Pinot noir is but a blip in Australia’s wine consumption statistics. But it’s one of the most satisfying varieties to drink when winemakers get it right, as they increasingly do. And though style and quality vary enormously, my experience is that those at the top mercilessly test their own wine against global peers, especially the classics from Burgundy, France.

As I judge, taste, visit wineries and interview winemakers, numerous Burgundy producer names pop up. But there’s one name – Domain Armand Rousseau – that every winemaker seems to revere.

It’s a name familiar to some older Canberrans as local wine merchants, Farmer Brothers, imported Rousseau’s wines (as well as Domaines George Roumier and Tollot-Beaut) from the early eighties until thee demise of Farmers in 1994.

Particularly memorable are those years when an Aussie dollar fetched eight French francs and the pool of world billionaires was much smaller than it is today. As an employee and then partner of Farmer Bros, especially in the pre-fringe benefits tax days, drinking top Burgundy (and not just Rousseau) became a daily experience.

It was a similar exposure to great Burgundy that inspired pretty well all of our now acknowledged local pinot noir producers. And though it’s more expensive to indulge a Burgundy taste today, a new generation of makers finds inspiration in the same journey.

So what is it about pinot, and more especially Burgundy, and in particular Domaine Armand Rousseau Burgundies, that ignites such enthusiasm? The answer is in the glass.

Even as a newcomer to pinot (assuming a modicum of wine interest), Rousseau’s wines are delicious. They tend to be pale in colour but very bright; they have a striking purity of aroma and flavour; and despite their pale colour, there’s a silky richness and persistence to the flavours that becomes more pronounced as you move up the quality scale from the village Gevrey-Chambertin through the ‘premier crus’ and on to the remarkable ‘grand crus’, including Chambertin and Clos de la Roche – nine wines in all, produced from 13-hectares of vineyards.

For all that we read of ‘funky’ pinot (a euphemism for smelly), the best young Burgundies, in my experience, offer pure, bright and clearly varietal aromas and flavours, across an interesting spectrum.
Since ‘funkiness’ is usually associated with winemaker inputs (or lapses), and the best pinot makers bend over backwards not to interfere with the grape flavours, the purity of top pinot should come as no surprise.

What is surprising, though, is that despite its comparatively pale colour (although it can be deep), pinot delivers one of the biggest tannin loads of any variety – bigger even than cabernet. It’s just that with pinot the tannins are generally soft, and often accompanied by a high level of naturally occurring, silky-feeling glycerol.

Words can never convey the loveliness of these wines. But clearly, from what they’ve inspired, they work!

And once you’ve tasted pinot as good as those made by Rousseau and other top Domaines, it’s not easy to be satisfied with anything less. This becomes a powerful force for aspiring new-world winemakers.

It’s a big jump from humid, cold Burgundy in eastern France to warm, dry Australia. And in the thirty odd years since the first wave of Burgundy-inspired vignerons set up shop, we’ve seen the pinot focus shifting towards the areas that we now know do it best – notably the Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Gippsland and Macedon in Victoria and Tasmania.

And just to show what long-term learning this wine business demands, thirty-plus years on the pioneers continue to tweak wine quality through changes in vineyard and winemaking practice. They still drink Burgundy, too.

For other established maker it can be wholesale change – not tweaking – as they replant vineyards to better clones and radically change winemaking practice.

There’s a new wave of pinot makers, too, some of them very good. Where the early, pioneers tended to carve vineyards in remote, untried terrain, drip-feeding capital from their full-time professional salaries, a new well-capitalised genre, builds on the pioneers’ learning. These, too, take their inspiration from Burgundy.

By now, I’m sure you’re wondering why all the fuss and bother over making the very best – when top-end wine makes up a tiny proportion of what we drink. Well, there are a couple of angles on this.

There’s the ‘wine snob’ element for those that’ve tasted and loved the best and want to relive the experience. And there’s the recruitment and trickle-down effect.

What we have now, because of the effort of our pioneers is a generation, albeit small, of pinot drinkers for whom Aussie or Kiwi pinot is the benchmark. They’ve never tried Burgundy. And as we succeed at the top end, we invariably produce wines that don’t make that cut and end up in more affordable blends. These expand the market.

