The Cooper Coffman Wine Co leased the Kamberra winery at Watson shortly before vintage this year. By mid April, winemaker Martin Cooper and his young cellar team, mainly Kiwis, had crushed 2,800 tonnes of grapes – equivalent to about 210 thousand dozen bottles of wine.

They’re by far the biggest producer in Canberra and almost certainly the biggest producer of Canberra-grown wine, even if local fruit makes up just eight hundred tonnes of that 2,800 tonne total.

What brought Cooper Coffman to Canberra appears to have been not so much Canberra wine, but the availability of the former Hardy’s facility. It’s pure serendipity when a new wine company finds a vacant, state-of-the-art winery close to its existing grape interests. And it’s a bonus when the winery comes with substantial contract winemaking opportunities.

Hardy’s withdrew from Canberra, selling its interests to the Elvin Group at about the same time that Martin Cooper and Chris Coffman established Cooper Coffman Wine Co. In 2006 the new company purchased a wonderful old vineyard in the Eden Valley, South Australia, from Mark Hamilton.

The Canberra connection developed soon after. In June 2007, Cooper Coffman took over management of Foster’s 87-hectare Tralee vineyard at Tumbarumba, eventually buying the property in December. By this time Martin had also developed strong grape-grower connections in the Hilltops region. He had grapes galore but no winery.

Meanwhile the Elvin Group had the Kamberra wine brand, a winery and grapes from the former Hardy 83-hectare vineyard at Holt, but no winemaker.

A long-term lease gave Cooper Coffman the facility it needed to process its grapes from Tumbarumba, Hilltops and the Eden Valley. Elvin group had an accomplished maker to look after its fruit. And Cooper Coffman also secured a number of contract winemaking opportunities.

Cooper Coffman’s first vintage in Canberra processed five hundred tonnes of grapes from Tumbarumba; seven hundred tonnes from Hilltops; two hundred from the Eden Valley; eight hundred from Canberra, principally from the Elvin vineyard; and six hundred from ‘all over’, including Cowra, Heathcote Victoria, Watervale and the Southern Highlands.

While it’s a big winery for Canberra, Martin Cooper views Cooper Coffman as a ‘big, small-scale winemaker’ – a meaning that becomes clear as we taste barrel and tank samples of twelve different grape varieties from eight different regions. And that’s only part of what’s in the winery, much of it slowly ticking through the last stages of fermentation.

Apart from some larger scale processing for Pernod Ricard Pacific’s Cowra vineyards (for the Jacob’s Creek brand), it’s largely small-scale winemaking, with fermentations typically in batches of two-and-a-half, five or ten tonnes.

We taste few wines from Canberra. This simply reflects that fact that most of what’s been processed belongs to Elvin, not Cooper Coffman. But Martin describes viognier from the Holt vineyard as ‘absolutely superb’ and says that there were ‘some small parcels of very good early picked chardonnay’.

He has, however, made a shiraz viognier blend and a straight shiraz from the Wily Trout vineyard at Hall. These are in the elegant, supple, regional mould – the straight shiraz in particular showing a wonderful spicy, peppery varietal character.

Martin says that he’s setting up contracts now for future grape supplies from Canberra, focusing on shiraz and viognier.

From the cool, high-altitude Tumbarumba vineyard we taste chardonnay and pinot noir – the former in the taut, intense style, the latter finely structured and pure varietal. Chardonnay from this vineyard has a venerable, if little known track record as a component in Penfolds ‘white Grange’ project of the nineties and as source of the extraordinary 1996 Hungerford Hill Tumbarumba chardonnay; pinot has potential, if not runs on the board.

From Eden Valley we taste, from the 2008 vintage, taut, steely riesling from the Tscharke vineyard; ripe, soft, concentrated-but-elegant shiraz; an extraordinarily powerful but balanced cabernet sauvignon from the company’s Eden Road vineyard; and from the 2006 vintage a striking savoury/fruity very complex grenache from vines planted in the 1890s.

From Hilltops we taste several reds including some from Jason Brown’s Moppity Park Vineyard and Brian Mullany’s Grove Estate. There’s an impressive sweet-fruited-but-savoury sangiovese; and very promising nebbiolo – a difficult Italian red variety that’s often beautifully fragrant but unbearably hard and tannic. This one has the fruit to match the tannins at this stage.

One of Martin’s projects, based on long experience in the Hilltops region with McWilliams, is to make a red inspired by the so-called ‘super Tuscans’ – blends of Tuscany’s native sangiovese with one or other or both of the Bordeaux varieties, cabernet and merlot. He sees Hilltops cabernet as uniquely suited to blending with sangiovese. Perhaps the components are in barrels now in the Watson winery.

What we tasted recently were all components of blends that’ll come together over the coming months and years to emerge, ultimately, under various Cooper Coffman labels.

It’ll be a diverse range based partly on long-proven regional specialties like Eden Valley riesling, grenache and shiraz. But it’ll include as well emerging specialties like Canberra shiraz and viognier, Tumbarumba pinot noir and chardonnay and Hilltops shiraz and cabernet sauvignon.

