Have you ever poured a sunbeam into your mouth? I have. Quite recently, in fact. Winter is such a wonderful time to simply sit and soak up the sun's warm rays on a cool, blue sky day. The sunbeam I speak of, by the way, was actually a bottle of white wine from the Hunter Valley. Born from the little known sub-region of Luskintyre, down by the banks of the Hunter River, and made by budding Hunter winemaker and Luskintyre local Peta Kotz. It's a stunning blend of chardonnay and semillon. Its name is Bright Eyes and it is bottled under Kotz's own small-batch wine label, Sabi Wabi.
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"The label's name is inspired by the ancient Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi, which is all about finding beauty within imperfection," Kotz explains. "My wines may not be fine-tuned to perfection but that's kind of the point."
Wabi Sabi is a Japanese philosophy that refers to the beauty of impermanence, the imperfect, the rustic. Unlike our Western obsession with symmetry, perfection, youth and flawlessness, Wabi Sabi imagines things are always more beautiful when they display the marks of instance, age and individuality. The glazed cracks of a mended tea cup, the scuff marks and ink stains on your workday leather bag, perhaps the liquefied geography of a vintage, and certainly the emergent lines, creases and wrinkles upon our hands and faces; every instance a subtle yet vivid chronicle of nature over time.
Wine is one of the most tangibly ephemeral mementos of nature over time. Often, though, the nature of wine is stripped out or obscured by contemporary Western scientific conceptions of flawlessness and perfection rendered by the artifice of additions and textbook adjustments of, say, pre-packaged acid, tannin or Mega Purple (a Barney-coloured wine colour correction tool). Then, it's fined and/or filtered to within an inch of its life, thereby removing all but a faint trace of its original, native vitality. And this is all perfectly normal, by the way, especially if you're aiming for economically sound, bulk conformity of symmetry and ideal proportions, sold for around $3.19 a bottle. Perfection is not always so pleasurable. Hence, may I suggest a little splash of wabi-sabi? Or, Sabi Wabi, as the case may be.
Radiant, yet opaque, Bright Eyes is wine as sunlight, held together by water. A spritz of zesty lemon energy, yellow florals and honey-buttered melon dance upon olfactory nerves; buzzing like bees in the sun, enticing and joyful. A generous sip is mouth-filling and textual, like fleshy pineapple, crunchy and all-bright, with vital and lithe acidity. Refreshing and oddly comparable, as I said, to pouring sunbeams into your mouth. So gorgeous, charming and graceful (2019, $25).
The wine is available in strictly limited quantities. It's ephemeral, small-batch winemaking at its finest. Look for it at places like COQUUN and RAMA Bar in Maitland. Otherwise, contact winemaker Peta Kotz @sabiwabiwine (Instagram) or sabiwabiwine@gmail.com.
