Celebrating 150 years’ wine making last week, Penfolds turned on eleven vintages of Grange Hermitage in magnums. Magnum bottling commenced only in 1979, so this was an opportunity to appraise the lot. The tasting was held in Michael Hill-Smith’s Universal Wine Bar at 9 a.m.

My impressions of the wines from magnum were consistent with tastings from bottles of the same vintages over the past year, though, with some, I thought perhaps the magnums wines were a little less mature. Interestingly, Grange’s creator, the late Max Schubert, told me just two years ago that he’d always been against putting Grange in large containers “because it takes so bloody long to come around” even in normal bottles.

Nevertheless, magnums are scarce and fetch amazingly high prices at auction. For what they are worth, these are my impressions of vintage 1979 to 1989 ex magnum.

Penfolds Grange 1979

Just like several ordinary bottles enjoyed in recent months, a tough, very firm red showing the amazing range of intriguing flavours unique to old Grange. Without tasting magnums and bottles side by side, I fancied a sweeter, slightly fresher fruit character in the magnum. But apart from that smidgin (perhaps imaginary) of difference definitely the same wine and quite drinkable now.

Penfolds Grange 1980

To my taste a bigger and slower developing Grange than either the 1979 or 1981 flanking it. Under the tough, chewy tannins lurks sweet, ripe fruit which I suspect will permeate the wine more with time. Confirms earlier impressions of the wine. Of all vintages, this one seemed the most different to my recollection of standard-size bottles.

Penfolds Grange 1981

Less advanced than the 1979 but showing similar characteristics of sweet, aging fruit and firm, chewy tannins. Needs more time.

Penfolds Grange 1982

A wonderful Grange that’s been approachable since it was quite young because of the sweet, succulent fruit characteristic of the 1982 vintage in general. To my taste an under-rated Grange because of this easy approachability while young. The lush fruit is underpinned by quite firm tannins and the colour and richness at twelve years of age suggests to me those pundits urging us to drink it now will be proved wrong. Chateau Shanahan boasts 10 bottles of this wondrous drink and I’m in no hurry to see it off. As Len Evans pointed out at the tasting, the 1962 drank easily when young, and it’s still a wonderful wine.

Penfolds Grange 1983

The most strikingly powerful and tannic of all eleven vintages tasted — a thunder-in-the-brain red inspiring images of the drought and bush fires of the vintage that spawned it. But from the tough nut of tannin, sweet shoots of fruit-flavour bud a little more with each passing year. This will always be a controversial Grange, but I suspect in another ten years its underlying beauty will have revealed itself.

Penfolds Grange 1984|

The youngest wine in the line-up to reveal maturing, bottle-aged aromas and flavours. It’s unusual for the many flavour and aroma components of Grange to converge so early, but here we have it: age, sweetness, firm tannins, and a heady, buoyant aroma unique to Grange — a combination of mature fruit, oak, bottle age, and a higher than average level of volatile acidity. Great drinking now, but shows the strength to keep for another decade easily. These wines stay on a plateau for many years if well cellared.

Penfolds Grange 1985

Grange at a transition stage of development, showing neither the raw freshness of youth nor the mellowness of age. At the moment very full and tannic with hints of the sweet fruit ready to burst through. A very good Grange needing another five years, I suspect, to reach the stage already achieved by the 1984.

Penfolds Grange 1986

Glorious, opulent Grange as we might see once a decade — has a simply amazing rich, supple, glorious, elegant depth of aromas and flavours with firm, persistent tannins totally integrated with the fruit flavours. A very great wine by any measure and bound to grow in drinking enjoyment and stature for several decades.

Penfolds Grange 1987

Shows the opaque, brilliant colours of youth, yields little on the nose, but possesses a steely-taut palate with ripe fruit and tannins ready to explode into Grange in another seven or eight years.

Penfolds Grange 1988

A wine that’s rounder and sweeter than the 1987 but a chunky little fella nevertheless and, like the 1987, needs many more years in the cellar.

Penfolds Grange 1989

The latest release and already showing a striking, sweet — what I describe as ‘mulberry’ — aroma. This shows up as intense, sweet fruit bobbing around in all the tannin and oak flavours on the palate. Another quite distinctive vintage and needing extended cellaring — but may be approachable early, like the 1984.

Since its start in 1990, Mc Williams Wines’ Maurice O’Shea Award for historically significant contributions to the wine industry has been won by individuals: Max Schubert was the first winner, in 1990, followed by Len Evans, Ron Potter, and David Wynn.

McWilliams Wines stunned four hundred dinner guests at Sydney’s Regent Hotel this year by a magnanimous handing of the O’Shea Award to a competitor’s successful brand, Jacobs Creek.

In accepting the award on behalf of Orlando-Wyndham (owner of Jacobs Creek), Chief Executive Perry Gunner praised marketing man Stephen Couch and wine maker Robin Day for keeping the twenty-year-old brand fresh in the eyes of consumers and maintaining quality through years of phenomenal growth.

Well-deserved praise indeed for an Aussie brand selling 1.5 million cases a year overseas and half a million here at home — a big wine brand on a global scale.

Mr Gunner, unfortunately, failed to match McWilliams’ magnanimity. Not the slightest acknowledgement went to former Orlando-Wyndham chief, Gunther Prass, for his role in the birth of the brand in 1976 and its subsequent success.

In an interview with Gunther in 1991, he recalled that in the mid 1970s Orlando had been looking for a range of mid-priced, new-generation table wines. Of a handful of now defunct brands released together at the time (remember Lyndale Riesling and Fromm’s Moselle), Jacobs Creek Claret was the sole survivor, achieving volumes dreamed of by every wine company.

Chief Wine Maker for Orlando, Robin Day, assembled the early Jacobs Creek blends with technical director Mark Tummel. The two successfully created a red that went against the style trend of the time: instead of being big, tannic, and slightlty oxidised, Jacobs Creek offered drinkers fresh, generously-fruity soft drinking. These characteristics were made possible not just by wine-making techniques but by the arrival of high-quality fruit from a vast new vineyard area at Padthaway, an hour’s drive north of Coonawarra.

