Yearly Archives: 2006

Wine review — Leconfield, Evans & Tate, Miceli

9 July 2006Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Leconfield Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 $26 to $30
In the early eighties some Coonawarra makers flirted with early-picked cabernet styles. The resulting thin, green wines enjoyed wine-show support for a time before good sense and ripeness once again prevailed. Leconfield hung onto a green component in its cabernets for much of the nineties, so it’s good to report a shift to a more generous, riper, fresher style under winemaker Paul Gordon. Less irrigation, pruning for lower yields and later harvesting account for the riper but elegant berry flavours. And increased skin contact, easy-on-the-new-oak maturation and more aeration combine to present these bright berry flavours wrapped in a satisfying packet of firm, ripe tannins.

Evans & Tate Salisbury Chardonnay 2005 $9-$11
Largely because of generous, fruity, inexpensive wines like Salisbury, chardonnay remains Australia’s favourite bottled wine. AC Nielsen figures reveal that in the year to March, 2006, chardonnay accounted for 16.1 per cent of bottled wine sales with sparkling white in number two position, followed by shiraz, then cabernet sauvignon, then sauvignon blanc in fifth place accounting for 5.8 per cent of sales. While we drink almost three bottles of chardonnay for every one of sauvignon blanc, chardonnay is in mild decline and sauvignon blanc in rapid growth. Sourced from the hot Murray Darling region, Salisbury offers generous, ripe, peachy varietal flavour with a delicious zesty freshness.

Miceli Mornington Peninsula Iolanda Pinot Grigio 2005 $19.95
As Australian and New Zealand winemakers grapple with pinot grigio – a white mutant of the red pinot noir — we’re seeing a diversity of styles driven as much by winemaker input as by region of origin. What Michael Miceli has shown is that even with high levels of winemaking artifice – oxidation, warm ferment, wild yeast ferment and lees maturation etc – the variety can still assert itself. We’ve seen some beauties in this mould from Miceli in recent years, including this very complex, new-release 2005. It captures the minerally/nashi pear flavour of pinot grigio, somehow enhanced by the patina of winemaking inputs.

For sale — Seppeltsfield, Aussie icon, fortified wine treasure trove

9 July 2006WineChris Shanahan

Last week, as part of a cost cutting drive related to its acquisition of Southcorp, Fosters Group announced the sale of one of Australia’s most cherished and visited wine estates, Seppeltsfield.

The 185-hectare property is a treasury of Barossa winemaking history dating to the early 1850s. Visitors to the site drive through an avenue of date palms – established to keep workers employed during the depression – to the complex of cellars, dwellings and National Trust listed Seppelt family homestead.

Five generations of the Seppelt family established this sprawling village before the company floated in 1970 and subsequently passed, intact, through successive ownerships by South Australian Brewing Holdings, Adsteam, Southcorp and Fosters.

Perhaps the most direct links to the past, with continuing relevance to wine today, are the 108-hectares of vines and around nine million litres of fortified wine stored in an estimated thirty thousand barrels – each in need of TLC.

With the market for fortified wine all but dead, who will take on such a colossal volume, even if it is some of the best material in the world?

It’s easier to imagine would-be buyers eyeing the beautiful old grenache, shiraz and mourvedre bush vines and thinking red rather than fortified.

But those nine million litres of fortified wine won’t simply evaporate. And the fact that Fosters is offering for sale the Seppeltsfield fortified brands as well as the stock means that their continuation is not beyond imagination.

Could a luxury goods business – such as Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, already with substantial wine and spirit assets – be tempted? If anyone knows how to crack luxury markets, the French do?

Look, for example, how they’ve created the Chandon sparkling business in the Yarra and at the importance of the magnificent winery, restaurant, cellar door complex in the marketing of it. Could they attempt this with fortifieds and with a similar icon in the Barossa?

Another possibility is to find an extremely wealthy family or private company prepared to become custodian of this priceless asset. They’d need to love wine more than they love money.

But that has been the case historically with wine and wealthy people. The pursuit of great wines can supplant normal commercial judgement – or live side by side with it in the situation where a profitable business supports a lofty wine ambition.

