There’s a buzz around the industry about the 2008 rieslings. It started during vintage and by April, many winemakers, including Chris Hatcher of the Foster’s Group (one of our leading riesling makers) rated the wines as the best since the legendary 2002 vintage.

Quantities were up, too, as nature seemingly compensated vignerons for the harsh, small-cropping 2007 season. Nationwide, riesling production jumped to 37 thousand tonnes from 31 thousand in 2007. The six thousand tonne increase equates to an additional 420 thousand dozen bottles.

But with the domestic market stagnant, this won’t be easy to sell – especially given riesling’s perennial niche status – no matter how often columns like this one talk it up. So if you’re a riesling lover – and there’s a lot to love about the 2008s – there’s delicious, good-value drinking in the wines now coming to market.

Many of the top-end wines are already available. And it shouldn’t be long before the cheaper, big-volume rieslings, like Jacobs Creek, Wolf Blass and Hardy’s Siegersdorf hit the shelves. In big-volume, high-quality years like 2008 these are probably the best-value Aussie whites on the market, quite often drinking better as young wines than their more expensive counterparts.

That’s because the finest rieslings when very young tend to be a little austere, albeit with a slurpy lump of fruit that’s easily overlooked. This is because these long-lived rieslings tend to be higher in acid and perhaps have a little extra sulphur dioxide to protect them across perhaps decades in the bottle.

These wines regularly fare worse than cheaper, earlier drinking styles in wine shows when they’re young. But the medals flow a few years later as the superior fruit shines through.

We saw an example of this at the Canberra regional show a few weeks back when Ken Helm’s $28 Classic Dry Riesling pipped his $45 Premium Riesling for the trophy. So, did we judges stuff it up? Not really. It just says that they’re both bloody good wines but the cheaper one drinks better now. Ken’s Premium will still be putting a smile on our faces ten years from now.

So how good are the 2008 rieslings? As a judge at the local show I rated Canberra’s as the best I’d ever tasted from the region. These were exciting wines and perhaps good enough, at last, to hold their own against the benchmarks from the Clare and Eden Valleys.

To gauge the hype, and glimpse where Canberra’s rieslings sit in the bigger picture, a group of us set off for a weekend of tastings down at Tuross. We served the wines in masked groups of three, with food. And after our appraisals, ripped off the covers and continued drinking and eating – to give the wines a true road test.

Two Canberra wines – Jeir Creek and Helm Premium, both gold medallists from the regional show – slotted in comfortably with some of Australia’s most revered riesling names.

It was a feast of delightful wines covering a spectrum of styles, from the taut, steely, potentially very long lived Leo Buring Leonay DWL17 High Eden and Grosset Polish Hill to the fuller, rounder, absolutely delicious (and still delicate) Petaluma Hanlin Hill 2008.

Between these two extremes were the sensationally lime-like, seductive Mount Horrocks Watervale and intense, guava-like Leo Buring Leonay DWL18 Watervale.

The only sweetie, Mount Horrocks Cordon Cut Watervale, was all plush, luscious, pure-riesling flavour – a joy to sip.

The Canberra and Tuross tastings tend to confirm the vintage hype. Riesling appears to be on the money in 2008. Watch for more reviews.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

This year’s regional wine show tells us more strongly than ever that Canberra’s reputation and future rests heavily on the two varieties that shine here — riesling and shiraz. Other styles play a niche role – or perhaps, in some cases, none at all in the long run – with the important caveat that we ought to continue experimenting with sangiovese, tempranillo, graciano and other emerging varieties.

Summing up our judging of 254 wines from 46 exhibitors Brian Croser said that our rieslings are ‘world class, as Ken Helm will be glad to tell you’ and our shiraz is ‘up there with the very best of Australia and the globe’.

He said that chardonnay is ‘not our forte, but OK’, that pinot noir ‘should be grown elsewhere’, that ‘merlot struggles’ and that cabernet sauvignon has a place here – the best are excellent though ‘the balance are ordinary’.

Putting this in a global context, Croser said that Australia suffered a hangover from the twenty-year commodity wine boom and that our regions now needed to take the lead. Fine wines, he said, had been suppressed for too long.

He dismissed the ‘myth’, put about by big companies, that Australia had too many cool climate vineyards. And with Australia viewed as ‘the McDonalds of the wine world, it was essential to develop our fine wines – especially in the face of big changes now being forced upon us.

