Category Archives: People

Saltram celebrates 140 years

As a Johnnie-come-lately of the wine world, Australia boasts some remarkably old wine dynasties.

We can’t equal the 600 years of Italy’s Antinori family; nor the 952 years claimed by my old mate Ferdinando Guicciardini of Poppiano, Florence.

Considering the comparative recency of our own industry — and the lack of a popular wine-drinking culture for most of that time — it seems even more amazing that so many of our last century’s wine businesses survived – either still in family hands or subsumed into larger companies  — until 1999.

The Hill-Smith family (Yalumba) in the Barossa, the Henschke’s in the Eden Valley, the Drayton’s in the Hunter Valley and the Potts (Bleasdale), to give a few examples, continue the work started by their families last century.

The Penfold, Lindeman, Seppelt and Hardy families all lost control of their enterprises. Not only the names but elements of those original cultures survive in today’s global brands.

Saltram, founded by William Salter and his son Edward, in 1859 might easily have perished. It flourished, slumped, sputtered, almost died and now seems set to flourish again under its sixth owner, Mildara Blass.

Mildara acquired the lovely old winery at Angaston (Barossa Valley) as part of its Rothbury acquisition in 1996. The languishing Saltram and Stonyfell brands came with it.

Celebrating the company’s 140th birthday last week, wine maker Nigel Dolan commented how in his own time, he’s seen three owners: the inept (Seagram, 1979 to 1994)), the romantic (Rothbury, 1994 to 1996) and the professional (Mildara Blass, from 1996).

Prior to that Saltram had been owned by the Dalgety Pastoral company (1972-1979), HM Martin and Sons (1937-1972) and the Salter family (1859-1937).

The Saltram brand weathered the early changes in ownership and acquired Stonyfell along the way.

Both brands may have blossomed in the wine boom of the eighties. But Dalgetys disposed of the winery shortly before the 1979 vintage, leaving wine maker Peter Lehmann without a job and many grape contractors without a buyer for the year’s crop.

Magically, Lehmann rescued the growers by establishing another winery in time for the vintage. Peter Lehmann Wines (now a listed company) was the result.

New owners, Seagram, the giant Canadian spirit company, with all the best will in the world, just could not come to grips with the wine industry.

In my view wine quality deteriorated and the old flagship brands Saltram’s Mamre Brook and Stonyfell Metala gave way to Saltram Pinnacle Selection, widely viewed in the industry at the time as a poor joke.

Yet Saltram and Stonyfell survived the Seagram period. Just two years before the end of that sorry time, Nigel Dolan left Seppelts, where he’d been red wine maker, to join Saltram.

His arrival was, perhaps, an omen of better things to come, first under Rothbury and then under Mildara Blass.

Nigel came to Saltram with a strong awareness of its winemaking heritage. His father Bryan, had been winemaker there from 1949 to 1959, before transferring to Stonyfell, the company’s other winery.

For his first four years at Saltram Bryan worked alongside Fred Ludlow. Fred had been there since 1893, making wine for the last fifteen years of a remarkable sixty years’ service.

When Bryan moved to Stonyfell in 1959, he was replaced by Peter Lehmann. Peter (trained at Yalumba) continued making robust, long-lived reds in the style established by Ludlow and Dolan.

As Peter developed the Saltram wines, introducing and a flagship red, Mamre Brook in 1963 the use of new oak in 1973, Bryan Dolan took over wine making from Jack Kilgour at Stonyfell. Jack made wine there from 1932 to 1959.

Across the decades Jack had been making a sumptuous, velvety red from the Metala vineyard (planted at Langhorne Creek in 1891). Bryan changed the name of the wine from Stonyfell Private Bin Claret to Stonyfell Metala in recognition of the vineyard.

1961 Metala, the first vintage, won the inaugural Jimmy Watson Trophy at Melbourne Wine Show in 1962.

So, when Nigel Dolan joined Saltram in 1992, he inherited both the Stonyfell and Saltram red-wine traditions.

And when Nigel joined Saltram he found the most palpable and palatable of all connections with these traditions.

Sprinkled around various warehouses were thousand of bottles of Saltram and Stonyfell red dating back into the 1940s.

Saltram 140th anniversary, part 2

Last week we saw how Saltram wine maker Nigel Dolan inherited two red-wine making traditions — one (Saltram) based on Barossa Valley grapes, the other (Stonyfell) on fruit sourced from the Metala vineyard at Langhorne Creek, near Lake Alexandrina.

When Nigel moved from Seppelt to Saltram in 1992 he brought not just his own considerable wine-making skills, but family connections with those traditions through his father, Bryan, winemaker at Saltram from 1949 to 1959 and at Stonyfell (owned by Saltram) from 1960 to 1966.

