Category Archives: Wine

Canberra – vintage 2010 a rollercoaster

People, Uncategorized, Vineyard, Wine

What might vintage 2010 hold for Canberra wine drinkers? The season began exceptionally hot  and dry in November, turned cool and wet at Christmas, warmed up in January, then dumped rain again in February and March – encouraging berry split and fungal diseases. A slightly too-cool week following the early March rain retarded grape ripening. But as I write the mercury’s rising and we’re moving into a final, idyllic run of cool nights and warm days.

This is likely to save the day for the district’s red grapes. But the vintage could be down as much as fifty per cent for both reds whites, due largely to outbreaks of the fungal disease botrytis cinerea and berry split.

Ken Helm at Murrumbateman calls 2010 “the most topsy-turvy vintage ever”. Pessimism set in as the November heatwave stressed vines and seemed likely to bring vintage forward by weeks. But optimism rose at Christmas when four days of rain and cool weather revived the vines and put vintage back on a normal track.

Optimism faded with the February rain and outbreaks of mildew and botrytis – especially after bird netting made anti-fungal spraying a nightmare. But Helm and his grape growers found a workaround, using a small tractor and an improvised technique to spray a mix of hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid through the nets.

By now Helm had written off the chance of making a premium riesling in 2010, despite a record crush of the variety. Yes, there’s botrytis in some of it. But Helm is amazed by the combination of high sugar, exceptionally low pH and high acidity of the riesling juice – enough to revive hopes of a ‘premium’ riesling. It’s still a long shot and he says the jury’s out until the wine’s bottled in June.

Chardonnay withstood the botrytis charge less well and is a complete write off – there’ll be none made in 2010. A little sauvignon blanc survived to make a botrytis affected semi-dry style.

Helm’s main red variety, cabernet sauvignon, sourced from Al Lustenburger’s block, looks healthy, he says but won’t ripen until early April.

Clonakilla’s Tim Kirk calls 2010 “a difficult year that’s not in the same league as 2008 and 2009 – and in fact shows what remarkable years they were”. He’s glad to have picked riesling before the early March rain and says because it’s on the low-alcohol, high-acid side, it’ll be a delicate style.

By 13 March, he’d already processed 70 tonnes of “fantastic” red grapes from the warmer Hilltops region, but still had some whites and all of his reds hanging on the Murrumbateman vineyards. He anticipated harvesting the reds between mid March and early April. “It’ll be a selective pick”, Kirk said, “and some of the fruit will be declassified”.

Roger Harris of Brindabella Hills, Hall, describes 2010 as complex, “even the vines are confused”, he says, with cabernet ripening ahead of shiraz when it’s normally the other way around. Harris says he escaped disease but berry split (followed by shrivelling) caused by the rain reduced his crop significantly.

He’s made tiny amounts of good sauvignon blanc and riesling (crops are down 50 per cent) and, if weather forecasts prove correct, he anticipates a small but high quality shiraz crop.

At our highest and coolest vineyard, Lark Hill, vintage generally begins later – the first fruit generally coming in as the rest of the district polishes of the last of its whites. Running against the district trend, Sue Carpenter calls 2010 “our most striking vintage yet” with picking of pinot noir and chardonnay for sparkling wine scheduled for 19 March and chardonnay and riesling for table wine a day later. She expects to wrap vintage up on 15 April, harvesting the Austrian variety gruner veltliner and riesling for Lark Hill’s legendary auslese.

Carpenter says the vineyard has no botrytis and attributes this to biodynamic vineyard management. She believes that mulching interferes with botrytis’s life cycle. As well, the berry skins are too thick for the botrytis to penetrate and it therefore dies.

Down the hill at Lerida Estate on Lake George, Jim Lumbers reports good quality but quantities severely reduced by a “huge amount of botrytis”.  He says he salvaged 50 per cent of the chardonnay by using sorting tables – eliminating rotten fruit and sending only clean fruit to the fermenters. The resulting wine should be on the light and delicate side, reflecting the low sugar and high acid of the cool vintage.

Lumbers says unlike other recent cool vintages, 2002 and 2005, 2010 received far more rain. The combination of cool weather and moisture means big crops losses to botrytis and significantly later ripening for the red varieties.

Lumbers anticipates losing half of his pinot noir crop and sees his vineyard “sitting on the boundary of possibility” – meaning that when the chances of ripening fruit is marginal there’s also the possibility, given a run of slightly warmer days, of producing exceptional wine.

At this stage, he says, merlot and cabernet franc are “bursting with health, with berries like melons – but they need weeks to ripen”. And shiraz, says Lumbers, “is as green as green and needs ages. Perhaps Edgar Riek was right after all” (Dr Riek, founder of the neighbouring Lake George vineyard believed Lake George foreshore too cool to ripen shiraz).

At this stage, with the whites largely in the vat and the reds still on the vine, we can’t assess the vintage properly. What we do know is that quantities are down and the whites will be on the delicate side. The fate of our reds depends on weather conditions over the next few weeks. No rain dances, OK.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

Trophy Collector — how a Canberra shiraz stole the Sydney show

People, Vineyard, Wine

There was no phone call, no email, no press release. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for a tip-off from one of the judges, Alex McKay’s success at Sydney’s 2010 Royal Wine Show might’ve escaped our notice. His Collector Reserve Shiraz 2008 won a gold medal and four trophies, including the Dr Gilbert Phillips Memorial Trophy for best red wine of the show.