Thus, Jacob’s Creek Claret always had at its core ‘a nucleus of cool-climate fruit’ to use Robin Day’s words. That nucleus quickly grew and in 1977 included, for the first time, a significant proportion of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz from Australia’s foremost red growing area, Coonawarra. The 1977 went on to pick up several gold medals against far more expensive competitors. I seem to recall it retailing in Canberra for $1.99!

In those early years the brand was developed on a small budget by Martin Bullock, Mark Swann, and Stephen Couch in Orlando’s marketing department. They were assisted by Orlando’s very strong distribution base. But finally, high quality was at the heart of the brand’s explosive growth in Australia, then in New Zealand, and now in the U.K. where Orlando-Wyndham claims it is the No. 1 selling wine brand.

In the early eighties, Prass and his team decided on a little brand extension, the marketeers jargon for atttaching a successful name to a new product. Thus were born over several years Jacobs Creek Rhine Riesling, Nouveau, Semillon Chardonnay and Chardonnay. (From memory the chardonnay came after Prass and Tummel had moved on to Hardys).

Under Prass’s leadership, Jacobs Creek prospered and became a leading brand here and overseas. Does it denegrate the present custodians of the label to acknowledge his seminal role? Shouldn’t he share some of the industry applause?

The morning after the awards, I visited McWilliams Mount Pleasant Winery in the Hunter Valley. It was here the legendary Maurice O’Shea worked from 1921 until his death in 1956. O’Shea originally owned the property but stayed on after McWilliams bought a stake in 1932 and moved to full ownership in 1941.

Under Phil Ryan, the quality of Mount Pleasant wines, some made from vines planted by O’Shea, moves steadily upwards after what I see as a lull during the 60s 70s and early 80s.

It’s now a cliche that the wonderful McWilliams Mount Pleasant Elizabeth, a bottle aged semillon, is one of the great bargains amongst Australian whites. And the Mount Pleasant and O’Shea Chardonnays of recent years show terrific flavours, beautifully combining oak and fruit.

Watch, too, for the Mount Pleasant 1991 shirazes — spectacular reds that come along in the Hunter only once a decade. The O’Shea blend is especially good and should cellar for a few decades.

Perhaps the greatest treat of all, though, will be the release later this year of McWilliams Lovedale Semillon 1984. This is perfect Hunter semillon, so rich, mature, dry and delicate. It comes from a vineyard planted by O’Shea back in 1946 and in the past was released as Anne Riesling.

Does anyone remember San Marco and Monticello? — red wines made by Montrose Winery of Mudgee? They offered not just Italian names but Italian flavours, too, as they were made from native Italian grape varieties — something almost non-existent in Australia — by an Italian wine maker, Carlo Corino.

But Carlo must have been exasperated by his lack of recognition in Australia and finally went home. The last time I saw him was at Vinitaly, a wine exhibition in Verona, where he told me he was making 3.5 million cases of wine a year in Sicily.

Our narrow focus on French grape varieties and a wine press invincibly ignorant of what Italy has to offer ensured his modest pioneering attempt to introduce an Italian influence in Australian wine making and import top-notch Italian wines passed unappreciated.

When Montrose passed into the hands of Orlando Wyndham, remaining stocks of San Marco and Monticello were taken up by Farmer Bros here in Canberra and the brands subsequently axed.

But the Italian grape varieties nebbiolo, barbera, and sangiovese — about two acres of each — still flourish in Mudgee where Montrose wine maker, Robert Paul, hopes they might one day find a life of their own rather than disappearing anonymously into the corporate blending vat.

There are stong arguments, both consumer and commercial, to support his hopes. We drinkers demand variety and since the potential is there to provide it, we should have it; and from Orlando-Wyndham’s point of view, although the quantity of wine that could be made is small — around 3,000 cases total from the three varieties — success in this niche market could lead to a fairly quick expansion of plantings and production. Yet it would be difficult for competitors with no knowledge of these varieties to follow suit.

As well, Australian wine companies would be foolish during the current export boom to abandon the development of new products and brands — for that is where future growth lies.

These Italian varieties deliver wine flavours well removed from the familiar range worked with by most Australian makers. Just as the very full bodied, floral grenaches now emerging in tiny quantites from the Barossa and McLaren Vale widen the flavour spectrum available to us, so the Italians have the potential to broaden it yet again.

They can give us delicious new flavours that can be delivered at a reasonable price. For these plantings are not the sort to inspire avant-garde wines that need be savoured drop by drop. No. Here are the makings of happy drinking wines with corresponding low production costs: healthy grape yields, no expensive new oak, and no lengthy maturation periods required.

Barbera, a native of Northern Italy, occasionally reaches great heights around Asti in southern Piedmont. But more typically it gives rich wine with a pleasant, distinctive flavour, high natural acidity (that suits Australia’s warm conditions which tend to make wines too low in acid) with stunning crimson colours.

Under Carlo Corino, Montrose’s barbera was blended with nebbiolo for the Monticello brand. Nebbiolo, another Piedmontese grape, at its best makes the profound, long-lived reds of Barolo and Barbaresco. But in Mudgee it has to date made tasty wines without the majesty it displays in Piedmont. Robert Paul is still working on it, but sees it still as a blender.

A tank sample of the 1994 barbera sent by Robert inspired this column. His idea of mellowing it in old oak for 6 months before bottling strikes me as spot on. I hope others in Orlando-Wyndham allow it to happen.

Sangiovese, widely planted in Italy these days, springs from Tuscany and is the heart and soul of Chianti. There it is blended with the red mamaiolo, sometimes with the white varieties malvasia and trebbiano (although that seems less common now that it is not mandatory), and sometimes with cabernet sauvignon.

Modern Chianti is very good, but ranges from light and easy-drinking styles to quite robust and complex versions capable of long cellaring. The style you get depends on which of the sub-regions the wine comes from and the winemaking preferences of the maker.

Mudgee sangiovese (the 1994 sample anyway) tends to the fuller-bodied style with lovely, fresh fruit and fine, persistent tannins making it a real red. Early, exceptionally tasty drinking seems to be its fate. Robert Paul thinks a few per cent of cabernet added to the blend might just complete it and he’s probably right.

But whether or not these terrific reds reach us intact seems in the lap of the marketers. I hope they hear our prayer for variety. Deliver us from nothing but shiraz and cabernet forever and ever, amen.

nes made by Montrose Winery of Mudgee? They offered not just Italian names but Italian flavours, too, as they were made from native Italian grape varieties — something almost non-existent in Australia — by an Italian wine maker, Carlo Corino.