As well, we have producers, like Montana in New Zealand, intentionally scaling up pinot production for mass consumption – and basing the scale up on the work their doing at the top end.

Because pinot’s such a lovely drop and offers so much pleasure, I recently visited a few of our successful, inspirational pioneers in Victoria. Their stories follow.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Kamberra’s state-of-the-art winery, abandoned by Hardy Wine Company a year ago, might have become a white elephant. Instead, both the winery and the Kamberra wine brand are to live on under Canberra’s Elvin Group.

The group bought the Watson winery and tourism complex and 83-hectare Holt vineyard last year. But speculation about the fate of the Kamberra brand, winery and vineyard persisted until Cooper Coffman Wine Company made Kamberra its home this week.

Under a long-term lease arrangement, Cooper Coffman is to make Kamberra branded wines for Elvin as well as its own wines and wines under contract to local grape growers.

With the capacity to process 2,200 tonnes of grapes (equivalent to about 165 thousand dozen bottles of wine), Kamberra is by far the largest (and best-equipped) winery in the district – and the new owners plan to get it humming.

Winemaker Martin Cooper says that he established the business in 2006 with investment banker Chris Coffman, a hard-nosed wine nut with a taste for Aussie shiraz.

The trigger for Coffman, Martin said, was an experimental 2005 vintage Eden Valley-Heathcote shiraz, made during his time at McWilliams. With the blessing of boss, Jim Brayne, this was Martin’s shot at a top-end shiraz. It pushed Coffman’s buttons — and Jim’s too, it seems – as the wine made it into McWilliams flagship red blend, ‘1877’.

In 2006 Brayne again supported Cooper’s creative flair. This time he worked with only the Eden Valley shiraz component — sourced from a former Hamilton family vineyard planted in 1895. This one hasn’t been blended away, though, and is due of release in May as Cooper Coffman’s inaugural flagship red – Eden Road V06 Eden Valley Shiraz 2006.

Must be good, because in December 2006 the new company purchased the vineyard, located near Springton, from Mark Hamilton. It looks to be a gem and contains, as well as the old shiraz vines, grenache planted in the 1920s and riesling planted in 1971.

It also has a wonderful old gravity-fed winery, complete with jarrah fermentation vats, that hasn’t been used since 1982.

Martin’s work with McWilliams had also brought him into contact with fruit, wines and grape growers from the Tumbarumba district. He admits to having ‘jumped the fence’ at times to check the fruit on Southcorp’s (later Foster’s) 87-hectare Tralee vineyard there.

This is one of the oldest vineyards in the area and contains 26 individual blocks, spread over three major hill sites and varying in altitude from 650–750 metres above sea level.

Southcorp had bought the vineyards from founder Ian Cowell, one of the first people to recognise this cool region’s potential for growing sparkling wine. Cooper, though, seeing more potential for table wine on this ‘beautiful spot’, arranged to buy it and plans to focus on pinot noir and chardonnay – the dominant varieties on the site.

Cooper Coffman began managing the vineyard in June last year. And by the time they finalised its purchase from Foster’s in December the new vineyard manager, Michael Wildsmith, had already pulled out seven hectares of low-lying, frost prone vines and begun renovating what had been a ‘severely drought affected vineyard’.

They’ve renamed it Tumba Hills vineyard and plan, over the long term, to replant it to the best clones, make lots of individual-site batches and, ultimately, produce single-site pinot and chardonnay as well as across-the-site blends of both varieties.

While Cooper Coffman doesn’t own vineyards in the Hilltops region (Young), Martin knows growers with dry-grown cabernet sauvignon – source of robust reds with distinctive, gritty tannins. Martin sees another project in blending these with sangiovese – in the style of Italy’s so-called ‘super Tuscans’.

And from Canberra, the Cooper Coffman team has access to grapes from the large Holt vineyard – a potentially rich source of shiraz and viognier. Martin feels comfortable with this big Canberra commitment as the fruit can feed into their existing ‘Sydney Red’ and ‘Sydney White’ export brands.

The plan is to bring grapes from all of these areas to the Kamberra winery and to make, mature and bottle the wine on site. Elvin is even building additional barrel storage and warehousing space to accommodate it.