Those of us who love those irreplaceable Seppeltsfield fortifieds certainly hope a suitable new owner can be found. And I’m sure James Godfrey does, too.

For many years now James has presided over this extraordinary collection of wine, including an unbroken line of Para Liqueurs stretching back to 1878.

His is a demanding and highly specialised skill. Each year he makes and adds new wines to the barrels while taking off carefully judged portions of older material for blending and bottling.

The range is wide and includes pale, delicate fino, aged-amontillado and luscious old oloroso ‘sherry’ styles; tawny ‘port’ styles of various ages, up to and including the sublime DP 90; luscious, aged

Rutherglen muscats and tokays; and the unique single-vintage Para 100-year-old – the first barrel of this having been laid down by Benno Seppelt in 1878 with instructions – duly followed – that it be bottled in 1978.

Whatever commercial possibilities Seppeltsfield possesses, this unique fortified collection will hopefully endure. It’s the heart and soul of Seppeltsfield – a national treasure that ought not gather dust, nor be discarded. Rather, it demands to live on giving every generation a taste of the past, present and future in every glass.

Wine review — Castello di Poggio, Musella & Illuminati

2 July 2006Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Despite a glut sloshing around the world, Australia continues its parochial wine-drinking ways. Indeed, distance — aided by a weak dollar — seems to be a one-way tyranny these days, holding back a potential flood of cheap, surplus foreign wine while allowing the free passage of our own in the other direction.

Thus in the year ended June 2005, imports represented just five per cent by volume and eight per cent by value of wine consumed in Australia.

Stripped of our fairly hefty Champagne drinking habit — and the pricey table wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy – the great bulk of imports consumed, I suspect, remain in the under $10 price range, with volumes tapering sharply above $15 a bottle.

Certainly this value area is the key focus for Australia’s two largest liquor retailers, Woolworths and Coles Myer. For both, imports play a profitable role in a tough market. And, increasingly, both import direct from producers, bypassing local wholesalers.

Importing direct is nothing new. At any time in the past one or two enterprising retailers – with an eye to bigger margins – imported direct, while the majority, of necessity, purchased from wholesalers.

In theory, a direct importer might pocket the entire wholesale as well as the retail profit margin. But in seeking an advantage over competitors most have traditionally undercut normal retail prices, effectively splitting the wholesale margin with customers.

With these two retailers sharing almost half of Australia’s take-away liquor sales and fighting tooth and nail to outdo one another, we can safely assume that today a greater proportion of the direct importing advantage is being competed away.

Curious at the increasing profile of direct imports in Woolies and Coles liquor outlets, I recently drove to Melbourne to visit the warring parties. On successive days I visited the Dan Murphy head office (Woolworths ‘big box’ brand) and Coles Myer Liquor Group to look at the overall imports list and, as a case study, to taste each group’s Italian imports.

What they have in common is a competitive urge backed by the resources and expertise to select and buy well – meaning a pretty good value offer for shoppers.

Tony Leon, Dan Murphy boss, an old-time trading retailer and former partner of the late Dan Murphy is still at the helm under Woolies’ ownership. In this no-bull, short-chain-of-command business, premium and imported wine man, Campbell Stott, reports direct to Tony and has support from the experienced former winemaker, Steve Creber.

The three have as good a nose for wine as for business and this translates into a growing portfolio of value wines from France, Chile, Argentina, Italy, Spain and Germany.

The focus is on very good under-$10 wines — increasingly under screw cap at Dan Murphy’s insistence — with a sprinkling of more expensive regional specialties of varying quality and value.

Within a somewhat more complex business structure, Coles’ premium wine and imports man, Jeremy Stockman – long-time retailer and wine show judge – reports to Grant Ramage, a wine experienced recent import from Oddbins, UK.

As Stockman’s selections appear not only in First Choice outlets (Coles’ answer to Dan Murphy) but also in the upmarket Vintage Cellars chain, the top-end section of his Italian range is, in my opinion, stronger and more diverse, and the cheaper wines are all interesting regional specialties.