But Carlo must have been exasperated by his lack of recognition in Australia and finally went home. The last time I saw him was at Vinitaly, a wine exhibition in Verona, where he told me he was making 3.5 million cases of wine a year in Sicily.

Our narrow focus on French grape varieties and a wine press invincibly ignorant of what Italy has to offer ensured his modest pioneering attempt to introduce an Italian influence in Australian wine making and import top-notch Italian wines passed unappreciated.

When Montrose passed into the hands of Orlando Wyndham, remaining stocks of San Marco and Monticello were taken up by Farmer Bros here in Canberra and the brands subsequently axed.

But the Italian grape varieties nebbiolo, barbera, and sangiovese — about two acres of each — still flourish in Mudgee where Montrose wine maker, Robert Paul, hopes they might one day find a life of their own rather than disappearing anonymously into the corporate blending vat.

There are stong arguments, both consumer and commercial, to support his hopes. We drinkers demand variety and since the potential is there to provide it, we should have it; and from Orlando-Wyndham’s point of view, although the quantity of wine that could be made is small — around 3,000 cases total from the three varieties — success in this niche market could lead to a fairly quick expansion of plantings and production. Yet it would be difficult for competitors with no knowledge of these varieties to follow suit.

As well, Australian wine companies would be foolish during the current export boom to abandon the development of new products and brands — for that is where future growth lies.

These Italian varieties deliver wine flavours well removed from the familiar range worked with by most Australian makers. Just as the very full bodied, floral grenaches now emerging in tiny quantites from the Barossa and McLaren Vale widen the flavour spectrum available to us, so the Italians have the potential to broaden it yet again.

They can give us delicious new flavours that can be delivered at a reasonable price. For these plantings are not the sort to inspire avant-garde wines that need be savoured drop by drop. No. Here are the makings of happy drinking wines with corresponding low production costs: healthy grape yields, no expensive new oak, and no lengthy maturation periods required.

Barbera, a native of Northern Italy, occasionally reaches great heights around Asti in southern Piedmont. But more typically it gives rich wine with a pleasant, distinctive flavour, high natural acidity (that suits Australia’s warm conditions which tend to make wines too low in acid) with stunning crimson colours.

Under Carlo Corino, Montrose’s barbera was blended with nebbiolo for the Monticello brand. Nebbiolo, another Piedmontese grape, at its best makes the profound, long-lived reds of Barolo and Barbaresco. But in Mudgee it has to date made tasty wines without the majesty it displays in Piedmont. Robert Paul is still working on it, but sees it still as a blender.

A tank sample of the 1994 barbera sent by Robert inspired this column. His idea of mellowing it in old oak for 6 months before bottling strikes me as spot on. I hope others in Orlando-Wyndham allow it to happen.

Sangiovese, widely planted in Italy these days, springs from Tuscany and is the heart and soul of Chianti. There it is blended with the red mamaiolo, sometimes with the white varieties malvasia and trebbiano (although that seems less common now that it is not mandatory), and sometimes with cabernet sauvignon.

Modern Chianti is very good, but ranges from light and easy-drinking styles to quite robust and complex versions capable of long cellaring. The style you get depends on which of the sub-regions the wine comes from and the winemaking preferences of the maker.

Mudgee sangiovese (the 1994 sample anyway) tends to the fuller-bodied style with lovely, fresh fruit and fine, persistent tannins making it a real red. Early, exceptionally tasty drinking seems to be its fate. Robert Paul thinks a few per cent of cabernet added to the blend might just complete it and he’s probably right.

But whether or not these terrific reds reach us intact seems in the lap of the marketers. I hope they hear our prayer for variety. Deliver us from nothing but shiraz and cabernet forever and ever, amen.

For wine drinkers, probably the best thing that ever happened was opening up BYO restaurants. Some see the greatest benefit as money saved. But the real advantage, I believe, lies in quality of drinking. For the fact is, most restaurants offer a poor choice of wine. They’re what I call either defensive selections, based on what is not being discounted by retailers, or default selections made by the wholesaler easiest to deal with. What that means in either case is obscure wines, accidentally selected, delivering mediocre quality at a high price.

Wine lists, like the food offered, seem better than we found ten years ago, but in Canberra I still find the standard well below that of the best restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne.

I’ve yet to see a better wine list in Canberra than the one David Farmer put together with Michael Delaney for the Lobby Restaurant back in the early 1980s. It covered the best of Australian wine, current and mature, as well as a brilliant collection of classic French wines with a liberal sprinkling from the rest of the wine world. It was amongst the best lists in the country (probably in the world) at the time. Today you have to travel to Michael Hill-Smith’s Universal Wine Bar in Adelaide to glimpse its modern equivalent — and even that is not as exhaustive, although Michael offers some pretty exotic booze by the glass.

Lists as good as these give diners a spectrum of flavours almost unimaginable in today’s parochially Australian, homogenised wine scene.

The better wine list these days reflects the taste of the proprietor. When we find a restaurateur with the energy to track down what he or she sees as good, we end up with either an interesting or bizarre wine list (depending on our own point of view, of course).

Some restaurateurs choose better than others. Alby’s supplementary list at Barocca Cafe shows a sharp (if self-effacing) palate at work, and I have fond, if fuzzy, memories, too, of the odd good bottle produced by Jean Pierre at Le Carousel, Red Hill.

(John and Caryl Haslem’s new “Treasury’ cellar at Fringe Benefits, opening on July 4, offers not only an excellent selection of mature and maturing Australian wines, but stores it under ideal conditions as well — a first for Canberra. However, that’s a story in its own right for next week’s column.)

The slight rise we do see in the standard of restaurant wine lists we can put down to a number of forces. Consumers, of course, always demand value for money. But Australia’s all-pervasive wine culture now injects a demand for high profile, fashionable wines wherever food even pretends to be above average.

The commercially agile restaurateur dodges price criticism from customers and achieves profit margins by avoiding supermarket wines (and thereby many of the best value for money drinks in the country) and padding up with small-maker selections. Commercial necessity, though, is often leavened by a genuine love of wine by the restaurateur.

