Well known Barossa winemaker Grant Burge passed through Canberra this week, promoting Meshach, his flagship red, and commenting on the most extraordinary vintage in living memory.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, he said. ‘Reds are down in volume by seventy per cent and whites by thirty five per cent. It’s the vintage from hell’.

Burge believes that Australia’s vintage could be as low as 1.1 million tonnes, well down on industry mid-vintage estimates of around 1.3 million tonnes. He believes this is because initial reports extrapolated on yields from hot, earlier ripening regions that were not as hard hit by frost and drought as cooler, later ripening areas.

Burge believes that the sudden shortage will drive prices up and has already affected vigneron behaviour. Normally by this stage of vintage larger makers would have begun to sell off bulk wine not required for brand commitments.

But in 2007, he says, this is not happening, meaning virtually no current-vintage bulk-wine market. Everyone is hanging on to everything they have and many makers are desperately short of some varieties.

It seems that 2007 will be a year of great financial pain for many growers and winemakers. The abrupt change from surplus to shortage hits in different ways. Growers – some of whom may also be winemakers – are faced with all the costs of a normal season but little income to offset the costs.

And winemakers — whether self-reliant in grapes, partially reliant or totally dependent on contract fruit – face the dilemma of under utilised equipment and a big gap in stock for the years ahead.

Burge, for example, says that his Illapara winery, in the main street of Tanunda, Barossa Valley, processed 4.5 thousand tonnes last year but will see only two thousand tonnes in 2007. He believes that some larger producers have been even harder hit with some wineries reportedly falling tens of thousands of tonnes short of capacity.

After three vintages at around two million tonnes, the sudden wrenching shift from top to second gear, at 1.1 million tonnes, will jolt the industry and flow on to drinkers through firmer pricing.

Reportedly, surplus bulk wine from previous vintages is being dispersed rapidly. And because it is not being replaced, pressure on supplies and, hence, prices, will probably be fairly quick in some sectors of the market.

If there’s a serious shortage at the cheap end of the market, it’s quite likely that producers and large retailers will do as they have in the past and turn to imports to make up the shortfall.

For a middle-sized premium producer like Burge, though, that’s not an option. Grant says that the large vintages of 2005 and 2006 provide something of a buffer. Good stocks of reds from those vintages can be managed to at least partly offset the losses of 2007, and white volumes are down but not disastrously so.

And what’s quality like in the Barossa in 2007? Again, Burge says he’s never seen anything like it. Red grapes, hard as bullets, seem to be all skin and no flesh. What this means is inky black wines (colour pigments are all in the skins) packed with tannins. They’re not attractive at present, says Burge, and he doesn’t know whether they’ll soften with time or stay as they are.

Perhaps that’s good reason for us to stock up, at historically low prices, on the excellent 2004, 2005 and 2006 vintages now in the market.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

It’s been a field day for wine drinkers. But Australia’s benchmark red-wine brand, I believe, has never seen such grim times. Caught in a three-way pincer of wine glut, fierce retail competition and a parent company seemingly desperate for sales, Penfolds annual ‘Bin’ wine release hit new lows in 2007.

Retail prices slumped to unprecedented levels for the range as a whole. And what appears to me as indecisive marketing under successive ownerships sent a confusing message on the relative merits of cork and screw cap seals.

Penfolds winemakers favoured screw caps from early in the decade following a successful maturation trial with the 1996 Bin 389. But a piecemeal rollout means that of the current releases, Bin 138 Barossa Grenache Shiraz Mourvedre 2005, Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz 2005, Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz 2004 and Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 have screw caps and Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz 2004 and Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz 2004 have corks.

From a consumer perspective, in the short term anyway, things couldn’t be better. With Penfolds reds at fire-sale prices why not fill the boot and drive home with a smile on your face?

But why are the Penfolds prices at their lowest in a decade? Competition and glut play a role. But the malaise in parent company Fosters wine division is probably the key. With a reported ten per cent slide in wine sales in the first half of 2006-07, it’s quite plausible that Fosters are using the annual Penfolds release to bring sales home in the second half, though they tell me that that’s not the case.