Nigel recalls, as a child living in Mamre Brook House on the Saltram winery site, meeting Fred Ludlow, winemaker for the last fifteen of sixty years (1893 to 1953) spent with the company.

When Nigel moved from Seppelt to Saltram in 1992, connection with the past became more palpable with the discovery of a treasure trove of old table and fortified wines – thousands of bottles dating back in an almost unbroken chain to the 1940’s.

It’s difficult to imagine how this valuable (and drinkable) collection survived Saltram’s traumas and ownership changes of the past twenty years. But survive it did, and now resides (albeit, depleted after our visit there two weeks back) in a museum cellar of interconnected underground concrete wine tanks at the winery.

Given the similar provenance of many of those old wines to today’s, they give insights into what today’s wines might taste like in ten, twenty, thirty, forty or even fifty years from now.

The notion of glimpsing the future by probing the past may seem peculiar. But Nigel and his wine-making crew certainly view past triumphs as a key to current and future success.

After a tasting of reds from most vintages between 1946 and the present two weeks back, Nigel paid tribute to his father and Peter Lehmann (both present), acknowledging the importance of being able both to savour and build upon their achievements.

Remarkably, the great majority of those ancient Saltram and Stonyfell wines not only survived, but flourished over the decades.

Quite often, reds of hoary old age yield, at best, hint of past glories. But not these. With few exceptions, they shone.

The very first wine of the tasting, a tawny-rimmed 1946 Saltram Dry Red combined ancient, earthy, old-furniture smells with big, mellow, sweet-fruited, autumn-leaf flavours.

The standard held though vintages 1948, 1950, 1952 with a tremendous jump to a marvellous 1954 Saltram Selected Vintage Claret Bin 5 and even greater 1954 Leo Buring Vintage Claret (made by Saltram).

Other highlights were: 1957 Saltram Shiraz Bin 18; 1960 Saltram Selected Vintage Burgundy Bin 28; 1961 Saltram Dry Red Shiraz; 1963 Saltram Claret Bin 36; 1963 Stonyfell Angaston Burgundy (Barossa Shiraz); 1964, 1967, 1972, 1978 Mamre Brook Cabernet Shiraz; 1964 Saltram Shiraz; 1971 Saltram Selected Vintage Claret Bin 71/86; and 1973 Saltram Show Dry Red (first use of new oak at the winery).

What a disappointment after these to taste the feeble wines of the 1980’s – a truly disastrous decade for Saltram wine making.

At dinner after the tasting, Nigel introduced his flagship wines alongside more of the oldies:

A lively, intense fresh 1998 Mamre Brook Chardonnay overshadowed a tired, fat and faded 1982 vintage.

A lovely 1958 Saltram Claret Bin 21 and elegant, supple 1961 Stonyfell Langhorne Creek Metala (the first vintage and Jimmy Watson trophy winner) provided mature contrast to Nigel’s stunning Stonyfell Metala Original Plantings Shiraz 1996.

A wine of dense, crimson colour, striking perfume and opulent fruit character, Metala Original Plantings Shiraz, as the name hints, springs solely from grapes grown on the Metala vineyard’s century-old shiraz vines.

Nigel’s Barossa flagships, Saltram No. 1 Shiraz 1996, Saltram Mamre Brook Shiraz 1996 and Saltram Mamre Brook Cabernet Sauvignon 1996 (winners of a combined  8 trophies and 12 gold medals) sat gloriously — latently — beside 1973 Saltram Bin 53 Claret, 1975 Saltram Show Dry Red, 1964 Mamre Brook Cabernet Shiraz and 1976 Mamre Brook Cabernet Shiraz.

This new generation of Saltram and Stonyfell Metala reds rate, in my view, amongst the best and most sensitively handled in the country.

They’re big, powerful, potentially long-lived wines. But the bigness comes not through over-extraction of colour and tannins, nor through heavy-handed use of oak.

Like the older wines crafted by Fred Ludlow, Bryan Dolan and Peter Lehmann, the new Saltram and Stonyfell reds draw their great, supple strength from ripe, deeply flavoured grapes from the Barossa and Langhorne Creek.

A better equipped winery (meaning greater control) plus access to high-quality French oak (and the skill to use it subtly) probably gives today’s wines a slight edge over those glorious old ones.

Given the great pleasure derived from drinking those oldies from the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, $18 to $25 a bottle for the great 1996 reds seems a modest enough price to pay.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1999 and 2012
First published 28 February and 7 March 1999 in The Canberra Times

Langton’s Classification: Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay one of the few white elites

Whoever it was who called white wine foreplay, must’ve had a Langton’s Fine Wine Investment Guide at hand. As if to confirm that white wines are fun, but lead to something more satisfying, Langton’s classification cites just seventeen whites amongst our sixty-three highest priced, most frequently traded Australian wines in auctions.