Moscato d’Asti (Castello di Poggio) 2005 $13.99
Dan Murphy’s import is a lovely example of this unique, low-alcohol white made from moscato grapes grown in the vicinity of Asti, Piedmont. Beautifully, fresh, light and crisp with delicious, sweet grapey flavours, it weighs in at just 5.5 per cent alcohol by volume. Sweet wines might be unfashionable for some in Australia, but Moscato d’Asti is catching on as it ought. It’s a good case for regional specialisation as few Australian attempts at this style capture the light, tingly fresh essential to balance the juicy, sweet grapiness. Reduces to $12.99 in case lots.

Valpolicella Classico Superiore Vigne Nuova (Musella) 2003 $19.99
Watch for the specials on this as importer Coles Myer offers it considerably cheaper through First Estate and Vintage Cellars on occasion. It’s another Italian regional specialty made in Valpolicella, a little to the west of Verona, using the native red corvina veronese, rondinella and molinara grape varieties. This is a modern expression of the style – very bright and fresh with lovely perfume, medium bodied, juicy but tight palate, with a touch of new oak, and tart, dry finish. Valpolicella can be wishy-washy. But this one’s terrific – with the fruit and structure to accompany savoury food.

Montepulciano d’Abruzzo ‘Riparosso’ (Illuminati) 2004 $8 to $11
Just to show that Australia doesn’t have a monopoly on value, here’s a savoury favourite from Italy. I confess to having sourced Riparosso for Farmer Bros in 1991 and, after their demise, introducing it to the Coles Myer group in 1995. They continue to offer Riparosso – often misspelled as Riparossa in press ads — through Vintage Cellars, Liquorland and First Choice. It’s made in Abruzzi, on the Adriatic coast by the Illuminati family using the local Montepulciano grape. Family patriarch, Dino, elevated this variety to new heights and now his son, Stefano, continues to fine-tune Riparosso lifting it to new heights in the sensational 2004 vintage.

Wine review — Yalumba The Octavius, Trust & O’Leary Walker

25 June 2006Vineyard, Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Yalumba The Octavius 2002 $89.95
Yalumba’s inky, oaky Barossa shiraz began life in 1988 – a burly overstatement, says winemaker Brian Walsh that the old firm had renounced the wispy, wishy-washy reds of the 1980s. In recent vintages, however, ‘Oaktavius’, has become less inky, oaky and burly – thanks in part to a toning down of the oak regime – and increasingly seamless, without sacrificing its powerful Barossa fruit flavour. Recent tastings of the 1993, 2000 and 2002 vintages illustrated this progression from power and oak to power with elegance – the latter being partly attributable to unique vintage conditions. Octavius has progressed from exclamation mark to serious regional benchmark.

Trust Central Victoria Shiraz 2004 $
That high alcohol red is not the sole domain of our warm growing regions shows in this fragrant and velvety Central Victorian shiraz. Like the warm Barossa’s Octavius, above, it weighs in at 14.5 per cent alcohol by volume. And both wines display the rich mouth-feel of alcohol without inflicting the astringent heat seen in some similarly potent reds. Which just shows that all of the components of a wine – alcohol included – need to harmonise to produce an appealing drink. The key is in the grapes, in this instance selected batches from four vineyards turned into delicious wine by Don Lewis, Narelle King and Toby Barlow.

O’Leary Walker Watervale & Polish Hill Rieslings $20
& Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc 2006 $22
Find a warm corner somewhere and crack one of these deliciously vibrant 2006 whites from David O’Leary and Nick Walker. The Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc has the racy tang and exciting flavour of fresh passionfruit plus the mid palate richness missing in too many Aussie sauv blancs. The rieslings, from distinct sub regions of the Clare Valley, share a common varietal thread but differ in subtle ways. The Watervale wine seems weightier in the mouth and leans to zesty lime-like flavours. The Polish Hill wine has a lightness and fine-ness and a pleasantly tart citrus character.

Brian Walsh, Octavius and the case for diverse shiraz styles

25 June 2006People, WineChris Shanahan

Judged by share of media voice, Australia’s fragrant, refined, cool-climate shiraz styles have the upper hand over the sturdy, ripe warm-climate styles.