It’s the ideal fire-sale brand as retailers invariably offer Penfolds at or near cost on release. And it’s the most significant wine release of the year because of the large volumes and big dollars involved.

But it’s also one in which retailers don’t want to be caught out. In release week in early March, The Canberra Times carried three press ads for the new Penfolds reds in one edition: Woolworths-owned Dan Murphy announced the release without posting prices, adding that it wouldn’t be undercut. Coles-Group-owned Vintage Cellars stuck its head above the trenches offering Bins 128, 138 and 28 at around $22 – only to have it lopped off by 1st Choice (another Coles Group brand) at around $18.

The following week, Dan Murphy cut the price to less than $16 – territory that hadn’t been approached, as far as I can recall, since the 1990s. Then last weekend, Sydney-based independent Kemeny’s chopped again — to $15.80.

What that meant, given Coles and Woolies ‘we-won’t-be-undercut’ pledge, was a new market-wide price that was more than $2 a bottle below last year’s floor.

Confusingly, Fosters have released two vintages of Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz – 2004 and 2005. The rationale for doing this, says the press release, is that ‘The Penfolds winemaking team believe the style of the Bin 128 is enhanced by an earlier release’. But that’s at odds with winemaker Peter Gago’s tasting note: ‘this wine needs time” – a view confirmed by my own tasting.

The confusing messages emerging from the current Penfolds release – why am I worth less this year than last? Am I to be cork or screw cap sealed? At what age should I be released? – could not come at a worse time for Australia’s wine industry.

With the price per litre of exported wine in serious decline, we need to build premium brands, not degrade the ones we have.

Whether justified or not, confusing messages, even little ones, about brands creates doubts about quality. And that’s something Australia’s wine industry cannot afford with an icon like Penfolds.

We can only hope that Fosters comes to grips with its wine portfolio. On a brighter note, the new Penfolds releases – Bins 28, 128, 138, 389 and 407 – do stack up on quality. You can read my reviews of the range on this website.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

Grape production figures for Victoria’s King Valley (stretching thirty kilometres northwards up the King River roughly from Milawa at 170 metres above sea level to the Whitlands plateau at 800 metres) reveal the tiny scale of some the most interesting wines in the valley – tiny plots of Italian varieties like sangiovese, nebbiolo and arneis.

In the King Valley, as in virtually every region in Australia, some, or all of, shiraz, cabernet, merlot, pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling, sauvignon blanc and semillon contribute the majority of output.

But because everyone, everywhere grows these varieties, we might be excused for not hanging a King Valley sign on any one of them – as we do, say, for Hunter semillon, Clare riesling or Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon.

No, the King Valley’s shingle, to date, hangs on Italian red and white varieties even if these make up only a small portion of an annual fifteen thousand tonne grape crush.

Although Brown Bros pioneered some Italian styles in its ‘kindergarten’ winery — designed for small, experimental wine batches — Mornington based Gary Crittenden took Italian diversity and quality to another level before local Italian-descended small growers made the transition from grape-growing to winemaking.

During a downturn when Brown Bros reduced its grape intake, cousins Fred and Arnie Pizzini and another grower, Guy Darling, established King Valley Wines at Whitfield. Fred says they built the winery because, “We all wanted a winery, but thought, why build three? We didn’t want our grapes going to distant places. And we wanted to maintain the premium image of wines, mostly whites at the time, coming out of the area”.

The switch from contract grape growing to winemaking gathered pace in the nineties. Certainly by the time I passed through with visiting Italian winemaker, Dino Illuminati, in 1997, Italian-descended farmers-turned-vignerons were setting the Valley’s wine and food direction.

The Italian flavour grew over time and was the real point of interest when the Valley’s makers visited Canberra recently. Sure, they offered shiraz and cabernet, chardonnay etc. But who cares? You can taste these varieties anywhere.

