Visiting Canberra two weeks back, Barossa vigneron Grant Burge rated 2010 his “best white vintage in 10 years”.  Then came the highs and lows of a wet 2011 season, “throwing up all the diseases in one year”, devastating crops in many vineyards, and driving up spraying and vineyard costs across the board.

In his own vineyards – about 400 hectares, mainly in the southern Barossa – Burge sprayed against disease 12 to 16 times, instead of the usual four. And when late-season rain spurred outbreaks of botrytis cinerea, vineyard workers cut out infected berries by hand.

Faced by unrelenting disease pressures, says Burge, “some growers stopped spraying, because they felt uncertain about the final result”. Better to cut their losses early, they reasoned, than to spend more on spraying when there might be no grapes to sell in any event. Some lost their entire crops.

As a winemaker needing every berry, Burge persisted and in the end reaped a good harvest from his own vineyards. In the final ripening period, he says, mild to cool weather settled on the Barossa, bringing healthy fruit to flavour ripeness at unusually low sugar levels. Reds at Burge’s elevated Corryton Park Vineyard, for example, came in at around 12.5 to 13.4 Baume (a measure of sugar), instead of the usual 14 plus.

The low temperatures at ripening produced intense flavours and high natural acidity in the whites, says Burge, and now believes they’ll be even better than the 2010s.

He rates Barossa Valley ahead of the adjoining, cooler Eden Valley in 2011, particularly for cabernet sauvignon. Burge’s Corryton Park vineyard – normally much cooler than the Barossa floor, and more akin to Coonawarra – usually produces his best cabernet.

But in 2011, says Burge, “cabernet sauvignon off the valley floor is the best in 25 years. If fact, I’ve never seen the quality before. I’ve never seen the purple colour on the floor, like at Corryton, but it’s black-purple”.

Overall, says Burge, 2011 wines seem generally leaner, very pure in their fruit expression, less alcoholic and needing time to mature – comments closely paralleling the Canberra 2011 experience.

Burge visited Canberra to promote his flagship Barossa shiraz, Meshach ($155), released, like Grange, at five years. But Burge operates on a large scale for a private Australian producer – and the styles he makes extend far beyond the more expensive reds behind his reputation.

Burge’s 400-plus hectares of vines supply only 60 per cent of company needs. The other 40 per cent comes from about 20 long-term growers, says Burge.

He now makes more white wine than red, largely through the success of his $30-a-bottle sparkling wines, sourced from the cool Adelaide Hills (immediately to the south of Eden Valley on the Mount Lofty Ranges).

But Burge’s most intense passion clearly lies in his beloved Barossa reds.  On this trip he’s showing us Meshach 2006 (straight shiraz, mainly from the Filsell vineyard) and Holy Trinity 2008 ($36), a blend of grenache, shiraz and mourvedre.

They’re beautiful examples of their styles – Meshach made since 1988 and Holy Trinity from 1995. While we might call them “traditional” robust, warm-climate styles, they’re both thoroughly modern wines, expressing regional fruit flavours first and foremost, and benefiting from careful fine-tuning over the years.

While the market still loves them, Burge laments a shift away from the style in wine shows. He says the judges are now “all cool-climate orientated. I went to a few shows last year with Craig [winemaker Craig Stansborough] and warm climate wines like McLaren Vale and Barossa couldn’t get a look in. Anything showing American oak got kicked out. But some of the cool shirazes were tried were just green. I understand they need to show a lead for the industry, but they shouldn’t get too far from the public. The judges now have a narrow focus”.

He sees it as a worrying trend that wine judges today tend to award a narrower range of styles now than an older generation did in the past.

Burge offers interesting insights into international markets, too. He exports to 32 countries, sees opportunities for strong brands despite our dollar’s strength. Describing China as “the wild, wild east”, he’s built export volumes of high quality wine there through “individuals all over the place” and expects ultimately to have a central distributor.

He’s neve done much in the United States but plans to attack the market in the near future and sees huge potential there for good wine. Research, however, revealed a widespread perception in America that Australia doesn’t make good quality wine – a stereotype, he believes, created by the success of cheap, fruity wines like Yellowtail.

He’ll therefore emphasise Barossa Valley, not Australia, as Grant Burge wines roll out across America.

Oh, and the wines? See Grant Burge Meshach 2006 and Thorn Vineyard Eden Valley Riesling 2010  in today’s reviews and Holy Trinity 2008 next week.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2011

At Chateau Shanahan we’ve experienced cellaring joy and disappointments over the years. But consistent pleasure in older bottles of Majella Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon and The Malleea cabernet shiraz, reminded us of this marvellous winery’s interesting transition from farming to grape growing to winemaking.