Steadfastly, however, Australia’s wine investors and consumers continue to back the robust, ‘old fashioned’ warm-climate shirazes. Some might say that this is just the old guard doggedly sticking to the past, forever blind to the enlightenment.

Others, more reasonably, might say that, well, if winemakers grow shiraz in cool places like Canberra or Great Western or Mount Barker, the wines aren’t going to taste like those made in the warmer Clare, Barossa or McLaren Vale.

These reasonable people might also add that the longer history and greater production volumes in the warm areas probably explains, at least in part, why these robust reds still overwhelmingly dominate the secondary market (judged by Langton’s Classification, based on auction volumes and prices).

Yet another explanation might be that the majority of people simply favour big, ripe, warm shiraz flavours over the fragrant, savoury, refined styles from cooler areas.

Or perhaps, as a note from Yalumba Winemaker, Brian Walsh suggests, this is not a popularity competition at all. Brian writes, “What is important though is that we acknowledge that shiraz has many great manifestations in this country and the debate should be less about cool climate verus warm/hot climate and more about celebrating the differences between the styles, while interpreting and being true to the appropriate style for one’s region…”

Brian’s long, thoughtful note arrived with a sample bottle of Yalumba The Octavius 2002 (reviewed below) – an idiosyncratic wine that in 1988 marked Barossa-based Yalumba’s return to making solid reds after having lost direction for most of the eighties.

Octavius’s evolution — from a dense, overwhelmingly oaky style (hence the industry nickname ‘Oaktavius’) to the rich, ripe harmonious regional style of today – parallels the finessing of so many other warm climate Australian flagships.

Like Octavius, Peter Lehmann Stonewell, Grant Burge Meshach, Hardys Eileen Hardy and Tim Adams Aberfeldy – to name just a few – modified viticulture, winemaking and oak maturation over the past decade to produce increasingly graceful, harmonious styles – without losing the regional thumbprint.

While this finessing has been far from universal, it reflects a restlessness amongst our best and most influential winemakers. This is fuelled by both self-criticism and wider debate amongst winemakers and critics and often fanned by our wine show system.

Within this style debate, makers from our cooler areas have unquestionably helped to raise the bar. Wines of the calibre of Canberra’s Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier and Seppelt St Peters Shiraz are their own best argument for seamless, delicious, near perfection.

The best warm-climate shiraz makers acknowledge these – as they do the best of France’s Rhone Valley styles and see some attributes of these wines – if not the cool-grown fruit flavours – as desirable in their own wines.

But just as some cool-climate shiraz suffers from being too lean or just plain unripe, warm climate shiraz can move beyond plummy ripe fruit flavours to cloying porty or raisened flavours. And both, of course, can suffer from poor winemaking, particularly in the use of inappropriate oak.

As consumers, we’re fortunate to have such a spectrum of outstanding shiraz styles available in Australia. We’ve taken ownership of this French variety. And whether it’s a peppery Craiglee Sunbury, an earthy Brokenwood Graveyard Hunter, a fragrant, silky Clonakilla Canberra or a powerful, graceful Octavius Barossa, the drinking pleasure is immense.

Wine review — Helm, De Bortoli Gulf Station & Jr Jones

18 June 2006Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Helm Canberra District Pinot Noir 2005 $28
Tasted Ken Helm’s 2006 riesling just before bottling early this week. It’s a lovely, intensely flavoured, finely structured drop. Watch this space for a full review when it’s released in September. Ken’s little surprise, though, was this Pinot Noir, sourced from Frank Van Der Loo’s Mount Majura vineyard. With a little help from Edgar Riek and the late Andre Simone’s Burgundy writings Ken makes a tasty debut into the difficult world of pinot making. It’s attractively perfumed, with delicious fruit and the variety’s silky texture – a very attractive drop for current drinking.

De Bortoli Gulf Station Yarra Valley Chardonnay & Pinot Noir 2005 $18
Family-owned De Bortoli appears to be thriving in the current tough market and a fair bit of that success surely rests on the exceptional value for money offered across a wide range of wine styles. This Gulf Station pair delivers Yarra Valley style and quality at a modest price — made even more modest by occasional retailer discounting. While built on elegant, cool climate varietal flavours, both wines offer a few little winemaking extras that add greatly to the appeal. Both are made by Steve ‘Wally’ Webber, the same man behind De Bortoli’s premium Yarra Valley wines.