Rationalisation of manufacturing and distribution makes it easier to compile decent wine lists. Though many owners simply avoid big-company products, the cream of Australia’s small makers are represented by just two distributors, Tucker and Company and Fesq-Dorado. Add local wholesalers Harry Williams and the Oak Barrel and restaurants may easily cobble together a worthwhile small-maker wine list using just four suppliers.

July 10th, 1994

Provenance. That’s the key to an older wine’s condition. Where has it been? Am I buying someone else’s mistake? They’re the important questions to answer before plunging in from any source: auction, retail, or restaurant.We’ve probably all been burnt once — regretting a reputable wine that’s gone crook through bad storage.

The best solution, if you like mature wine, is to keep a cellar. Buy it young, mature it, then enjoy it at home or in a BYO. But cellaring is not always practicable. For that special occasion when a vintage wine is called for, most wine drinkers have no choice but to rely on a retail outlet or restaurant offering mature selections.

If more well-cellared wine were available, more might be sold. That’s what John and Caryl Haslem hope, anyway. After eight years offering some of Canberra’s best food, they’ve moved (and vastly expanded) Fringe Benefit’s vintage selections from a closet, established by Alby Sedaitis during his years of management, to a specially constructed, climate-controlled, on-premise cellar, ‘The Treasury’.

This is no ad hoc move — but a carefully planned major investment in storage, presentation, and stock all with high ongoing running costs. It offers Canberra diners a big, well-selected and changing range of wines of impeccable provenance — quite a bold move into new commercial territory — a big punt by the Haslems and one I hope pays off for them.

‘The Treasury’ houses wines collected by John Haslem (including a few ancient bottles inherited from his wine-merchant father) and devotes one corner to the Anders Josephson collection (see below). As well, there are locked bins available to clients — the idea being to store your own special wines under ‘The Treasury’s’ ideal conditions then pay rent in the form of corkage as each wine is withdrawn and served.

You can order from the wine list. But, better still, stroll into the cellar and make a selection in the flesh. Lighting intensity increases automatically as you enter and diminishes as you leave — ensuring wines don’t suffer from excess exposure to ultra violet light. The temperature sits at a constant 16 degrees and John, or Andrew Doyle, occasionally hose the gravel floor to keep humidity as high as the elaborate joinery can withstand. (High humidity helps keep corks moist and airproof.)

As the Haslem’s hatched plans for the cellar, they hired professional sommelier Andrew Doyle to help in selecting and managing the enlarged wine selection and preparing a complete new list of contemporary wines for the restaurant.

Andrew’s skills will be needed to make the whole concept work. He’ll be kept busy not just doing the nuts and bolts selections and maintenance work, but helping the likes of you and me match wines with our food and then seeing that service is up to scratch.

The new wine list offers a to-be-regularly-changed single page of white, red, and dessert wines with a special supplement of Canberra-district wines. This is a smart list, offering value and variety, including one older red and white. Prices range from $16 to $50 a bottle.

The main wine list offers a far bigger choice, categorised by grape variety (except with the sparkling wines). It seems to offer one of everything from every district. That, perhaps, is a weakness — breadth without any depth of the proven regional specialties. But this is just a beginning. I would also dearly love to see more imports. A surprise or two from France and Italy might add that little extra spice — perhaps an Alsace Riesling or a good Chianti, — something with a strong point of difference from Australian wine? Again, I find the pricing very reasonable for this standard of restaurant.

‘The Treasury’ list is packed with Aussie blue-chips — 10 vintages of Grange, 6 of Bin 707, 4 of John Riddoch and others. But there is a solid sprinkling of less intimidating older whites and reds like Bin 28 1984 at $32, 1984 Bin 389 at $50, and a run of Elizabeth semillons from $21.

The Anders Josephson collection (Josephson maintains a maturation cellar at Lake Macquarie and now wholesales worldwide) embraces not only the Aussie blue-chips but an eclectic range of mostly small-producer Australian wines and one New Zealander, Neudorf of Nelson. These add more depth to a remarkably good new cellar.

You can get a glimpse of the Anders Josephson collection at a special Fringe Benefits dinner to be held early in September featuring mature wines from Petaluma, Leeuwin Estate, Mountadam, Parker Estate, Lindemans, Rouge Homme, De Bortoli, and including 1969, 1976, and 1982 Granges.

The Haslems are offering us a feast of Australian wines properly stored and professionally served with outstanding food. The Treasury is a great asset for Canberra. I hope the demand is here to support it.

I see the wine list at Canberra’s latest buzz restaurant, The Republic, for example, falling somewhat into this mould. It rises above the ordinary without breaking new ground. It offers plenty of good wine, including a solid selection of mature vintages at reasonable prices. It contains wines from all states, then all but neglects two of our biggest and best wine growing areas, Barossa and McLaren Vale, and misses the rising star of chardonnay and pinot noir — Mornington Peninsula.

The rest of the world is conveniently forgotten, too — the only import being Champagne. But these are quibbles. Every wine on the list is a good one and prices are reasonable. And how welcome it is to find so many mature whites and especially reds — as well as staff who know how to serve them.

Full marks to The Republic, too, for offering a wide range of wines by the glass including several Canberra-District wines featured on the list. Noting district of origin of each wine on the list is another good idea. But lads, please note Sharefarmers Blend is not in Coonawarra.

Coonawarra’s 1990 and 1991 vintages brought nothing but good news for red-wine drinkers. From both vintages we’ve seen a steady progression of brilliant red releases from the rich, good value of Wynns Hermitage at $8, to the complex wonders of Majella and Rymill Shiraz at $15, to the sublime depths of John Riddoch and Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignons at $40 — to name just a few. Most have come and gone. But a fair sprinkling of reds from these outstanding vintages still sits on retail shelves, and some high-quality wines are yet to be released.

Inevitably, the question of which is the greater vintage raises its head, especially after the huge dollops of praise lavished on the 1990 vintage, first by wine makers and later by other critics. What are consumers to believe, after being fired up on enthusiasm for the 1990, when told that the 1991 was another great vintage. Is it all hype? Which wine makers and critics are to be believed?

In truth, the only opinions to be wary of are those of the entrenched dogmatic variety. With wine there is no objective measure of quality. So each vintage has its merits and followers. Wine makers themselves tend to see the two not in black and white, but take a more parental approach: “These are two exceptional offspring. Each has its own character.” And, like parents, deep down each wine maker has a favourite.

