Konpira Maru Vermentino and Garga Nola

Konpira Maru Wine Company make a Vermentino, but the company is new to me. The website says 'Wines made in Melbourne, true to variety and the ground in which they're grown'. But the website does not tell you where 'Konpira Maru' comes from. The young men featured on the site, Sam Cook and Alastair Reid, are the winemakers, helped by our local Jared Dixon. Like most of Dixon's not-interfered-with white wines, the Konpira Maru V for Vermentino is a cloudy gold in colour, being unfiltered and unfined. Nuts, citrus and butter feature in the aroma, and the well-judged, mid-length palate is creamy with green apple. If I wanted to say what Vermentino is, this is it … as well as the Yalumba Vermentio. There's no year on the bottle, but the label is black, with grape in white and company in red. The detail of winemaking includes 'batonage', an old wine-making technique: stirring the wine-in-barrels with a baton.

Konpira Maru's Garga Nola is made with Garganega (Soave) and Noisola (northern Italian grape, Trentino). I would have expected to like this because of the Soave, but, of the two wines, the Vermentino and Garga Nola, the Verm is the better. The GN is again a little cloudy but nevertheless gold in colour, has a perfume of dense mead and honey, but I found it Retsina-like on the palate. This label features white on red.