Jr. Jones Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir and Chardonnay 2005 $16.95
These make an interesting contrast to the more savoury, similarly price Yarra wines reviewed above. Vigneron Rob Frewer says these are grown and made to achieve the comparatively low price point of this high-production-cost region. They say that the proof of the chardy is in the sipping. And both wines hold up to the taste test. The chardonnay is pure citrus and melon varietal with the fine structure of the region and yeast-maturation-derived textural richness. The pinot is fragrant and pure and medium bodied with solid texture and fine, drying acid/tannin grip. See jonesroad.com.au for stockists.

Wine exports to China — it’ll be a long march

18 June 2006WineChris Shanahan

Business people have been easily seduced by the sheer size of China. Surely, the argument seems to go, if I can sell just one widget for every ten of the 1.3 billion population, then I have a market for 130 million widgets.

But in China – as in every market – the devil is in the detail. Hence recent decisions by both of Australia’s major brewers – Fosters and Lion Nathan – to shut or sell their Chinese operations.

Unlike the big brewers, Australian winemakers are in general more likely to export to China than to attempt local production. But despite encouraging export growth from a low base, it’s going to be a long march to success.

Driven largely by shipments of bulk wine, China exports for the year ended May 2006 grew 483 per cent by volume and 110 per cent by value over the figures for May 2005.

In the same period, the surge in bulk wine shipments – no doubt fuelled by Australia’s wine glut – saw the unit price plummet sixty four per cent to $1.75 a litre – the lowest of any of our export markets.

I’m told that the bulk of these exports are destined to the big commercial centres of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. And, indeed, it’s easy enough to fine Australian wine – conspicuously Jacob’s Creek — in these cities.

But with Jacob’s Creek selling at around 160 Yuan ($27) a bottle – about two thirds of the weekly wage for a schoolteacher — we get some idea of how limited the market is in relation to the population as a whole.

While China’s massive economic growth is surely increasing wealth for parts of its population, the continuing weak Yuan seems likely to limit demand for imported consumer goods like wine for many years.

Visiting China recently, I heard a Bloomberg report that the number of Chinese earning more than fifty thousand Yuan a year is set to double by 2010. Impressive as that sounds, it may not mean a great lift in consumption of wine imports.

While a person might live well in China on fifty thousand Yuan a year, it equates to just $AD8,300 or $US6,250 – leaving limited power for buying imported luxuries.

As well, it could take decades before China changes its broad consumption habits. The same Bloomberg report said that household consumption accounted for just forty per cent of China’s GDP (compared with seventy five per cent in the USA) and that Chinese households saved twenty five per cent of disposable income (compared with minus 0.1 per cent in the USA)

Assuming continued economic growth, then the market for Australian wine in China should increase steadily in the major cities then, over many, many decades, spread as the middle class grows.

At present, though, I could see little evidence of wine consumption beyond the city stores and expensive restaurants.

What I found on the streets of China was an abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap food and a choice of beer, baijiu (clear spirit), water or tea in most little restaurants.

A good sign for future marketers though, is that the Chinese love their food and the blokes in particular like to wash it down with a refreshing lager or tot of baijiu.

Indeed, it’s easy to imagine a future Chinese generation enjoying a chilled Aussie riesling. But it’ll be a long, smoggy road that might take some time to traverse.

Maurice O’Shea’s remarkable Hunter heritage

11 June 2006People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

A tasting of wonderful Hunter reds last week brought home what an amazing winemaking heritage we have in Australia. It also served as reminder of how terribly slow we’ve been at taking this message to the world.

As we reach the end of a tremendous boom that took our wine exports from a few hundred million dollars to about $2.8 billion in a little over a decade, our winemakers now face the reality that few of the millions of people enjoying Australian wine have any awareness of our wine-growing regions.

Even less known are the intriguing wines made from small plots of very old vines sprinkled throughout our best wine-growing regions.