A combination of shifting markets, water shortage, government policy and climate change will force a new fine wine industry to ‘emerge from under the commodity business’. ‘We are being forced to go inland and upland and to the cool coastal valleys… this will be the trend for fifty years and beyond’.

In this context we will have no choice but to promote the varietal strengths of our regions. And with its highly continental climate and hard granitic soils Canberra’s strong suit would be riesling and shiraz – a fact demonstrated by show results.

A look at the ‘medal matrix’ shows the relative performance of the major varieties in this year’s show. The high medal strike rate of riesling (54 percent) and shiraz (49 per cent) points to their superior average quality.

But the figures also reveal more sustained highlights for the two varieties with about a quarter of their medals being gold – compared to 11 per cent for sauvignon blanc and blends, eight per cent for chardonnay, nil for pinot noir and 15 per cent for cabernet and blends. These, of course, are the basis for Brian Croser’s opinions.

Beneath the dry figures, though, is a feast of lovely wines from across the regions covered by the show. And the excitement goes well beyond the trophy and gold medal winners.

The trophy winners

• Best riesling and best white of show – Helm Classic Dry Murrumbateman 2008
• Best chardonnay -– Barwang Reserve Tumbarumba 2006 (not yet released)
• Best sauvignon blanc – Cuttaway Hill Estate Southern Highlands 2008
• Best shiraz, best red and best wine of show – Chalkers Crossing Hilltops 2005
• Best cabernet – Binbilla Wines Special Steps Hilltops 2006
• Best sparkling wine – Hungerford Hill Dalliance Tumbarumba Pinot Noir Chardonnay 2004

Riesling top performers
Beautiful field from the 2008 vintage, including the gold medal winning Helm Classic Dry, Helm Premium and Jeir Creek – all from Murrumbateman – and the silver medallists, Z4 Wines Zoe Murrumbateman Riesling and Mount Majura Vineyard, the latter winning a gold as well for its 2003 vintage.

Shiraz top performers
Gold medallists from the 2007 vintage: Barwang Hilltops, Dionysus Murrumbateman and Nick O’Leary Murrumbateman 2007. Gold medallists from the older class: Chalkers Crossing 2005, Barwang Hilltops 2006 and Long Rail Gully Murrumbateman 2006; and silver medallists: Long Rail Gully Murrumbateman 2005; Four Winds Alinga Murrumbateman; Borombola Hiraji’s Spell (probably Gundagai) 2006; Shaw Vineyard Estate Murrumbateman 2006; Chalkers Crossing Hilltops 2006; Brindabella Hills Hall 2006; Nick O’Leary Murrumbateman 2006.

Cabernet Sauvignon top performers
Silver medallist Grove Estate The Partners Hilltops 2007. Amongst the older wines, gold medallists Binbilla Special Steps Hilltops 2006 and Pankhurst Hall 2006 and silver medallists Barwang Hilltops 2006 and Shaw Vineyard Estate Murrumbateman Cabernet Merlot 2006.

Bubbly highlights
Tumbarumba showed its suitability for this style for the second year in row with the gold and trophy going to Hungerford Hill Dalliance Pinot Noir Chardonnay 2004. Centennial Vineyards from the Southern Highlands earned silver with a delicious, if acidic, pinot chardonnay blend.

Sweeties
A small class of sweeties showed a touch of class with three of four wines winning medals. Gold medallist Enos Family Murrumbateman Late Harvest Semillon came in luscious few points ahead of silver medallists Lark Hill Bungendore Auslese Riesling 2006 and Lerida Estate Lake George Botrytis Pinot Gris 2007.

Who can enter the Canberra Regional Wine Show?
The show caters for wines from the Canberra, Gundagai, Hilltops, Tumbarumba, Shoalhaven Coast and Southern Highlands regions. The wines can be made outside of these areas – and many are – but at least 85 per cent of the grapes used in any wine must originate from one or more of those regions.

The regions are defined and protected globally under Australian law. You can read all about these and view maps of Australia’s ‘zones’ and ‘regions’ under ‘geographic indications’ on the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation website at www.awbc.com.au

How are the wines judged?
To compare like with like, we judge wines in homogenous classes. For example this year, ‘Class 1’ was for 2008 vintage rieslings, ‘Class 2’ was for 2008 sauvignon blancs and ‘Class 16’ was for shirazes from the 2006 and earlier vintages. While we judge the major grape varieties in discrete groups, it’s not practicable, say, for emerging styles where there may only be one or two entries for each. So there are a couple of ‘other varieties’ classes plus small, mixed groupings for bubblies, rosés, stickies and museum wines (2003 vintage and older).