In what Langton’s call the ‘Outstanding A’ category, a holy trinity of reds (Penfolds Grange, Henschke Hill of Grace and Mount Mary Quintets) perches on the very pointy part of the high-price pyramid.

Not a white in sight! Not even the $150-a-bottle Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay gets a guernsey. It can’t get in for ten years under club rules that favour long-term performance over one-night stands.

On the next level down, in the ‘Outstanding’ category three whites – all Chardonnays – stand beside nine reds. Leeuwin Estate Art Series Margaret River, Piccadilly Valley and Tyrrells Vat 47 Hunter, all have pedigrees stretching back into the seventies – about the time the chardonnay phenomenon started in Australia.

Tyrrells Vat 47, the oldest of the three, kicked off (from memory) in 1971, gradually carving a reputation for itself. Only in the last three years has the cellar-door price broached first the twenty dollars a bottle a mark and then thirty dollars – still quite modest in comparison with Leeuwin’s seventy dollars, or the one to two hundred dollars a French white Burgundy fetches

Vat 47 looked good in the seventies, put on weight in the eighties as Californian wine-making styles influenced the Tyrrells, then trimmed down again from 1987 before settling into the stunning quality we’ve seen in the nineties.

While the eighties vintages appear to be fading, some of the seventies Vat 47s power on, as Bruce Tyrrell demonstrated at Len Evans’ house after the recent Hunter Valley wine show.

Asked for a good old white Burgundy (the French region famed for its chardonnay) for the occasion, Bruce showed up with a 1973 Vat 47. Evans demurred at serving it masked alongside a bottle of 1982 Corton Charlemagne (one of the very greatest French chardonnay vineyards). Bruce insisted. Evans poured.

Well, it was an experienced wine group gathered. And they decided that the two chardonnays served in unmarked glasses were, in fact, very fine examples of Corton Charlemagne.

I guess we might call that another blow for French mystique and reason to question our views on Australian chardonnay – not just on how well it ages but on current wine-making practices that might influence ageing potential.

Bruce Tyrrell says he was greatly influenced by a tasting of all the Vat 47s in 1992. The less manipulated 1970s wines were ageing gracefully, while the fatter 1980s simply grew fatter. “I could’ve switched the wines around and no one would’ve noticed”, recalls Bruce referring to the deceptive youthfulness of the 1970s wines.

By the time of the tasting, Bruce had already altered wine-making practice, having totally eliminated malo-lactic fermentation from the 1988 vintage onwards. Malo-lactic fermentation reduces totally acidity in a wine and converts malic acid to soft lactic acid.

The process can give a soft, creamy texture to chardonnay. But it also introduces an aroma and flavour resembling butterscotch – quite a strong characteristic in many   of our better quality chardonnays.

Tyrrell’s view is that in the Hunter’s warm climate, Chardonnay grapes develop ample, ripe flavours and that acid levels, if anything, tend to be too low, not too high. In contrast, cooler areas experience higher grape-acid levels and produce wines that often benefit from the mid-palate boost given by malo-lactic fermentation.

Since abandoning malo-lactic fermentation, Tyrrells see greater freshness in Vat 47 Chardonnay and has great confidence in the cellaring capacity of recent vintages. Only time will tell, of course. (Chateau Shanahan’s experience supports the Tyrrell view).

Of course plenty of other factors influence how chardonnay ages: age of vines, vineyard management, climate, soil, clone of vine, timing of harvest, crushing and juice handling techniques, fermentation temperature, type of oak and maturation regime are vitally important.

But, just as an intrusive oak character marred some chardonnays of the eighties, excessive malo-lactic character (a cloying butterscotch aroma and flavour) spoils my pleasure of some of today’s generally much better wines.

In some ways this is a quibble on a quite a valid wine-maker technique to reduce acidity and increase flavour. But I do wonder if, when it’s overdone, it reduces the ageing capacity of some wines. Could this be the next area for fine-tuning by our chardonnay makers now that oak usage is pretty well under control?

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1998
First published 20 September 1998 in the Canberra Times

Chardonnay a perennial favourite. But beware the unoaked versions

Twenty years ago Australia’s chardonnay plantings were too small to be noted in official statistics.

In 1988 we harvested 21,800 (1.5 million dozen bottles) tonnes of chardonnay — just one eighth of 1998’s record 173,000 tonnes (12.1 million cases).

1988’s chardonnay harvest accounted for just five per cent of Australia’s wine grape production; 1998’s represented eighteen per cent of the total harvest and half of premium white production.