I’ve visited Coonawarra six times in the last twelve months. All along the terra rossa strip, wine makers agree, both 1990 and 1991 were exceptional vintages — each with its own attractions.

Peter Douglas of Wynns says, “1990 was a great vintage, one that hit us out of the blue… it was unique. Fruit got very ripe and very rich. That means the wines are not distinctively Coonawarra. They are very big, rich and strong and have outstanding cellaring potential. The sweet fruit and high alcohol balances the tannin and makes them drinkable now and many will be drunk early, but they will cellar for a very long time.

“The 1991s are more typical Coonawarra… very good Coonawarra, intensely varietal, and display more astringency than the 1990s. As a wine maker, stuck in Coonawarra working only with Coonawarra grapes, every year I look for grapes of the quality of the 1990 vintage, but it’s a pipe dream. 1990 John Riddoch is closer to what I want and I look more forward to tasting the 1990 in ten years than to the 1991.”

Even so, Douglas sees both years as outstanding, describing the 1990 as “sumptuous” and the 1991 as “varietal” (ie: with well-defined aroma and flavour of a particular grape variety).

Douglas’ colleague across the vineyards at Rouge Homme Winery, Greg Clayfield, believes, “… the 1991s are more classically correct Coonawarra, being elegant with strength. The 1990s are robust, good, rich reds, but atypical. Both have great ageing potential but 1990 will outlive 1991.”

In southern Coonawarra, small maker Doug Bowen of Bowen Estate is unequivocal: “ I prefer 1990. The wines have more depth of flavour. The 1991s have more structure, but the 1990s just have better fruit. Ripeness and high Baumé (a measure of sugar in grapes) are what matters, and that’s what we had in 1990. They have more complexity in the long run.”

Across the road at Leconfield, Ralph Fowler agrees that both were unusually good years, the 1990s showing opulent fruit and the 1991s backbone, or structure. But he believes, “… the 1991s are superior from our point of view, having complexity, depth and nuances not found in the 1990s. But 1990 was my first vintage here. I arrived a few weeks before vintage to a winery in chaos. So I did everything conservatively and safely. I had a safety-first attitude. In 1991, things were more settled and I made wine the way I wanted to.”

At Katnook Estate, Wayne Stehbens supports 1990 over 1991. “Both were definitely better than average. The 1991s have finer fruit flavours but they lag behind the 1990s which have a subtle richness of fruit and a wonderful mid-palate richness.”

My own tastings support the view of 1991 Coonawarras offering ripe-berry aromas and flavours with strong varietal definition, but with a lean astringency. From what I’ve tasted these are, as Greg Clayfield alliterated, “classically correct Coonawarras”. The best deliver a great concentration of flavour and will certainly cellar very well.

The 1990s in general are massively constructed for Coonawarras and in my view the unusual richness of fruit currently masking strong tannins might finally win the day. But whichever style you prefer, wines from both vintages strike me as amongst the best and most affordable Australia has yet produced. 1990 and 1991 Coonawarra reds are not just an exciting cellaring proposition, but safe ones as well.

Re-packaging of a range of Seppelts wines due for release on July 1, signals an awakening of the industry giant, Southcorp Wines. As the diverse wine-making cultures of Sepplelts, Wynns-Seaview, Lindemans-Buring, and Penfolds were folded together under one banner just a few years back, market share slipped away alarmingly.

But according to the group’s Chief Executive, Bruce Kemp, the slide has been not only arrested but reversed. One of the forces driving renewed growth is the emergence of a marketing arm with a vigour approaching that of the wine making cultures making up the group.

Colourful labels, designed by Barrie Tucker of Adelaide, put an attractive face on five wines emerging from Seppelts Great Western winery in western Victoria. At last packaging matches the sheer quality of what’s in the bottle. And an audience beyond a handful of connoisseurs ought to follow. Winemaking traditions going back to the 1920s and a promise that all wines will be sourced only from Victoria within two years underpin the whole concept

I doubt there’s another winery in the world handled such volumes of chardonnay from diverse sources, fermented and matured in every possible permutation and combination of tanks and barrels from every major oak forest in the world. Of the literally hundreds of separate components each year, thousands of blending options presented themselves.

Commercially, the payoff for twenty years development came with Woodleys Queen Adelaide Chardonnay, now the biggest selling white wine in Australia. And for consumers there has been top quality at every price point between $5 and $25: Gold Label, then Corella Ridge, Great Western, and Show Reserve Chardonnays.

In recent years, Corella Ridge, one of the revamped labels, selling for around $9.99 on discount is the wine that’s captured consumer interest. It succeeded because it delivered the magic flavour combination of chardonnay and oak at a modest price. In masked tastings it easily took on wines in the $15-$20 price range.

The latest version, I believe is the best yet and really issues a challenge to small producers. All those years of experimentation in the Great Western Winery pay off here: the wine is a predominantly Victorian blend (Strathbogie Ranges, Bright, Yarra Valey, Mornington Peninsula and Heathcote) with a touch from Glenroy in the NSW Snowy Mountains.

It has a phenomenal richness derived from top fruit sourcing, polished wine-making skills and the use of high-quality oak during fermentation and maturation. If you’ve grown tired of oak-matured chardonnays, try this one to restore your faith in the breed. Revel in it and smile at the price — about $12.50 recommended retail, but certain to be discounted to $9.99. It’s sensationally good at that price.

Sheoak Spring Rhine Riesling 1993 drinks beautifully. It’s riesling with an intensiy of flavour but delicacy well removed from mainstream Australian styles from warmer areas. The nature of the beast springs from its origins in the very cool Portland area (about 38.5 degrees south), on the Western Victorian coast, tempered and filled out a little with a touch from Great Western. Price is the same as for Corella Ridge.

‘Rhymney’, a name long associated with Seppelts Victorian wines disappeared for a decade or so. It made a comeback appended to a superb Sauvignon Blanc in 1992. The brightly-liveried 1993 delivers the same outstanding quality. It features the distinctive, pungent aroma and fruitiness of sauvignon blanc grown in cool climates. Like the other two whites, it offers outstanding quality at the price. Cloudy Bay followers could get a pleasant surprise here.