We’ll see the first of the Cooper Coffman wines in a few weeks – the  $220 a bottle Eden Valley Eden Road V06 Shiraz 2006 and the $70 a bottle Two Trees Eden Road Eden Valley Grenache Shiraz 2006. I’ll review these in mid May.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Visiting Canberra last Wednesday, Chris Hatcher, chief winemaker for Foster’s, Australia’s largest wine producer, said the 2008 vintage produced better than anticipated grape quantities and considerable quality variations.

A warm start to the season boosted the vines out of the blocks before milder weather set in, providing what looked to be ideal conditions for ripening and flavour development.

These hopes proved well founded for varieties harvested before an exceptionally hot spell hit much of South Australia in the first weeks of autumn. ‘We had fifteen days over thirty-five degrees’, said Chris. But the quality outlook isn’t so good for varieties picked after the heat.

The heat arrived after harvest for most white and earlier ripening red varieties, including just about all of the warm-area shiraz. But, in the hot areas along the Murray River, the engine room of the Australian industry, just about everything came in ahead of the heat and ‘looks fantastic’, says Chris.

As most cabernet sauvignon from warm, premium areas came in post heat wave, it’s not a great year for that variety. But Chris sees shiraz and riesling in particular as being exceptionally good.

He rates riesling as the best since the extraordinary 2002 vintage. He says that this was the last year that they made a Wolf Blass flagship riesling (just released), that none of the intervening vintages had the keeping qualities to make the grade, but that 2008 probably would.

At this early stage the new shiraz ferments look exciting. Chris says that Wolf Blass red-wine maker, Caroline Dunn, said during vintage that they reminded her of the 1998s – a great vintage for the variety in the Barossa.

But it’s early days yet and when Chris stopped in Canberra for a few hours he was on his way to classification tastings with his senior winemakers. There’ll be rounds of tastings and blending, followed by barrel maturation for the reds. We’ll see the first of the 2008 whites over the next few months. But it’ll be a few years before we have a full measure of the reds.

Asked about wine seals, Chris said that screw caps had been overwhelmingly accepted in Australia after their rollout ten years ago, that export markets increasingly preferred screw cap over cork and that sparkling-wine seals were the next challenge.

From later this year, he said, all Wolf Blass wines exported to Canada would be screw cap sealed. And in the USA, all wines had been screw capped since the brand’s introduction there twelve months ago.

In Japan, sales increased dramatically after the introduction of screw cap, driven largely, Foster’s believe, by the fact that eighty per cent of Japanese households don’t own a corkscrew.

While the convenience factor has been one of the great forces behind the screw cap’s success – the switch from cork was originally a winemaker-driven quality initiative.

Hatcher believes that the breakdown of consumer bias towards cork opens the way for screw cap alternatives. He believes that this has been hampered to date by lack of global volume. But as the world’s big wine producing nations inevitably shift to a superior technology, the innovations could roll.

He says that we now have a better understanding of how wine matures under screw cap. Early fears that the caps might be too airtight and simply preserve wine, rather than allowing it to mature, had not been justified.

A trial on one of Australia’s venerable cellaring reds, Penfolds Cabernet Shiraz Bin 389 1996 (one of Foster’s brands), showed that the wine under screw cape developed comparable flavours over time as those sealed under cork.

In a recent masked tasting, he said, the senior winemakers couldn’t discern between cork-sealed and screw-cap samples of the 1996. But there were significant differences. Most important was the need to open several cork-sealed bottles to get one in prime condition – because of oxidation or cork taint.

And observation over time has shown that in the first few years after sealing, cork-sealed reds develop maturation flavours more rapidly than those sealed with screw cap. These tend to retain bright, fresh fruit flavours. However, after ten years in bottle, the maturation flavours of cork-sealed and screw cap sealed wines converge.

After ten years the maturation flavours for both tends to plateau. But the bottle-to-bottle variability of those sealed with cork contrasts starkly with the consistency of those sealed with a screw cap. In other words if you cellared a dozen bottles each of cork and screw capped versions of the same wine, you’d enjoy every screw capped bottle equally but find some of the corked ones dull, dead or corked.

An immediate challenge, Chris reckons, is to find an alternative to cork for sparkling wines. Some producers, including Moet’s Australian arm, Chandon, have trialled crown seals. While these have been successful from a quality perspective, they haven’t won universal consumer support.

Hatcher believes that this is partly because of the convenience factor – you need a tool to open these, where you don’t with cork. He says that Foster’s have briefed several suppliers and expects to see cork alternatives developed before too long. One possibility, he says, is a two-phase screw cap that allows gas to escape before coming off completely.

Growing concerns about energy use and greenhouse gas emissions would drive other change in wine packaging. Already some producers have moved to light weight tetra packs for cheaper wines. And Foster’s successfully exports some if its products in PET plastic bottles, weighing only a fraction of their glass equivalents

But these containers suit only wines intended for immediate consumption. A challenge now, says Chris, is to develop light but strong bottles that keep wine in good conditions for decades. Already, he says there’s evidence of consumer and press backlash against those super heavy bottles used for some premium wines.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008