When brothers Brian and Anthony Lynn made the first Majella wine in 1991, they’d been growing grapes in Coonawarra for twenty-three years. They’d lived all their lives in the area. They’d grown fat lambs and wool long before vines took root on the family farm in 1968. Yet their first step into winemaking was, perhaps, even more tentative than their first step into grape growing had been two decades earlier.

Then, at least, there was a pre-arranged buyer for the grapes. Eric Brand, a good mate of George Lynn (Brian’s and Anthony’s late father), encouraged the planting of six acres of shiraz and agreed to buy the grapes to help satisfy a winemaking contract with Hardys.

The first Majella wine, a 1991 Coonawarra Shiraz, however, had no guaranteed buyers. If you’d asked Brian or Anthony where the business was headed when the wine was released in 1993, they’d not have foreseen Majella’s complete transition from contract grape grower to leading wine estate in just ten years.

“People ask, were we visionary?” says Brian ‘Prof’ Lynn. “And I say, not really”. But Majella’s huge success wasn’t just blind luck either. It’s a success that grew from strong, deep roots in the Coonawarra landscape and community, fertilised by experience, skill, imagination, good management and – during it’s first decade of winemaking at least – by impeccable timing.

The release of Majella’s 1991 shiraz in 1993 came at the beginning of the unprecedented global red-wine boom. The wine was, and still is, a brilliant drop, beautifully packaged (designed by Barbara Harkness) and realistically priced.

I recall my first taste of it on a wine-buying trip to Coonawarra with David Farmer in September, 1993. At a little cook-your-own steakhouse, Nibs – owned at the time by Bill Brand and ‘Prof’ Lynn – the new Majella label caught our eye amongst all the familiar names on display. Who the hell was this we wondered? Nice label.

Nice wine, too – a classy drop, packed with Coonawarra’s unique ripe-berry flavour. Whether it was our huge grins or the label that prompted Patricia Lynn (Prof’s and Anthony’s mum) to approach us, I’ll never know, because we never met again. She died a few years after our visit.

But this former mayor of Penola (the little town at Coonawarra’s southern tip) turned on the warmth and charm for her Canberra visitors with tales of wartime Canberra. “I was the minutes secretary to the Minister’s secretary’, she told us of her job with the Minister for Supply. She knew ‘Chif’ and Nugget Coombs and that “after the bombing of Leeds, that Lithgow was the only remaining .303 manufacturing plant in the allied group”.

And she told us of Majella. In the post war years she met and married George Lynn, moved to the Coonawarra area where they produced wool on a property just to the south of Penola. One night Patricia told George she wanted to name the property ‘Majellan’ – after St Gerard Majellan, the catholic patron saint of mothers. She’d lost her first child and wanted another.

George’s response was pragmatic. ‘Majellan’ was too long to stamp on a wool bale. End of conversation – although a memorable night in other ways, recalled Patricia. Next morning, George offered a solution. Drop the “n”. And so Majella was born as a wool farm. In 1960 it became a fat lamb farm, too, when George bought his uncle Frank’s block in the heart of Coonawarra. In 1968 Majella became a vineyard. And in 1991, a wine name.

The Lynn family’s move into grape growing, recalls Prof, followed a high school geography project on Coonawarra viticulture. With luminaries such as Bill and Jock Redman, Eric Brand and Phil Laffer advising him, the young Prof’s interest shifted from the theoretical to the practical.

With advice and encouragement from Eric Brand of Laira vineyards, Prof and his dad planted six acres of shiraz in 1968. The propagated the vines from cuttings taken, on Bill Redman’s advice, from Arthur Hoffman’s ‘North Block’ (now Redmans). Prof remembers Bill Redman saying, “I’ll take you to Hoffman’s, because they’re the best shiraz in Coonawarra”.

Similarly, when the Lynns decided to add cabernet sauvignon to the mix old Jock Redman of Wynns advised them to take cuttings from vines he’d marked with white paint. These, he said, produced the best wine.

With a steady contract to supply grapes to Eric Brand, the Lynns were happy with those early grape-growing years. But in 1974 George became ill. By the time he died in 1976, the Brand contract had ended and nobody wanted Coonawarra shiraz – only cabernet, which made up only one third of the Majella plantings.

“If we didn’t have wool, we would’ve gone broke”, says Prof. Business improved in the early eighties when Majella began selling grapes to Wynns – an arrangement that lasted until vintage 2001. And it was grapes that saved the Lynns in the wool crash of the late eighties and early nineties. “We would’ve gone broke without grapes, then”, laughs Prof.

So, by the time Majella made its first wine in 1991, it had served a long, tough apprenticeship learning how to grow high-quality wine grapes good enough to sell even in tough times.

Mature red vines on a good Coonawarra plot, and the ability to produce top grapes, says Prof, is the family’s biggest asset – entrusted, in the early days, to his old mates, the Brands and their talented winemaker, Bruce Gregory.