“Chalambar’, another old Seppelt wine label is resurrected quite logically as the name for its shiraz (formerly hermitage), grown at the foot of Mount Chalambar, Great Western. The 1991, like so many vintages before it over the last thirty years provides rich, satisfying drinking and has the potential to cellar for many years. Priced the same as the whites, it is a bargain.

Harpers Range Cabernet Malbec 1991, winner of the Jimmy Watson Trophy in 1992, moves to another quality level. Bruce Kemp tells me only 4,500 cases were made and it should sell between $13 and $17 a bottle. This is one to cellar for 5-10 years — a substantial wine.

In the long-term interests of consumers and the industry, though, Seppelts ought to find a new name for Harpers Range. It has some validity for the current vintage, a Coonawarra-based wine, because Harper’s Range is the name of a limestone dune in the vicinity of Coonawarra. But as grape sourcing moves to Victoria in future vintages, ‘Harpers Range’ has no place on the label. It’s wrong not only in principle, but sets the scene for conflict with future grape growers over on Harpers Range.

Padthaway is a dear friend of Australian wine drinkers. Yet its contribution to the quality of our everyday drinking has often been anonymous or, before Lindeman’s success with chardonnay from the district, served up under the name Keppoch. As a viticultural area it barely existed until broad acre plantings began in the late 1960s.

For reasons best known to itself, the ABS lumps statistics on Coonawarra and Padthaway together, making it hard to trace separately the growth of what are probably the two most important modern wine-growing areas in Australia.

But to give some indication of the phenomenal growth of the region, the combined Coonawarra-Padthaway grape tonnage for wine making in 1968 was about 1000 tonnes. By 1973 that had grown to almost 5,000 tonnes, leaping to 18,000 tonnes in 1978; 22,000 tonnes in 1983 and 42,000 tonnes in 1992.

By parting with a modest $400 I prised split figures from the ABS for the past decade, revealing Padthaway’s production since 1985 as around 20,000 tonnes a year of wine grapes. That’s twice the entire output of Western Australia, and the equivalent of about 1.4 million dozen 750 mL bottles.

That’s big production in anyone’s language. And it’s poised to explode over the next few years as more large-scale planting proceeds.

According to James Halliday, Seppelts were the first in the area, planting small trial plots in 1963, followed by 25-hectare vineyards in 1964 and 1965. Hardys and Lindemans arrived in 1968 and were followed by Wynns, a private grower, Don Brown, Orlando, Tolleys, and Padthaway Estate.

Broad-acre plantings were the order of the day. And although Seppelts original plantings focused on red wines, Padthaway was soon feeding the white wine boom of the seventies and eighties. Today, grape production is 60 per cent white, 40 per cent red. But that may well be swinging the other way as exports gather pace and the area’s reds reveal their full potential.

Despite such phenomenal grape output, Padthaway did not have a winery until Padthaway Estate commenced operations in 1989. It remains the district’s sole winery (more on that next week).

The large operators simply truck grapes or juice to wineries elsewhere. Southcorp, for instance, sends most output from its 1100 hectares in Padthaway to the Rouge Homme and Wynns wineries in Coonawarra, 80 kilometres to the south; BRL Hardy sends juice northwards to Reynella and McLaren Vale.

Seppelt, Lindemans, and Hardys all originally saw the area as a source of large-quantity, reasonable quality grapes for commercial table-wine production. Despite high grape yields in those early days, quality was generally far better than the wine makers had expected. Even so, most output disappeared anonymously into big commercial blends.

Where the area was acknowledged on the label, both Seppelt and Hardy used the name Keppoch or Keppoch Valley. But Lindemans phenomenal commercial and show success with its Padthaway Chardonnay and Fume Blanc soon saw that name adopted by all parties. By a quirk of marketing, Keppoch remains an obscure place name on a map, while Padthaway slowly but surely strides onto the world stage as a unique wine-making region.

Padthaway may ever remain source of commercial wines with no acknowledged district of origin. Hardys Sir James is a good example of that (around 120,000 cases a year, the local rep tells me). But, equally, we are increasingly seeing the cream of the crop acknowledged on labels or in press releases.

Lindemans Padthaway Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Verdelho have a place in most liquor stores and remain the region’s best-known ambassadors. But there is another level of quality above these now emerging.

Orlando’s Lawsons Padthaway Shiraz consistently demonstrates the area’s ability to produce exceptionally-high quality long-lived reds. And in recent years, I notice Penfolds impeccable Bin Number reds acknowledging Padthaway on their labels. I understand fruit quality was good enough for Bin 707 in 1993.

Wine lovers visiting Coonawarra might slip up the road 80 kilometres to see Padthaway’s great sea of vines. A gentle slope flattening out to the west contrasts with Coonawarra’s unbroken flatness. But 700,000 years back they were part of the same coastal formation.

The terra rossa soils of both areas are weathered from the same limestone bed deposited all those years ago. Padthaway, with its shorter wine-making history has a less clear-cut identity than Coonawarra with its world-class, unique reds.

My bet is that Padthaway’s highest achievement are yet to come and they will be reds not whites.

Austrian glass manufacturer Georg Riedel recently toured Australia touting his wares. Georg would have us believe a glass is not simply a convenient vessel for moving wine from bottle to lip.

He claims glasses from his Kufstein factory are purpose built to transport the subleties and highlights of specific wines and spirits to the drinkers nose and palate.

In an article in Wine & Spirit International, we’re told that Georg’s father, Professor Claus Josef Riedel, in 1970 turned his back on aesthetics to concentrate on functional wine glasses. His family had been engaged in the glassware trade for two centuries, first in Bohemia and now in Austria.

Professor Riedel believed that a wine’s first contact with one of the tongue’s four taste zones (sweet, bitter, salt, and acid) was generally the most influential factor in the drinker’s perception of its taste.

And given that the nose detects a far bigger and more subtle array of charactersitics than the tongue, glasses had to capture as much aroma as possible.

Regarding this latter attribute, Professor Riedel was not the first to observe how dramatically better big glasses are than small ones. Perhaps he’s taken this further than anyone else, though, with a special Bordeaux glass capable of holding about one litre of wine.

It sounds more like a goldfish bowl than a wine glass and you can imagine what a twit you’d look using one in public (perhaps even heroic at Canberra’s wine and food frolic).