There are three judges and two associate judges, each with a partitioned-off tasting table. We see only glasses on numbered squares, never bottles. And we don’t discuss the wines while we’re judging and giving each wine a score out of 20. After finishing a class, we sit around a table, tally our scores and compare notes, mainly on the best or contentious wines. Any wine with a gold-medal score from any of the judges comes back for a second look by the group.

We aggregate the scores of the three judges (but not of the associates), with adjustments, in some cases, following the discussion and re-tasting – meaning a score out of 20 for every wine. Any with 46.5 or more win a medal: 46.5 earns bronze, 51 earns silver and 55.5 strikes gold. If there are two or more gold medal winners in a class, the judges usually decide on a ‘top’ gold to advance to the trophy taste-offs.

At the trophy taste offs, where there can be only one winner in each category, we shift to a simple order of preference ranking. For example, in the taste-off for the wine-of-the-show we unanimously ranked a shiraz first among the trophy winners from the riesling, shiraz, cabernet, chardonnay and sparkling classes.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

In January, with a small vintage predicted, the wine glut appeared to be over. Grape growers along the Murray and Murrumbidgee feared the worst. Winemakers expected supply to fall in line with demand – good news for them. As a consequence, it seemed as if wine drinkers might have to pay a little extra for branded products. And the endless flow of bargain-basement cleanskins would slow to a trickle.

But predictions of a small vintage proved to be dramatically wrong. On Friday 13 June, a press release arrived from the Winemakers Federation (WFA) putting the harvest at 1.83million tonnes.

‘This figure’, said the press release, ‘is significantly larger than estimations made at the start of the growing season, and is in fact almost double some early predictions’.

Shortly after, in his Australian Wine Companion 2009, James Halliday wrote that this ‘explains why Foster’s had to write down the value of its bulk wine stocks, with all the major companies floating in a sea of excess chardonnay’.

So the glut’s back on. And it’s being made worse by a dramatic slowdown in exports combined with a modest decline in domestic consumption.

The Australian Wine and Brand Corporation recently reported that our exports in the year to August 2008, at 703.3million litres, were 103 million litres less than in the year to August 2007.

And Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that domestic sales declined from 482.1 million litres in the year to June 2007 to 479.7million litres in the year to June 2008.

But that apparently modest decline of 3.6million litres includes imports, which rose by 19 million litres to 53.3million litres – representing what is probably an historic high of 11.1 per cent of domestic sales.

Worryingly for local makers, sales of domestically produced wine declined from 447.8 to 426.4 million litres – mirroring the rise in sales of imports.

While the recent fall of the Aussie dollar should in time boost exports and blunt imports, it’s unlikely to soak up the wine surplus in a hurry – meaning continued pressure on domestic wine prices.

But in the longer term, we may have to pay more for our wines. The WFA sees a major restructuring in the offing with a need to focus more on our regional specialties and less on cheaper products. Its press release expresses ‘concerns regarding the future sustainability of the lower-priced sector or our industry’.

This is largely a reference to the worsening water shortage and its effect on our vast river lands. Increasing costs and declining volumes in these regions will price us out of the lower end of the market.

Restructuring will also mean moving with consumer tastes. For example the inexorable rise of sauvignon blanc, either straight or blended with semillon, means that we probably now have more chardonnay than we need and not enough sauvignon blanc or semillon.

In 2008 we harvested 166 thousands tonnes of the two combined, compared to 444 thousand tonnes of chardonnay. Yet sauvignon blanc and blends now account for 37 per cent of domestic bottled white wine sales compared to chardonnay’s 31 per cent.

To cater for this change winemakers can’t necessarily graft chardonnay vines over to sauvignon blanc. That’s because chardonnay grows just about anywhere, but sauvignon blanc needs a cooler climate (and that means higher production costs) to reveal its distinctive flavour – hence the success of New Zealand in this sector. This variety makes up the majority of its 18.1 million litre exports to Australia.

We’ve got a few regional specialties of our own, too, though it’s a secret to most of the world.  But when we’ve sipped our way through the current glut (and it may take a few years) we’ll be hearing lots more about them from a vastly changed wine industry.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008