Some of these date to the mid nineteenth century – the surviving free settlers or, perhaps, refugees if you like — from the great vineyards of Europe that perished in the phylloxera vine louse invasion of the 1870s, 80s and 90s.

These vines and the wines made from them have a fascinating story to tell and will hopefully play an important part in the next phase of marketing Australian wines as we take our individual regions to the world.

Phylloxera-ravaged Europe has few stories to match the 1840s vines shirazes of Langmeil and Turkey Flat in the Barossa; of wines from Tahbilk’s and Best’s 1860s and 1850s vines in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley and Great Western region, respectively; or of McWilliams Hunter Valley 1880s vines Maurice O’Shea Shiraz or Brand’s Coonawarra Stentiford’s Block 1890s vines shiraz.

And these are just examples of wines drawn from individual vineyards. So much of the best material coming from, say, McLaren Vale and the Barossa, and going to high quality blends comes from extremely old vines dating from the nineteenth and earliest twentieth century.

How each of these vineyards survived across a century more has its own story. The common thread, of course, is that the soil and climate proved hospitable. Then come all the variations based on successive owners, economic swings and suitability of the grapes to wine styles.

That so many of the oldest vines are shiraz may owe more to versatility – it makes good fortified wine as well as good table wine – than to the durability of the vine itself.

In the case of McWilliams 1880s Old Hill Vineyard, ownership passed through two generations of the King family before Maurice O’Shea bought the vineyard, at Pokolbin, in 1921. Shortly afterwards O’Shea planted nearby the still-surviving Old Paddock Vineyard.

Who knows what may have become of the vineyards had O’Shea been forced from the land following financial difficulties. Fortunately, the McWilliam family bought an interest – and later full control — of Mount Pleasant and encouraged O’Shea, a brilliant winemaker, to remain for the rest of his working life.

Upon O’Shea death in 1956, his assistant, Brian Walsh assumed control. And Walsh, in turn, passed the mantle to current winemaker, Phil Ryan, in 1978.

Though winemaking practice has changed considerably since O’Shea’s time, Ryan still relies on fruit from those old vineyards – one selected by O’Shea the other planted by him – to make McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant property’s flagship shiraz, named after O’Shea.

It’s a great example of the idiosyncratic regional style – rich and earthy, but refined and soft, with tremendous ageing ability. When we drink these, we savour a little history. And, as the 1957 vintage showed in last week’s tasting, it’s a pleasure we might share with our grandchildren.

McWilliams Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz 2003 $60
As a taste of history or simply as a Hunter red, O’Shea Shiraz offers fair value at around $60. Sourced principally from McWilliams Old Hill Vineyard (planted 1880s) with a component from the Old Paddock vineyard (planted 1920s), it’s a higher alcohol, oakier red than Maurice O’Shea made from the same vines from the 1920s until 1956. However, with a few caveats about the oak and alcohol, the heart of this wine remains the very concentrated fruit flavours delivered by these old, low-yielding vines. Over time these should assert themselves as the wine reveals its mellow, soft, idiosyncratic Hunter character.

Wine review — Ravensworth, Eileen Hardy & Madfish

4 June 2006Wine reviewChris Shanahan

Ravensworth Canberra District Shiraz Viognier 2005 $30
Winemaker Bryan Martin works at Clonakilla Wines, Murrumbateman, helping Tim Kirk with the Clonakilla products and making his own wines under the Ravensworth label. Bryan’s first Ravensworth Shiraz Viognier blend improves significantly on the very good straight shirazes of recent years. It’s a seamless, seductive drop squarely in the highly aromatic, savoury, refined style pioneered by Clonakilla and glimpsed in several others from the Murrumbateman and Hall sub regions. Ravensworth is another significant wine for Canberra, cementing shiraz as the district’s great specialty. It’s wine of this calibre that’ll put Canberra on the map. Available from Bryan via ravensworthwines.com.au

Eileen Hardy Chardonnay 2004 $48 to $50
Since tasting this in a twenty-vintage line up last year Eileen 2004 went on to blitz the Australian show circuit – blowing the judges away as surely as it did the tasters at our vertical line up. It’s the first Eileen to come screw cap sealed, guaranteeing current freshness and a steady evolution in bottle. With some benchmark chardonnays pushing to $100 a bottle and beyond, Eileen looks undervalued, given its quality and pedigree. Made by Tom Newton, it’s a blend from Tasmania (fifty per cent), Hoddles Creek (Yarra Valley) and Tumbarumba. This is opulent but restrained, complex chardonnay of the highest order.