I remember ecountering outsize glasses at restaurant Gener Nev in Asti, Italy. There we revelled in the perfume of a 1978 Barolo served in tiny splashes in huge bowls. But it was a great wine and may well have been just as impressive in standard tasting glasses.

If Riedel is not unique in the immensity of his glasses, he is, I believe in claiming to shape each model to tip wine precisely on the right part of the tongue to maximise the best features of a specific wine.

For example both his riesling and pinot noir glass have an outwardly curved lip (Prof’s son Georg calls it a spoiler) directing wine to the tip of the tongue “highlighting fruit and sweetness and balancing the natural acidity of these grape varieties.”

But for cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, the design pushes wine to the middle of the tongue balancing fruit and acidity.

Do the glasses really work? Wine & Spirit quotes American wine guru Robert M. Parker, “All of this may sound absurdly high-brow or esoteric, but the effect of these glasses on fine wine is profound. I cannot emphasise enough what a difference they make.”

And the magazine also cites a tasting in New York attended by some of the world’s best palates, including our own Len Evans, concluding that the lowest-rated wine in the highest-rated glass outperformed the highest rated wine in the lowest-rated glass.

That, of course, is absurd. Does Mr Riedel really expect us to believe his glasses are more important than the wine we drink? Believing glass size and shape is crucial to delivering aroma is not unreasonable. But to assert that it can be infinitely fine-tuned to best suit every wine on earth — indeed to trasform humble wine to great — stretches credibility.

Whether or not the glasses really work as claimed, Professor Riedel’s venture has been a remarkable success commercially. The factory now employs 300 people and turns over fifteen million pound sterling a year.

With all those mouths to feed, little wonder he travels the world with his velvet-lined sample case mesmerising a breathless wine press.

The success is a measure of just how wide and deep the wine culture has spread in the last twenty years. And perhaps illustrates the pretension that sometimes accompanies it.

Georg has developed, as well, Cognac glasses in conjunction with Hennessy and there are whisky glasses (with Campbell distillers) and grappa glasses (with Nonino) in the pipeline. In all these he seeks to highlight the subtle fruits hidden under masses of spirit.

For all the publicity Mr Riedel attracted, I don’t think one sensible, sceptical phrase has been written in the Australian press. Let’s give one sceptic, wine merchant David Farmer,the final say, “I have recently been experimenting with a goldfish bowl as the ultimate taster. I wonder when these tastings are set up if anyone wonders whether viewing the glasses and knowing what is being promoted as the best glass effects the result. I recall Uri Geller being able to bend spoons with thought waves.”

SOUTHCORP OWNERSHIP, SIZE AND SALES

Southcorp Wines is a wholly owned subsidiary of Southcorp Holdings, a public company with a market capitalisation of around 2 billion Australian dollars.

Until 1994 Southcorp Holdings was known as South Australian Brewing Holdings. The name change followed the disposal of its brewing interests to Lion Nathon.

According to figures published in The Australian and New Zealand Wine industry Directory 1994, Southcorp crushed for its own use 162,000 tonnes of grapes in 1993. Its biggest rivals, BRL-Hardy Limited and Orlando-Wyndham crushed 115,000 and 110,000 tonnes respectively.

Roughly speaking then, Southcorp produces the equivalent of 3.3 million dozen 750 mL bottles (or 29.7 million litres) more than its nearest rival.

In March, 1993 Chief Executive, Bruce Kemp, estimated Southcorp had 30 per cent of the domestic bottled wine market (including sparkling wine) and 22-23 of the cask wine market.

Of exports he puts his company’s share at 25-26 per cent, after discounting for the unusually large volumes of bulk wine shipped to New Zealand wine makers following a disastrous vintage shortfall there in 1993.

The Australian and New Zealand Wine Industry Directory 1994 claims our biggest export earners in 1992-3 were Orlando-Wyndham ($78 million), Southcorp Wines ($68 million), BRL Hardy Ltd ($40 million) and Mildara Blass Ltd ($21 million). With current rates of growth, both Southcorp and Orlando-Wyndham seem poised to sail past $100 million a year in export sales this year.

Bruce Kemp puts Southcorp’s current sales break up as 28 per cent export and 72 per cent domestic. He predicts a fifty-fifty split by the turn of the century.

For the six months to December 1993, the wine division’s domestic sales were up 8.7 per cent and exports 34 per cent. Profit before interest and tax was $34.7 million, up 50 per cent.

The group owns, Tollana, Tulloch, Hungerford Hill, Lindemans, Rouge Homme, Matthew Lang, Leo Buring, Penfolds, Seppelts, Woodleys, Wynns, Seaview, Killawarra, Kaiser Stuhl, Stock Gala Spumante, and J.B. Reynolds Cooler.

As well, it manufacures and distributes under licence market-leading cooler, West Coast and Stock Brandy.

HOW SOUTHCORP WINES EVOLVED

Southcorp Wines is the new masthead for Australia’s biggest wine producer. From shortly after its formation in 1990 until 1994 it was known as the Penfold Wine Group.

The group, with its dazzling array of brands and (even by global standards) spectacular collection of vineyards, was formed when South Australian Brewing Holdings (SABH) bought Penfolds Wines from the troubled Adsteam Group.

SABH already owned Seppelts Wines (inlcuding Woodleys and Hungerford Hill) and had moved one of its young brewery executives, Warrick Duthy, to the helm.

However, Seppelts was dwarfed by Penfolds which, over the previous decade, had added numerous wineries, vineyards, and brands to its portfolio. Kaiser Stuhl, Stock, Wynns, Seaview, Killawarra, Tulloch and Tollana were acquired in the early and mid eighties. With them came vineyards in the Hunter and Eden Valleys, McLaren Vale and, probably most importantly of all, included Wynns priceless holdings on the central terra rossa strip of Coonawarra.

The biggest and grandest haul, though was its purchase from Phillip Morris, early in 1990, of Lindemans Wines including the Leo Buring, Rouge Homme, and Matthew Lang brands.

The acquisition included the historic Ben Ean Winery in the Hunter Valley, Chateau Leonay in the Barossa, and the massive winery, bulk-storage, vintage-cellar and packaging facility at Karadoc on the Murray River near Mildura.