Even in 1988 people spoke – as some do today – of chardonnay going out of fashion. But for all the talk, the flow of chardonnay continues to increase – suggesting that as long as people drink dry white wine, chardonnay might remain number one.

Clearly, consumers prefer it to riesling, semillon and sauvignon blanc, the other leaders in Australia’s white-wine popularity stakes. Perhaps the reason for chardonnay’s sustained success lies not just in an inherently pleasant flavour, but also in its tremendous versatility and, ironically, that at the cheaper end of the scale it makes pleasant whites that don’t make the mistake of having too much flavour.

(You only have to taste beer to see what I mean by that last remark. Modern, mass-produced lagers appear to be ‘de-brewed’ – literally stripped of any distinctive malty or hop aromas and flavours in order to please the widest range of palates and offend none).

If the very cheapest chardonnays tend to blandness it’s not such a bad thing. At least they’re clean, fresh, very, very cheap and don’t have the distinctive flavours of sauvignon blanc, semillon and riesling that turn some drinkers off.

A short step up from commodity chardonnay we find distinctly more colourful beasts like Lindemans Bin 65 and Rosemount Diamond Label. These globally loved whites were decades in the developing.

Besides showing good varietal flavour from a continuously evolving range of vineyards, each benefits in its own way from considerable wine-maker added aromas and flavours. Philip John at Lindemans Karadoc winery and Philip Shaw at Rosemount’s Denman winery between them know (or invented) every chardonnay trick in the book.

Unoaked chardonnays have been with us a long time, although the proliferation of brands and popularity with marketers is a relatively new phenomenon. The first brand to make a virtue of not having contact with oak, as far as I can recall, was a 1977 Saxonvale Chardonnay, released alongside its oak-matured cellarmate.

My impression of the new-age unoaked chardonnays is that they were a reaction to the worst of the over-oaked chardonnays of the 1980s. This was a period of learning by wine makers and, not surprisingly, many wines tasted more of resin and fresh timber than they did of the grape.

However, the unoaked craze is well and truly sprinting, even if the majority of the runners, to my palate, come close to water. My advice is to approach with caution. Region of origin, wine maker reputation, vintage and price should all be watched. Above all, since these wines come to the market without expensive oak maturation, they should be offered at a discount not a premium.

These three, tasted recently, appealed to my palate, offering various expressions of rich, clean, crisp varietal flavour: Antipodean Eden Valley Unwooded Chardonnay 1997, Goundrey Unwooded Chardonnay 1998, and, at the budget end of the market, the new Lindemans Cawarra Chardonnay 1998 (predominantly from the old Seppelt Barooga vineyard on the Murray River in New South Wales).

Unoaked’ is not the only adjective to excite chardonnay marketers. It’s been joined recently by a ‘gentle press’ product, Sarantos, from Kingston Estates (referring to the common practice of using only the finest cut of juice in making some premium products) and ‘malo’ unwooded chardonnay from the old master, Brian McGuigan.

Malo’ refers to the also common practice amongst chardonnay makers of reducing malic acid by inducing a secondary fermentation and converting malic acid to lactic acid. The result is a softer wine with, quite often, a distinctive ‘butterscotch’ aroma and flavour derived from the malo-lactic ferment. McGuigan’s wine certainly has buckets of this character, although I was hard pressed to spot any chardonnay flavour.

This merely highlights the fact that chardonnay is perhaps the most highly-manipulated of any grape variety. It’s flavours mix and match readily with a number of wine-maker inputs and this only adds to the diversity created by nature. More on this next week.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1998
First published 13 September 1998 in the Canberra Times

Rothbury Estate — part one of two: the Len Evans’ years

In 1996, Foster’s-owned Mildara Blass acquired Rothbury Estate, just four years after it went public.

Foster’s advances had not been welcomed by Rothbury Chairman, Len Evans. Many small shareholders shared Len’s wariness. With a soft spot for Len’s exuberance and fond memories of the wine-loving origins of the venture, they wondered where the hostile takeover might take Rothbury.

Would it become just another brand to sit alongside Wolf Blass, Yellowglen and Jamieson’s Run in the Mildara Blass portfolio? Would production of the small-volume, idiosyncratic Hunter wines continue? Would the popular mail-order wine club continue?

Indeed, Rothbury Estate’s history and personality were so strongly linked to Len, it seemed hard to imagine a Rothbury — let alone a better Rothbury (and that’s what’s emerging) — without him.

Len seemed to combine a romantic view and love of wine with hard-nosed, pragmatic entrepreneurial skills. As a founding father of Rothbury, Len watched his baby crawl, totter, stumble, walk and grow.

