Passel Estate – A New Name in Margaret River

Producer: Passel Estate

Owners Barry and Wendy Stimpson

After a spirited and educational afternoon evaluating some wines from the Barossa Valley, the organiser of the session asked if we would like to stay back for a few minutes to meet the owners of a small winery in Margaret River. I had initially planned to rush off to the next appointment, but as they were already there I decided it would be churlish not to at least taste the wines. I am glad I did. Barry and Wendy Stimpson are Singapore residents with high-powered careers in the fields of law and strategic consultancy, but they were bitten by the wine bug when visiting Margaret River. In 2011 they purchased the land that was to become Passel Estate. The inspiration for the name came when they volunteered part of the area as a refuge for endangered western ringtail possums (passel is the term for a group of possums). As it turns out, the peppermint trees ringing the vineyard provide the ideal shelter and food source for the tree dwellers. Plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz date back to 1994, now augmented with a parcel of Chardonnay.

Different Shades of Pink

Eight years ago, a group of us were at the Barton & Guestier Wine School in Bordeaux, where the facilitator presented us three glasses of wine to taste. The twist being that these wines were served in opaque black glasses so as to remove any preconceptions that colour might give. While most of us were able to pick out the red wine, a surprise was that most of us mistook the rosé for a white. Did this suggest that taste-wise there was very little difference between a rosé and a white wine? Would our tasting notes have been different had we been able to see the colour? Research certainly indicates so. A study by Frederic Brochet and Denis Dubourdieu in 2001 found that tasters perceived a white wine as having the odour of a red wine when coloured red.