With the new brands and wineries came some of the best vineyards in the lower Hunter in the vicinity of Pokolbin and Broke, a huge acreage at Padthaway and, an hour’s drive further south, yet more of the great Coonawarra terra rossa vineyards. These included the plum sites-become-brands, St George and Limestone Ridge.

At the time of the SABH acquisition, Penfolds still had not fully digested Lindemans. How, the trade wondered at the time, would Ross Wilson, head of SABH, blend the Penfold-Lindeman juggernaut with the smaller Seppelts and come out with a profitable business?

Somehow he had to make three distinct wine-making and corporate cultures fit with those of the parent company. To compound the difficulty, the domestic wine market was in the doldrums and the export market, while gathering momentum, was not the booming phenomenon we see in 1994.

Early in the piece, the dominant culture — Penfolds — appeared to gain ascendancy. But some key players from all cultures fell victim as the new corporate cuvee took shape.

From the SABH/Seppelt side, Warrick Duthy moved on, leaving former Penfolds Chief Executive, Ian Mackley in charge with his old sales and marketing force largely intact. Duthy was joined by old SABH insider, Pryme Footner. At around the same time, Penfolds’ Jim Williams, heir apparent to Mackley, also moved on.

By then Lindemas had already lost Philip Laffer, one-time understudy to former Managing Director, Ray Kidd. Laffer was a technical wizz with a hand in the evolution both of many Lindeman classic wines and the brilliant technology behind the Karadoc facility.

Considering the scale of the merger, there was remarkably little blood letting. As well, the core of each company’s wine-making culture remained intact, giving future marketers the necessary gold dust — diversity and individuality — to develop brands.

And while Ian Mackley’s standing was good on all sides, his retirement fell due shortly after the SABH take over.

With Mackley’s retirement, Wilson appointed Bruce Kemp, from SABH’s hot-water division to head the wine group. So Australia’s largest wine company, with a largely Penfold sales and marketing culture and a mix of wine-making philosophies, found itself with a sharp, business-proven pair of fresh eyes at the top.

VINEYARDS

More than those of any other of the four big Australian producers, Southcorp’s wines draw their strength and character from the company’s own vast and impeccable vineyard holdings in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

Southcorp’s unique ‘end-use evaluation scheme’ links wine maker and viticulturist by tracing, as the name suggests, the end use of each batch of grapes to enter one of the group’s wineries.

As data builds over time, a clear picture of the nature of wine produced from each vineyard plot emerges. Ultimately this lifts wine quality as vineyard management focuses more precisely on what each plot is best capable of producing.

The end-use scheme began with Penfolds and is now applied across the entire group holdings as well to fruit bought from outside growers.

Results of a tasting conducted by international wine society, Les Amis du Vin, dispel any lingering belief in the sanctity of wine-show results or the infallibility of wine-guru palates.

Here, at last, is palpable evidence of the subjective, unreliable, and often meaningless nature of wine judging. As well, the automatic supremacy of cabernet amongst red grape varieties comes under challenge.

The masked tasting, conducted by the Chicago chapter of Les Amis in February, lined up many of the finest French and American cabernet sauvignons from the 1982 vintage.

Fifty judges now wonder how a ring-in won the day. As Chapter Director Paul H. Ernst reported, a shiraz was “the hands-down, concensus favorite of the entire tasting.”

How could grubby-old, work-horse shiraz lick the glitziest names in the glitziest of all red grape varieties, cabernet sauvignon? What was it doing there in the first place?

Ernst writes, “… this year’s ringer was the 1982 Penfold’s Grange Hermitage… no one overtly identified the wine, the combination of cassis-like fruit and green olive character contributed by the oak, sufficed to stump the majority of attendees. Its relative maturity and round, elegant fruit were certainly some of the elements that resulted in it being… the favorite.”

Why the ringer was included, I don’t know. But anyone who attends masked tastings appreciates just how difficult it is to spot the unexpected. When we’re told there are twenty four cabernets to assess, we assume that’s what’s in front of us. Trickery’s the last thing we expect. So, it’s not surprising that no one identified one big, rich shiraz amongst twenty three big, rich cabernets.

Still, assessing the 1982 reds, not spotting the odd one out, was the theme of the tasting. And because the press release focuses on scores, presumably the organisers believe the results have some significance beyond being simply a tally of preferences on the day. Are they telling us this is a valid and definitive ranking of the wines tasted?

For that to hold true, then the results should be reproducible. And, of course, they are not. Even at this tasting where guests were free to use either of two scoring systems, two appreciably different rankings resulted. Were the same wines to be lined up again the next day with a different group of judges, no doubt a different order of preferences would result.

What we have to conclude is that the tasting, like all of its ilk, offers the consumer no reliable guide to quality. It can be seen as nothing more than an averaging of the opinions of fifty people and offers not one useful insight into the nature of the wines tasted.

No absolute value can be stuck on a wine. And even relative values in a line up become less valid in direct proportion to the diversity of styles being tasted. Wine collectors with the 1982s in their cellars might find carefully prepared descriptions of each wine more enlightening than a mere ranking.

The tasting presented a diverse array of wines, including many classics. All five Medoc First Growths were present, plus a sprinkling of other highly-regarded Bordeaux, as was Grange Hermitage, and Opus One, the brilliant joint creation of California’s Robert Mondavi and France’s late Baron Phillipe de Rothschild of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild (one of the Bordeaux First Growths).

Had it been a race, the bookies would’ve cleaned up. The illustrious favourites, under both scoring systems, finished well down a field led by an outsider. (Somehow, though, I suspect the form books won’t be re-written just yet).

The tasting was split into three flights of eight wines each. But even if we question the overall valdity of rankings, it does say a lot for Grange 1982 that it was in the flight containing four of the five Bordeaux First Growths.

Being a touch jealous and not too happy with the way it has been reported, I’m joining forces with Alby Sedaitis of Barocca Cafe to reconvene the tasting here in Canberra and will report back in due course. However, we intend lopping the number of wines from 24 to 12 and the number of tasters from 50 back to 6 — a proper ratio.

We’ll assess the wines blind and then savour them slowly over an extended lunch to see how well our initial assessments hold up.

To paraphrase the recently deceased Max Schubert, creator of Grange, when you’re confronted by magnificence you should savour it to the hilt.