From being a Lower-Hunter specialist in 1968 Rothbury became a non-listed public company
in 1974, shifted its focus from the Hunter to Cowra in purchasing a large chardonnay vineyard there in 1981 and, after a public float in 1992, became the centrepiece of an operation including Baileys and St Hubert’s wineries in Victoria.

Prior to the float, St Hubert’s and Bailey’s belonged to the Goodman Fielder Wattie Group. When Rothbury purchased these two wineries, GFW Ingredients, a subsidiary of Goodman Fielder Wattie, acquired 19.7 per cent of the new company, making it the largest shareholder. Len Evans remained the second biggest holder with a 15 per cent stake, and another founding father, Daniel Chen, was the third biggest with 11.3 per cent.

From Rothbury’s 11 founding investors in 1968, Len Evans assumed the role of marketing director, while Murray Tyrrell looked after the vineyards. The company planted about 340 hectares, all in the lower Hunter. Gerry Sissingh made the wines. But only those passing muster with the selection panel — Len Evans, Rudy Komon, Gerry Sissingh, and Murray Tyrrell — emerged under the Rothbury label.

Rothbury’s initial production was predominantly red, a direction dictated by a short boom in red-wine drinking in the late sixties. Unfortunately for Rothbury, consumer preferences moved quickly to whites, putting the unprepared company under severe financial pressure.

Rothbury’s bacon was saved by a controversial 1981 board decision to buy an established vineyard in Cowra. It allowed Rothbury to meet an exploding demand for good-quality but inexpensive chardonnays.

It turned out that the wine-buying public was little interested in the lower Hunter’s great specialties, shiraz and semillon, varieties making up the majority of Rothbury’s Hunter plantings. Len Evans takes the credit for seeing where demand lay and persuading the board to grab Cowra.

The Cowra vineyard had been established by Tony Grey in 1972. It proved an ideal location. By the Lachlan River in central Western N.S.W. in a benign climate with plenty of water, it quickly and efficiently produced biggish crops of high-quality grapes. Evans recognised the quality early.

He was instrumental in sourcing Cowra grapes for Petaluma Chardonnay from the first vintage in 1977 until the vineyard’s acquisition by Rothbury in 1981. At the time of the purchase, Cowra was planted to a number of varieties including 12 hectares of chardonnay.

In that year Rothbury made just one thousand cases of its first Cowra chardonnay. Production increased steadily as more chardonnay went in and other varieties were pulled out. Forty two thousand cases were made in 1990, by the mid nineties production was running at about sixty thousand cases a year.

Rothbury’s production turned even more to whites with the acquisition in 1988 of Denman Estate’s vineyards in the upper Hunter. Then as tasted swung back to reds again in the nineties, Mudgee shiraz and cabernet became important.

By the mid nineties Rothbury’s Hunter plantings were down to just 63 hectares producing around 500 tonnes in good years. That was only 10 per cent of the group’s total crush, reflecting just how far from commercial reality the original Hunter dream had been.

Some might say the dream evaporated completely with the arrival of Mildara Blass in 1996. Heads rolled. And, shock horror, the flagship Hunter Reserve Shiraz was slaughtered — falling from around $30 to $15 a bottle in Sydney and Canberra retail outlets.

In fact, the old vision has been replaced by a new one. In some respects it’s more hard nosed than the old one. But, ironically, the dream of making great Hunter wines probably has more chance of succeeding under the new regime than it did under the old. That’s next week’s story.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1998 & 2007

King Valley Victoria part two of two — Brown Bros

Without Brown Bros there may not be a King Valley wine industry today. A seeming permanence on the landscape since 1889, sheer size, wide consumer recognition, an early acceptance of new grape-growing ventures in the south of the valley and apparent prosperity made them the biggest player in the region and keeps them well ahead of competitors in size and public recognition.

Amongst consumers, Brown Bros is one of the most widely recognised wine brands of all. It is also one of only a few wineries established in the nineteenth century to prosper and survive into the 1990s still under family control.

Where the Hardy, Penfold, Seppelt, Lindeman, Gramp, Morris and Tulloch families lost control of their businesses the Browns, along with McWilliams and Tyrrells not only survived the long haul but remained significant mainstream players as well, although each remained intact into the 1990s by a different route.

Until recent times, Brown Bros was a diverse farming operation. Wine making was a major, but not sole focus of the business.

Chief Viticulturist , Mark Walpole, says he joined Brown Bros as a farm manager, but as wine making became the core activity of the family, he concentrated increasingly on vineyard management, learning the trade from Dr Jim Hardy, hands on work and international vineyard tours.

These days, he says, the family farms are leased to allow a one hundred per cent focus on wine making, based on vineyards in the King Valley, Rutherglen and on the Murray River, near Swan Hill.