Then in 1999 Gregory joined the Lynn family full time at Majella’s new winery, next to the cellar door, opened in 1996.

Following its complete transition to winemaking a decade ago, Majella cemented its reputation as one of the region’s great winemakers. The wines all bear the regional style stamp.

Not surprisingly cabernet sauvignon ($33), Coonawarra’s great specialty, now sparks more interest than the shiraz ($30) that blazed the way for the label from the 1991 vintage. And the $75 long-lived flagship, The Malleea, a cabernet shiraz blend, hits profound heights. The same blend, in the $18 The Musician label , provides drink-now pleasure without diminishing the Coonawarra signature.

As the world’s wealthiest people pay ever greater prices for Bordeaux’s cabernet-based reds, we can get on quietly drinking estate-made Majella, and other Coonawarra and Margaret River reds, of comparable quality, at a fraction of the price.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2011

In a vintage plagued by mildew and botrytis outbreaks, biodynamic Lark Hill, like several traditionally managed Canberra vineyards, overcame the vine diseases and ultimately harvested good quantities of healthy grapes.

During our post-vintage visit to Lark Hill, David and Sue Carpenter and son Chris seem relaxed, perhaps relieved to have all the good stuff bubbling away in the winery. There’s a fair bit of it, too, says David Carpenter, estimating a yield of about six tonnes a hectare – double 2009’s crop and significantly up on 2010. It’s a wonderful outcome for a vineyard at 860 metres in a cool, wet season.

The fight against disease began early, says David. In winter 2010 Australian grape growers had been warned to expect a cool, wet spring and summer – ideal conditions for mildew – “so we could see it coming”, says David, “and commenced a protective regime”.

That meant spraying before outbreaks of mildew, beginning very early in the season with cupric oxide (permitted in biodynamic farming). “By doing it early we used only a little bit of spray on a small target”, says David. Later in the season sprays included a canola base with tee tree and, after fruiting, copper based spray followed by a biodynamic preparation aimed at building up natural predators.

While spraying can kill mildew spoors, a long-term regime aims at building healthy soils and strong, resistant plants – based on “spraying the vineyard with various preparations and endless involvement with deep composting”.

Even in traditional viticulture “spraying makes up only about 20 per cent of the arsenal against mildew – the rest’s vineyard management”, says David. He’s referring to practices like shoot and leaf thinning and hedging vines to maximise air circulation and allow penetration of sunlight.

The Carpenters say their commitment to biodynamics began at a conference in 2003 at Beechworth. Sue recalls “lots of arms folded tightly across chests”, theirs included, at the beginning, but a rush to sign up towards the end – sparked largely by a visit to Julian Castagna’s magnificent vineyard.

In their current newsletter, the Carpenters write, “from inception, we avoided insecticides and steered a careful path utilising biological controls wherever possible, but it is in the last eight years that we have fully entered the totally biodynamic regime”.

Biodynamics is sort of like organics with the added principles espoused by Rudolph Steiner. This includes the use of seemingly mysterious biodynamic preparations, numbered from 500 to 508, and adherence to the lunar calendar – practices, write the Carpenters, that some “regard with the deepest suspicion”. They add, “we assure you our attire has not progressed to sandals and loin cloths”.

However, a big part of biodynamics, certainly as practised by the Carpenters, appears to be giving tremendous attention to care of the land and vines. Who can argue against composting, deep mulching and keeping potentially hazardous chemicals out of the environment.

The more astrological components of biodynamics, such as planting, harvesting and racking wine by phases of the moon draws derision and satire from some quarters. And there’s much scepticism regarding the 500-series preparations – particularly regarding the legendary the cow horn full of dung – sometimes scoffed at as a belief in channelling cosmic forces.

But even scientists like the Carpenters have to stick with the Steiner precepts to be accredited as biodynamic producers – which they have been from vintage 2008.

They explain, for example, that the cow horn of dung isn’t about channelling cosmic or any other forces. It’s the beginning of breeding program for useful bacteria and fungal spores. It’s the base for the “500” preparation. Each autumn they fill the horns with cow dung, seal them with clay and bury them in shallow pits on beds of compost.

In spring they dig up the horns and use the dung as a starter culture in warm rainwater – adding 50 grams to every 200 litres and aerating it. The theory is that at around body temperature the bacteria and spores breed rapidly. The Carpenters then spray the mix around the vineyard where the microbes fix nitrogen in the soil and spores stimulate growth of fungi that enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the vines.

Whatever we make of the more arcane elements of biodynamics, the Lark Hill vineyard looks a treat and is delivering probably the best wines since the Carpenters began planting it in 1978.

Across the years they’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. As a result, they’ve pared the vineyard back to the proven varieties, riesling, chardonnay and pinot noir. And following a suggestion from Jancis Robinson, a visit to Austria tasting gruner veltliner – and the fortuitous discovery of two vines of the variety in Tasmania – propagated a thousand vines and planted them in 2006.