Madfish ‘Gold Turtle’ Frankland River Shiraz 2004 $17 to $21
Madfish is Howard Park’s budget label — in the relative sense anyway, since the standard wines cost $35-odd. Since the introduction of Madfish, smart consumers have lapped up its outstanding value-for-money offerings. And now the introduction of a straight Frankland River shiraz to the line (replacing the Margaret River-Great Southern-Blackwood Valley blend) raises hopes that this, too, will be caught up in the retail price wars – and the chance of the odd bargain at $15. It’s a terrific, vibrant red featuring pure, intense ripe-cherry aroma and dense, intensely fruity, silky textured palate with a pleasing savoury edge. It’s a classy and elegant red at the price.

Tim Kirk drives Clonakilla success — how quality, persistence and pressing the flesh built a brand

4 June 2006People, Vineyard, WineChris Shanahan

We could be forgiven for thinking there were no happy stories in the wine industry. The well publicised grape surplus and a Deloitte survey indicating that forty per cent of Australia’s two thousand winemakers operate at a loss tell of the pain out there.

But within our own backyard we have one example of a tightly run small maker thriving in the most competitive wine market ever, rejoicing in a record 2006 harvest and willingly paying grape growers above market price.

Clonakilla’s success carries a message not just for local makers but also for all small makers. And the message is that commercial success comes from making wine that becomes a benchmark of its style.

And that requires vision, commitment, time and patience; continuing (and frank) benchmarking against the rest of the world; attentive, uncompromising viticultural and winemaking practice; a tight business structure; and clever, consistent marketing.

Few businesses could tick all those boxes. But under Tim Kirk, Clonakilla has done so and emerged as Australia’s most talked about shiraz viognier producer – both here and in major export markets — and one of our most respected viognier producers.

While the shiraz viognier blend, especially, has emerged as a regional specialty, Tim’s other wines, too, benefit from what you might call the halo effect – not to forget the same scrupulous attention to detail that produces flawless wines across the board.

And if Clonakilla’s tiny Murrumbateman vineyard limits production of its flagship red, Tim added commercial strength to the business by sourcing shiraz from the nearby Hilltops Region, Young.

And in Clonakilla style, this is another no-compromise wine. Tim pays over the market price for top-notch fruit from which he makes a slightly more robust red than the flagship shiraz viognier, albeit still in the graceful, savoury cool-climate style.

Even at a retail price of $25 to $28 a bottle, production of Clonakilla’s second-tier red has grown from 26 thousand bottles in 2004, to 31 thousand in 2005 to ‘probably 45 thousand bottles’ this year, estimates Tim.

Having worked in retail and media over the last thirty years it has been interesting to see Clonakilla’s emergence, initially under Dr John Kirk and now under Tim.

The wine styles emerged gradually from the early seventies before taking shape – based both on vision and what could be achieved in the district – in the mid nineties.

Even as the wine styles emerged, and particularly when shiraz viognier crystallised as the flagship, the least commented on aspect of the success – and of critical importance – has been Tim’s persistent, relationship-based marketing.

Few winemakers work media and trade relationships as personally, constantly and cleverly as Tim does. A phone call here, a sample there and press releases whenever there’s a little news all add up over the decades – especially when there’s fact and substance – rather than cant – at the heart of the contact.

What Tim has done over time is to create a global network of influential wine people who believe in what he’s doing. And consumers have responded with equal willingness to what is, finally, an exciting wine offering.

This direct access to opinion makers and consumers by the person who grows the grapes and makes the wine is one big advantage that small makers have over larger ones.

Thanks to Tim Kirk, Clonakilla has exploited this advantage to the hilt. Anyone growing shiraz in Canberra should be extremely grateful for the platform he’s built.