Like other wineries, the focus is moving rapidly towards the premium end of the market. Over the last few decades, says wine maker Rob Scapin, production has been fairly evenly split between cask and bottles.

Now, all growth is in bottled wine and Scapin says the cask may not exist in another seven years. By that time production will have grown to around 18,000 grape tonnes a year (about 1.3 million dozen bottles) split fairly evenly between whites and reds with a smaller portion given to fortified wines.

By then, Brown Bros hopes to be exporting fifty per cent of its bottled-wine output, double the current level of 25 per cent.

Brown Bros see the trialing of new and different grape varieties as important to its future.

Scapin says the company crushed forty three different wine-grape varieties in 1997 and many of these were bottled separately for tasting and sale through the cellar door facility — one of the biggest in Australia and symbolic of the Browns’ unique approach to wine marketing.

The Browns are now, and for as long as I can remember, have been more concerned with what the drinker wants than with what critics, retailers or show judges think of their wines.

During the seventies and eighties — an era of perennial wine overproduction and subsequent producer-led discounting in Australia — the Browns steadily built a following for their brands by marketing an image direct to the public.

They were almost alone amongst wine producers in driving their own demand rather than relying on the retail trade to create interest through discounting.

They did much of the spade work at cellar door. With Melbourne just a few hours drive away from Milawa, the Hume highway just twenty minutes away and being on the road to the Victorian snowfields, Brown Bros direct sales boomed.

However, cellar door success came not just through location but through a consistent effort to find what the drinker wanted and then providing it.

Brown Bros became the champion of new grape varieties. With the CSIRO they developed tarrango — a new red-grape variety that thrived on the warm Murray and made fruity, soft, easy drinking wines.

It was first sold at cellar door in the seventies. Success there led to increased planting and production. It is now the company’s biggest selling red wine — selling more in the UK than at home.

More recently, the Italian variety, Barbera, made a successful debut at cellar door. Production is now on the increase, and thirteen hectares have been planted at the new Banksdale vineyard on a volcanic ridge in the south west of the King Valley.

Dolcetto seems set to get a guernsey, too, and the Brown Bros don’t give a hoot if the critics scoff. Instead of the traditional Italian dry style Browns have made an extremely sweet red wine. Why? Because cellar door trials showed that significant numbers of cellar door customers wanted a fruity, sweet red without bubbles — something more prestigious sounding and more expensive that Lambrusco.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1998 & 2007

Wine imports not a bad thing

Not since the early 1980s, when the Aussie dollar peaked at double its current worth against some European currencies, have I seen so many imported wines coming into the country.

Every Friday for the last three months I’ve attended commercial tastings where brokers and agents trot out their latest discoveries, with imports now outnumbering Australian wines. On top of that there are several standing invitations to visit wineries as soon as their foreign samples arrive.

But there are fundamental differences between the growing flow of imports now and what we saw in the early ’80s. Then we had a more fragmented, production-driven industry. It was under-capitalised, largely unprofitable, driven by winemakers and riding on the back of rapidly expanding sales, especially of cask wine.

There was no shortage of wine. In fact, the reverse situation kept prices low and sales growing. But there was a shortage of premium grape varieties, especially of chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon.

In an article I wrote for the Australian Financial Review in about 1983, I estimated imports at about 3% by volume of the total Australian market but 15% by value. Imports then were largely of reasonable-quality bottled table wine.

With our dollar buying between six and eight French francs, and the Americans yet to discover wine, French country wines like Muscadet, Pouilly Fume, Sancerre, Beaujolais and Chablis were affordable and consumed by a comparatively high proportion of Australians who enjoyed bottled wine.

But times changed. The dollar collapsed in 1985. The Americans discovered wine. And the tremendously strong vineyard and wine making infrastructure which had developed fairly quickly turned to exports.

Rationalisation and more professional management saw the trend strengthen so that we now have a much stronger, more out ward-looking wine industry than ever before. It still needs the cask market. But that market is shrinking, and the strongest growth now comes from sales of bottled white and red wine, both here and in export markets.

Rapid growth, especially in demand for bottled reds, coinciding with a run of small vintages, are the strongest forces behind the new flow of imports.

Pressure was on stocks of bulk red wine even before the 1995 vintage fell 250,000 tonnes short of expectations. Winemakers had still not recovered from the disastrously small 1993 vintage. It had led to “out-of stock” for the first time in the history of the Australian wine cask.

I saw wine drinkers stare in disbelief at bottle-shop attendants when told their favourite tipple had run dry. And I well remember big winemakers early last year wondering how on earth they could hold price parity of red and white wine casks when there was simply not enough red available. And what was available cost more than white of comparable quality.