The excitement, to this palate anyway, lay in the Italian varieties — pinot grigio (ok, it’s French but it’s the Italian name and made in the Italian style), moscato, dolcetto, sangiovese, nebbiolo, verduzzo, arneis, barbera, marzemino and prosecco – and to a lesser extent the Russian saperavi and petit manseng from Jurancon, southern France.

These varieties provide a novel flavour spectrum: from the delicate, grapey, sweet freshness of Brown Brothers Moscato – at around five per cent alcohol — to the sappy, dry, pleasantly tart Dal Zotto sparkling Prosecco; to the bracing Chrismont La Zona Arneis or slurpy, sweet, red Marzemino Frizzante; to Pizzini’s dazzling verduzzo and profound, tannic Coronomento Nebbiolo; to the savoury dryness of several sangioveses and summer-berry freshness of the red barbera.

Many of these can be found in good liquor stores. But the individual wineries and the region can be easily Googled for more information or online ordering. Even better, with the King Valley just four hours’ drive from Canberra, a long weekend is all it takes to explore the wines on site and to taste them with local Italian food.

I wonder, too, if the King Valley folk might complete the Italian theme and produce varietal grappa – an obligatory touch in any Italian wine-growing region.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

A few years back, says Ross Brown of Brown Brothers, the Winemakers Federation of Australia discovered something startling: sixty per cent of Aussie wine drinkers enjoy a glass only infrequently. Asked why they didn’t drink more wine, the occasional sippers said they didn’t like the flavour. Shock! Horror!

The revelation floored the WFA. Why, they wondered, was the industry talking to just forty per-cent of drinkers? How could so many people not like the flavour of wine? But the finding didn’t surprise Ross.

Why would you be surprised, he asked last week in Canberra? Wine, he said, is so unlike the sweeter things that we drink all the time – everything from mother’s milk to fruit juice to soft drink and even beer – it’s little wonder that many people don’t like it.

Conditioned by decades of testing — via Australia’s biggest cellar door operation – Brown Brothers had long since cracked the taste code of the WFA’s reluctant sixty per-cent.

Located on the Oxley Plains, at the northern entry to the King Valley, near Victoria’s ski fields, Brown Bros hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. They literally flow from buses, cars and bicycles into a series of easy-access, spacious tasting bays.

For decades Browns have used the cellar door to test new wines, learn what people like and then give it to them. This approach treats both the wine savvy and the insecure equally seriously.

While cellar door sales constitute only a small fraction of output, says Ross, it provides continuing, direct feedback on what people like. And this, in turn, drives strategic decisions on grape plantings and wine production for the market at large.

This approach encourages a stream of new products that can be made in small volume in the ‘kindergarten’ winery, tested at cellar door, and then rolled out in volume if successful.

Successful rollouts can mean anything from cool-grown, bone-dry pinot gris for enthusiastic wine drinkers to innovative sweet styles for the unconvinced. And whatever the new style is, ramped-up production means big investments in vineyards and considerable lead times.

Ross says that consistently over the years sweet, fruity table wines – in a range of styles — have been the winners and remain the biggest selling styles at cellar door.

The current cellar door favourites, for example, are the red Cienna and white Moscato – both sweet wines weighing in at a modest 5.5 and 5 per cent alcohol respectively.

Cienna is a new variety which, like Brown Brothers successful Tarango, was bred by the CSIRO. And the Moscato, a delightful frizzante style, is modelled on the fruity, crisp, low-alcohol styles of Asti, Italy.

These are seriously good, innovative wines that join a long line of other sweeties, including the red Dolcetto (a normally dry Italian variety), as consumer favourites.

And the people who buy them love them fervently, often driving hundreds of kilometres to stock up. Don’t ever believe that only experts are prepared to go out of their way to buy cases of wine, laughed Ross.

Of course there’s nothing new in people being attracted to sweet and fruity wine. It’s been a constant theme in Australia since the release of Orlando Barossa Pearl in 1956.

The difference now seems to be that most winemakers don’t take these styles seriously — and it shows in their mediocre offerings. What Brown Brothers have demonstrated is that occasional wine drinkers become enthusiastic wine drinkers when you give them what they want.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007