Gruner veltliner, say the Carpenters gives them a high-quality white that sits in style somewhere between the delicacy of riesling and opulence of chardonnay.

Like all of their table wines, bar riesling, it’s fermented by indigenous yeasts. Unfortunately the sensational 2010 sold out recently. But, says Chris Carpenter, the 2011 (still a lovely, sweet, acidic juice when I visited) will be released around October.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2011

Pedro ximenez probably isn’t on the radar of most wine drinkers. And where we see the name, it’s probably on the label of a dark, sweet, sherry. But it exists as a delicate, long-lived dry white wine as well. And there’s a dwindling but significant treasure trove of it at Campbells of Rutherglen.

It seems hard to believe now, but this Spanish white grape once starred in Australia’s wine industry. Brought to Sydney by James Busby in 1832, pedro ximenez spread to our hot, dry growing regions, including Rutherglen, Victoria. A century later it underpinned production of Australian “sherry”, much of it destined for the UK.

Rutherglen became an important production centre, with two of Australia’s largest producers and exporters located there. Winemaker Colin Campbell recalls Seppelt, at Rutherglen, and Lindemans, at nearby Corowa, New South Wales, being “based on sherry soleras”.

But by 1968, when Campbell returned to the family business from winemaking studies at Roseworthy College, fortified wine, including sherry, had begun its long decline, and table consumption was on the rise.

To meet growing demand for dry white wine, Campbell turned to the only two white varieties in the family vineyard – pedro ximenez and trebbiano. Both had been planted for sherry production and their fruit sold to Lindemans.

He says the pedro vines had probably been planted between 1900 and 1908, by his grandfather, David Campbell, son of the property’s founder, John Campbell.

Like other Victorian grape growers, the Campbells lost their original vines to phylloxera – the small but deadly American vine pest that also devastated European vineyards in the late nineteenth century.

To relieve distress among grape growers, says Campbell, the Victorian government despatched Francois de Castella to Europe. There he sourced vines, including pedro, grafted onto phylloxera-resistant rootstock. David Campbell’s new plantings came from de Castella’s material.

Campbell installed refrigeration at the winery and set about making a dry white pedro ximenez. Picked early, with comparatively low sugar and high acidity, the wine began life austere and dry, but developed greater richness and character with bottle age.

However, a run of wine show successes failed to spark interest in the variety. Incredulous winemakers, including Leo Buring’s John Vickery, laughed in wonder but stuck with established table wine varieties.

Vickery, the father of modern Australian riesling – an experienced sherry maker, too, using pedro ximenez in Buring’s popular Florita Flor sherry) – rightly dismissed pedro as a curio.

Campbell says bottled aged pedros invariably spark a similar reaction from drinkers ¬– scepticism before tasting, followed by an incredulous smile. I’ve been there twice. The first time, about eight years ago, on a retail buying trip, we tasted 20 or so vintages. The earlier wines carried “Chablis” labels, in line with generic naming of a past era; but from the late eighties carried the varietal name, pedro ximenez. What surprisingly delicious and delicate old wine they were. More recently, a lovely, fresh, delicate, slightly honeyed 1999 vintage, served at a dinner party, prompted a call to the winery, and this article.

Curio or not, pedro succeeded for Campbell’s from the late sixties until production ceased after the 2007 vintage. Colin Campbell says, “We stopped then because it was a curio and because we only made a small volume, it was difficult to handle”.

He says pedro shoots early, making it prone to damage from spring frosts. And the big berries tend to swell and burst in rain, or rot and fall off. However, pedro vines remain in the vineyard and now contribute to cheaper sweet fortified wines. Campbell says these vines are descendents of those established by his grandfather a century ago – the vineyard having been replanted in the mid 1990s.

While the winery discontinued production after 2007, Campbell expects stock to be available at the cellar door for some years as they’ve always released it as an aged wine. Because it’s so acidic and austere as a young wine, explains Campbell, “it needs at least five to six years to develop bottle age character. And it also needs cork character to age properly”.

But using cork exposes the wine to two risks – cork taint and random oxidation. And oxidation, laments Campbell, takes a massive toll, rendering up to 60 per cent of older pedros unsaleable. He says they destroy bottles that fail pre-release assessment.

Campbell’s dry, white pedro ximenez remains a curio – but a loveable, mellow and drinkable one, at a refreshingly low 11.5 per cent alcohol. Unfortunately, it’s destined for extinction.

But there’s still time to enjoy it. Campbells currently offer at cellar door the 1997 vintage for $35 and the 2004 vintage for $25.90. And all of the vintages from 1998 to 2007 remain in the cellar for future release. It’s history in a bottle.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2011
First published 6 April 2011 in The Canberra Times
Published in The Melbourne Age Epicure 26 July 2011