Well, under the same pressures, people come up with similar solutions. For sectors of the wine industry, the solution is a perfectly sensible and welcome one: if we can’t make it here, let’s bring it in.

For Miranda Wines in Griffith, the shortage led to California. With a Golden Gate wine cask to fill, and a Californian winemaker with good contacts back home, one thing led to another. And by late 1991 Golden Gate red casks became a blend of Californian and Australian wine.

Miranda’s Bob Burton says it was a matter of importing or taking the brand off the market. He tells me Golden Gate Soft Red, ‘Chianti’ and ‘Claret’ continue to sell well and appear to have been completely accepted by the consumer. Bob adds that when grape supplies meet demand, the winery hopes to return to full Australian production.

On a far bigger scale, Southcorp Wines, Australia’s largest winemaker, last week marketed a French-Australian blend in its big-selling Wynnvale cask and plans a similar blend for Kaiser Stuhl casks shortly.

I’ve tasted the Wynnvale red (51% Australian — 49 % French) and vouch for the quality. Southcorp chief executive Bruce Kemp told me the move was a logical one to meet a demand that was far beyond Australian capabilities after the huge grape losses in the 1995 vintage.

It’s a sweet irony, isn’t it, that the French, still perceived as the makers of the world’s greatest wines, should now be providing vin ordinaire for the humble Aussie wine cask.

As wine drinkers, we should welcome these changes.  A more open wine market, with perhaps 20% imports instead of 2%, not only opens our minds to the variety the world has to offer, but might finally provide the only foil to rising prices with major production capacity now concentrated in so few hands.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1995
First published 16 April 1995 in the Canberra Times

O’Leary puts Hardy’s red back on track

South Australia’s 1990 reds are spectacularly good. That was the one sure thing learned visiting a handful of wineries and tasting dozens of reds over there a few weeks back.

At Hardy’s Tintara winery in McLaren Vale, winemaker David O’Leary opened a dazzling array of 1990 reds from the humble $6 a bottle Hardy McLaren Vale Hermitage to the top-of-the-range Reynella Stonyhill Cabernet Sauvignon, Hardys Collection Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, and Hardy Eileen Hardy Shiraz.

The 1990 McLaren Vale Hermitage is one of the greatest friends the wine drinker will ever find when it is released in a few weeks time. It perfectly demonstrates many of the points made in last week’s column about good vineyards and winemakers’ skills maturing at about the same time.

With a keen appreciation of McLaren Vale’s ability to produce robust reds from the shiraz (or hermitage) grape, O’Leary, with encouragement of the marketing department, set about making the real thing in volume and on a low budget.

With so many new vineyards coming on tap, he had no trouble sourcing grapes from the McLaren Vale area. In fact, about ninety five per cent of the local shiraz goes into this one brand. The balance, the cream of the crop, goes into Eileen Hardy and Reynella.

Gone are the days of picking grapes early to make lighter reds. O’Leary uses only fully ripened shiraz even in the mass-produced budget wine. And while the grapes for this are crushed in a continuous press, not the old basket presses mentioned last week, about half of the total undergoes fermentation in open concrete vats.

These open fermenters allow the fermenting wine plenty of contact with air: two funnels per tank plunge through the wine three to four times a day forcing warmer wine from under the cap of skins to the surface. As well, the wine is drained off sending the header boards and skins (the cap) to the bottom of the vat, breaking it and allowing hot spots to cool as the wine is pumped back over, refloating the cap.

During this process, the wine absorbs oxygen, producing mellow flavours and introducing a firmer texture and structure.

Meanwhile, the other half of Hardys McLaren Vale Hermitage undergoes anaerobic fermentation in modern stainless steel Vin0matic fermenters. Fermentations is at a lower temperature than in the open vats. As a result this portions captures more of the pure fruit aromas and flavours.

After fermentation, both components are blended together and placed in five to six year old oak barrels for a twelve-month maturation period. The wine’s sleep is disturbed several times as it is drained out and put back into the barrels (racked). This aerates the wine and allows winemakers to remove sediment.

By the time it is bottled, the wine retains some of the aromatic characters of the anaerobically handled portion with its lively fresh fruit characters on the palate. But the aerobic part finishes the wine giving it the firm mouth feel…or structure…that all red wine drinkers look for.

In the better reds, where more time (and therefore money) may be spent in production, O’Leary leans ever further to aerobic handling. In his view the wines are simply better to drink.

Thus, the Reynella Stonyhill and Eileen Hardy reds, for example, are crushed in the old basket presses, fermented entirely in open vats, finish off their ferments in small oak barrels, and are regularly racked during maturation.

