to be passed doesn't have a convenient constructor (it's an interface). So I created an anonymous class to provide the context, like this:

public void setServletContext(ServletContext servletContext) {
  final ServletContext context = servletContext;
  try {
    init(new ServletConfig() {
      @Override
      public String getInitParameter(String name) {
        return null;
      }
      @Override
      public Enumeration getInitParameterNames() {
        return null;
      }
      @Override
      public ServletContext getServletContext() {
        return context;
      }
      @Override
      public String getServletName() {
        return null;
      }
    });
  } catch (ServletException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
  }
}

And now it seems to work. (It took me long enough to get here that I thought I'd better jot down what I did!) Next step, as I said, is to see if I can adapt HttpRequestHandlerServlet so that it can just instantiate a javax.servlet.GenericServlet directly without having to add those dodgy bits.

Mothers Milk

First Drop wines is a fairly new Barossa "virtual" winery. The comic-style label for 2007 Mother's Milk caught my eye at The Wine Emporium the other day, and I decided that it was worth a try. James Halliday gave it 4.5 stars, and I can see why. It's definitely fruit driven: soft and smooth, but with a medium body, and that all important cigar complexity. The length is quite good too. Dangerously easy to drink! I'll have to try a side-by-side tasting against the 2007 Jim's Hill...

Shiraz Expo

You'll remember that I discovered Pol Gessner champagne was available at Dan Murphy's. Given that Hamilton is a little out of the way, you might be wondering how I found out. Well, there's a good answer: I was attending the 2009 Shiraz Expo there back in early May.

I thought it would be good to record for posterity some of the 30-odd Shirazes that I tasted there, and what I thought of some of them. First of all, let me mention the expensive ones, in no particular order:

• Penfolds Grange (2004) ($570) - exceptionally full bodied, cigar/tobacco tastes; very long.
  
• Kays Amery Block - deep fruity liquorice, no smoke/pepper.
  
• Elderton Command - powerful, but limited back palate length.
  
• Grant Burge Meshach - smooth, full bodied spice.
  
• Penfolds St Henri (2001) - dry, low tannin, not particularly fruity. I don't get this wine.
  
• Penfolds RWT - Full bodied to chewy! smooth with fruit/tannin balance, not too spicy.
  
• Saltram No. 1. All spice, where's the fruit gone?
  
• Wolf Blass Platinum - very long.
  
• BVE E&E Black Pepper - Nice complexity, again not too spicy
  
• Eileen Hardy - too light... no body.
  
• Henschke Mt Edelstone Good long tobacco & spices.
  
• St Hallett Old Block - Nice smoky/leathery flavours with good mouth filling body.
• Annies Lane Coppertrail. Light bodied but smooth.
  

Some of the under-$40 ones that I'd like to taste again:

• Henschke Keyneton Estate - balanced & fruity.
• Wolf Blass Grey Label - Chocolate & vanilla hints, medium body, with good length.
• BVE Ebenezer - Smooth, balanced, medium bodied peppery, with front palate length only.
• Leasingham Bin 61 - Light bodied.
• Brokenwood - Syrupy plums with good length and balance.
  
• St Hallett Blackwell - Smoky and smooth, medium body.
• Glaetzer The Bishop - Smooth with well-integrated oak, quite a good length.

Some cheaper (under $20) ones that are probably good value, but hard for me to judge effectively with the other competition.

• Charles Cimicky The Trumps - a medium-weight peppery Barossa shiraz.
• Richmond Grove Barossa
• Thorn Clark Sandpiper
  

 I only tried a couple of cheaper WA wines (Vasse Felix and Cape Mentelle). While I like Cabernets from that side of the country, particularly Margaret River, on this occasion the Shiraz didn't rate.

I look forward to attending another Dan Murphy Shiraz Expo. The value for money was excellent (it was free!), and it was great to find a place with such a big variety of wines. I just need to get to the Wine Emporium in the valley now to compare.

Spring and Champagne, Bordeaux, Clare, Yarra

There's a couple of things to talk about. I'm getting frustrated trying to get the latest spring/hibernate/jpa libraries to work together to do the whole hbm2ddl business. It seems to delete the tables for my entities, instead of creating them. I'll try the Spring milestone libraries next instead of the MyEclipse bundled 2.5 ones.

But probably more importantly, I wanted to let you know about some Champagne. Now Joanna will tell you that I'm really not a Champagne person. In fact I'd rather have a Rockford Basket Press than the (sparkling) Black Shiraz that seems more popular. When we have méthode champenoise sparkling whites here in Australia, I struggle to find much in them. But I do remember about 10 years ago my Auntie Barbara shared a Pol Gessner with us, and it was a revelation: a yeasty, almost nutty flavour with a very creamy smooth bead. Now the memory may have aged well, and it was a pleasant dinner, so I may be raving a little too much about it. But I've always thought that I'd buy some more if I saw some. And now I've discovered where I can get it - it's exclusively imported by Dan Murphy. They're not local, but my local Vintage Cellars people advised me to try a Dumangin Vintage 2000 or a Gimonnet Brut (both premier cru grand classe) which were only slightly out of my price range. But a birthday and good loyalty-scheme-points seemed like a reasonable excuse, so I indulged.

We tried the Dumangin the other night, at our local restaurant "Plum" for a late birthday celebration. The food was pretty good - my pork belly (no, the one on the plate!) was not as succulent as I might have hoped - but the champagne did take me back. I'm not quite sure that the flavour was as strong in the nutty line. Perhaps "biscuity" as the salespeople suggested was a more accurate description. Maybe I need to look for blanc de noirs with more pinot. But the creamy yeast was there, and perhaps that made it worthwhile.

We also shared a 2005 Chateau d'Aurilhac from the Haut Médoc in Bordeaux. It was my first Bordeaux for a while, and we saw the smooth subtleties, complexities, and some length. I find it's chiefly the subtlety that distinguishes these French wines from the "blockbuster" Australian ones. The wine complemented my pork, and by all accounts the beef and duck too, so I'm quite happy with that one. There's another bottle waiting for the next occasion. (Another positive review)

A few days later, we had another family meal with a lamb stew, and so another Cabernet-based wine was called for. I decided to try a contrasting Clare Valley Kilikanoon Blocks Road Cabernet Sauvignon. While there was still smoothness, the wine was certainly very fruit-driven and had much stronger flavour than the Bordeaux. I'm not sure that the violets (as advertised on the label) were there, but I admit I'm not particularly familiar with the scent anyway. The berries were there, with a very slight hint of liquorice. The length was good, but not exceptional. With various driving commitments to think of, we spread the drinking pleasure over two nights. The vacu-vin seems to have preserved the quality nicely.

And just to make you think that my life really is centred on wine (and to save me from trying to remember details for another post), I'll also mention that we matched a roast pork with a Yarra Valley Sticks Pinot Noir. Now I'm not in the Sideways class of pinot fans, but Sticks, for about $20, seems to provide a reliable if not earth-shattering one. There's a slight tannic savour in there that distinguishes it from the cheap strawberry-cordial flavours of some others. In summer, it would definitely need cooling, but we found that on our 5°-25° Brisbane winter days a room temperature was just right.

Cheers!