In the long run, Martin hopes, ‘the regions will speak for themselves’.

And for Canberra grape growers, Cooper Coffman offers a contract winemaking service for ‘those wanting to abide by our philosophy’, said Martin.

In short, what we now have in Canberra is a substantial winery committed to making and marketing top-end wines from three local regions – Canberra, Tumbarumba and Hilltops -– and from South Australia’s Eden Valley region.

Importantly for Canberra and the region, the winery changes from being a provincial outpost of an American-owned corporation to the headquarters of a vigorous, new local producer with an international focus.

But it could be a dry argument for a while as we’ll have to wait for the new wines to come on stream. The first of what promises to be a series of exciting regional specialties is due to start in  May with the release of Cooper Coffman’s Eden Valley flagship, Eden Road V06 Shiraz 2006. I’ll report back when it’s released.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Since humans developed language tens of thousands of years ago, we’ve found expression for phenomena only now being explained on many levels, right down to the molecular, by scientists.

Almost instinctively, and certainly by experience, we understand that one man’s meat is another’s poison – an adage that applies in spades to the world of wine.

When scientists recently announced, for example, that cheese mutes the flavour of wine, wine trade veterans simply said, we told you so — and quoted the old wine merchant adage, “buy on apple; sell on cheese”. Those who trade in wine have known for centuries that apples sharpen the palate and cheese dulls it.

More pertinent to the meat/poison divide, though, is emerging evidence that our differences on what tastes good or bad isn’t just a matter of opinion. It seems to be in our genes. And it’s not just a matter of pleasant and unpleasant, but a whole range of individual experiences based on what we see, smell and taste.

The Aussie wine industry has long known, through observation and measurement, that we all have different thresholds for recognising certain aroma/taste elements in wine — especially for potential faults such as excess volatile acidity (vinegar) or trichloroanisole (TCA), the molecule behind cork taint.

Where palates can be sensitised to recognise the latter, there are other tastes and aromas that we either sense or don’t sense. Mousiness – a bacterial fault derived from the spoilage yeast brettanomyces – is a real life example.   It can make one taster gag while another smells nothing but wine. The ability to sense mousiness, I’m told, lies in the genes.

Yet long before scientists identified the blind spot as being in our genes, wine show judges had learned that the shortcomings of individuals needed to be addressed – just one of the reasons for using three-person judging panels.

And only last year, following five years of work, the Australian Research Institute revealed yet another example. They discovered the chemical behind the peppery aroma of shiraz, alpha-ylangene

But to the twenty per cent of people unable to sense the compound (another of the Institute’s findings) it’s of little comfort knowing that ‘a single drop is enough to make an entire Olympic-size swimming pool smell peppery’.

With taste at the centre of the wine industry’s existence, it’s not surprising that the venerable Institute of Masters of Wine amongst others, has become interested in the phenomenon of the super taster – a class of taster categorised by scientists researching genetically determined ability to taste.

Super tasters have an acute ability to taste the very bitter synthetic substance phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) in tiny concentrations – where others taste little or nothing.  Within the human population the concentration at which we sense PTC varies by a factor of one thousand.

In a Science a Go Go article in September 2005, Rusty Rockets, reported that, according to Professor Patrick MacLeod, president of the Institute of Taste, at least half of the 347 olfactory genes identified in humans are polymorphous, “meaning they have a great potential of variation amongst themselves” and giving “credence to the claim that no two people will ever taste or smell the same odor the same way”.
At about the same time, in glug.com.au, Richard Farmer reported that Professor MacLeod’s experiments have also revealed “the colour of a wine – which is visual information – can truly change the taste of the wine. This is not an illusion. A white wine that has been tinted red with an odourless dye will taste different and creates a different pattern of neural activity in the brain”.

According to Rockets, Professor MacLeod also points out that a “single molecule can provoke a response in a single cell that is then transmitted to the brain”—suggesting that “the human sensory system for odors has achieved maximum sensitivity”.

The combination of acute olfactory sensitivity, genetic variance and the diversity of sensory cues influencing what we smell and taste begins to explain why wine remains infinitely variable and fascinating, It also says that behind divergent opinions lie utterly different individual experiences.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008