The quality of these wines from the 1990 and 1991 vintages is nothing short of sensational. There is no doubt in my mind that the Reynella Cabernets are at least the equal of the fabled, long-lived reds produced from the same vineyards under the Chateau Reynella label in the 1960’s. Chances are the new wines are even better, but only a decade in the cellar will tell for sure.

While the 1990 Reynella would have to rank as one of the best and most complete Australian cabernets I’ve ever tasted, the 1990 Eileen Hardy Shiraz is also bound to make its mark.

Here we see that Padthaway, renowned for its whites but tending to make lighter reds, has at least one great patch of shiraz. O’Leary spent three years down at Padthaway where the Hardy winemaking team identified a low yielding block that consistently produced outstanding berries.

Blended with a small amount of Clare shiraz, grapes from the selected Padthaway block have produced one of the best Eileen Hardys yet in the great 1990 vintage.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1992 & 2007

Deadline nears for French name wrangle

Historic material: From the Canberra Times Sunday 1 July 1990

IT’S TIME to stop stealing French names for our wine labels.

If the Australian wine industry is to exploit the huge European Community market after internal boundaries fall in1992, it must now phase out the use of European place names on the labels of wine sold in Australia and in those export markets which still allow their use.

We no longer need to use French names. To continue to fight in our courts for the right to appropriate them is futile. Even if we win the legal fights locally, we will be losers in the bigger battle. The French will certainly see to it that non-tariff barriers are erected around the world’s largest pool of wine drinkers if we dig in our heels.

A country that sinks ships in friendly ports won’t have any qualms at all about doing its best to keep Australian wine out of the EC.

Speaking at the inaugural Maurice O’Shea Award dinner in Sydney on June 22, the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy, John Kerin, made it clear to gathered leaders of the industry and press that progress in negotiations with the EC is conditional on this issue.

Our negotiations with the European Commission also present some new challenges,” he said. “If you are willing to place restrictions on the use of generic names of European geographical origin, the EC has indicated it is prepared to accommodate some Australian wine making practices. It will also agree to simplified certification of wine exports to the EC.

Following further consultations with industry over the next few months, I expect formal negotiations to be held in 1991 with the EC on a wine agreement with Australia,” Mr Kerin said.

Despite the closeness of this deadline, Australian wine companies are now doing battle with the French over the use of two French geographical names: Champagne (now in court in New Zealand) and Beaujolais (yet to be heard here in Australia).

These, and especially Penfolds current battle with the French Government over use of “Champagne” in New Zealand, were the subject of a bitter attack by Wolf Blass in Canberra on June 23.

He was in town to launch his 1985 Black Label Cabernet Shiraz (a superb drop). It was a clumsy, buffoon effort as trade functions go (surprising for a man whose wines are marketed with such aplomb), salvaged only by Wolfs brilliant and inspiring speech.

It was a speech of vision and hope for the Australian wine industry, replete with bouquets and brickbats hurled atlightning speed towards a dazzled audience.

Wolf sees an industry producing wines that excel on an international level. But faced with a sated domestic market, it’s an industry whose future lies in exporting.

Being culturally European, our wine companies should now be setting up European head offices in England (because of the common language) to take advantage of the greatest economic explosion in human history about to unleash itself on the Continent.

If Ian Mackley, managing director of Penfolds Wines, had been sitting in the audience at this stage of Wolf’s speech, he’d have copped a flying brickbat between the eyes.

Wolf is outraged that his ambitious plans for Europe may be jeopardised by Penfolds’ insistence on fighting the French in Australian and New Zealand courts over the use of French regional names on Australian wines.

Wine writer and expert witness for the French in their “Champagne” wrangle against Penfolds, James Halliday, believes Penfolds’ persistence is amazingly short-sighted, and bitterly opposes it on two grounds: firstly, he believes that Australian wines simply no longer need to “borrow or steal” French names, and secondly, he says “the French have made it clear they will not cooperate on Australian/EC wine matters without an undertaking to phase out the use of French geographical names”.

With Ian Mackley in New Zealand, I’ve been unable to gauge Penfolds’ response to this strong industry criticism.

As a major exporter of wine to Europe, you can bet that Penfolds have not taken on the French without giving thought to the EC ramifications of their actions. Perhaps they hope that by winning the right to use the word “Champagne” in New Zealand they can later negotiate a phasing out of French names on their own terms.

But meanwhile the clock moves quickly towards 1992. With Mr Kerin seeking an EC wine agreement with Australia next year, and relying on a phasing out of European names to achieve a satisfactory outcome, it’s not surprising people are becoming edgy with the belligerent stance being taken by Penfolds, Australia’s largest winemaker.

Mr Mackley was there to hear the Minister’s speech last Friday. Was he listening?

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 1990 and 1993