It’s a significant win for Alex and Canberra shiraz, especially as Collector Reserve pipped one of Australia’s shiraz blue bloods, Best’s Great Western Bin O, for the top honour.

Alex reckons “it’s an achievement for the show to pick a wine like that. The judges are better and the classes are more sympathetic to this style”. But he’s not viewing the success of this elegant, cool climate shiraz as the end of big, traditional styles from warm areas. He says these regions have suffered a couple of very hot vintages, resulting in “a lot of over-ripe wines from South Australia, and they’ve not been doing well because of it”.

The Collector wine comes principally from the Kyeema vineyard, Murrumbateman, containing some of Canberra’s oldest shiraz vines, planted by Ron McKenzie in 1983. (Part of the small viognier component in the blend comes from Wayne and Jenny Fischer’s Murrumbateman). It’s been source of Kyeema Estate Shiraz (now part of Capital Wines) but the vineyard also provided fruit to Hardy’s during their period in Canberra. As Hardy’s winemaker, Alex appreciated the superior quality of Kyeema fruit and consequently maintained the relationship when he set up on his own after Hardy’s departure from Canberra.

Without this fruit, we wouldn’t have a Sydney trophy winner. But it demonstrates Canberra’s potential for shiraz – good sites with properly managed mature vines can make great wines.

Alex made the trophy winner in the old Madew winery at Lake George (now part of Lake George Winery). He fermented numerous batches of the Kyeema fruit, ranging from half a tonne to four tonnes. They were all natural – that is, spontaneous, without the addition of cultured yeasts. Controversially, he used whole grape bunches in about 40 per cent of the ferments.

Whole grape bunches include stalks — and these add distinctive stalky and herbal aromas and flavours, as well as bolstering the tannins and, hence, texture of the wine. But generally a little bit goes a long way.

At the time, Alex thought he might’ve gone “a bit too far – I was a bit scared”. He says that this herbal, stalky, slightly hard edge was most apparent in the young wine and admits, “a lot of people could be turned off by it”. However, he sees the character becoming better integrated into the wine with every month that passes and the fleshiness seems to increase.

I’ve tasted the wine only once, at a Senso dinner hosted by Clonakilla’s Tim Kirk last October. I noted the whole-bunch stalky character. It was certainly right up front. But the wine was delicious – silky, smooth and elegant with the stalky character adding complexity. “Superb” was the final comment.

I’ve not tried the wine since last October. But Jeremy Stockman, a judge the Sydney Show, tells me his main impressions were the wine’s purity and brightness – a wine of sufficient depth to bear comparison with Best’s legendary Bin O Shiraz.

Collector Reserve Canberra District Shiraz 2008 is available at around $46 from fine wine outlets and www.collectorwines.com.au. Alex expects to sell out within one month as he made only 1,000 six packs. He also offers the outstanding Collector Marked Tree Shiraz 2008 at $26 and has in the pipeline an $18 Canberra shiraz – a joint venture with fellow winemaker Nick O’Leary

HOW COLLECTOR STOLE THE SHOW

Collector Reserve Shiraz 2008’s four trophy winning streak at the Sydney Royal Wine Show began modestly. A gold medal won alongside Wolf Blass Gold Label Adelaide Hills Shiraz Viognier 2008 – its only competitor in class 52 (premium shiraz viognier blends) – put Collector in the running for the John Swann Memorial Trophy.

It was tasted off against gold medallists from the other eligible classes – Lillydale Yarra Valley Pinot Noir 2008, St Hallett Barossa Valley Gamekeepers Reserve Shiraz Grenache 2008, Yellowtail The Reserve Shiraz 2008 and Brookland Valley Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2008.

In this first ballot, “purity and brightness got it through”, recalls judge Jeremy Stockman – saying that of the other shirazes in the taste-off “one was too oaky and the other fruity but simple”. Collector then, by default, seized the Leslie Kemeny Memorial Trophy as none of the gold medallists from other eligible classes was from the 2008 vintage.

The real test of Collector’s mettle, though, came in the taste off for the Dr Gilbert Phillips Memorial Trophy for best red wine of the show. It faced a ballot against the other red trophy winners – Blue Pyrenees Cabernet Sauvignon 2008, Yalumba Hand Picked Barossa Shiraz Viognier 2008, Vasse Felix Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2007, Hardys Thomas Hardy Cabernet Sauvignon 2004, Wolf Blass Gold Label Pinot Noir 2008, Best’s Great Western Bin O Shiraz 2008 and Xanadu Next of Kin Cabernet Sauvignon 2009.

Stockman recalls “one seriously good cabernet in this class, but I voted one and two for the shirazes”. And Collector won the tally and the trophy. Winemaker Alex McKay, an associate judge at the show (associate scores don’t count), says he thought he recognised his own wine in the first taste-off but remained sceptical of its prospects – and then felt “surreal” as it stepped up to become red of the show.

It’s not clear from the catalogue of results (www.sydneyroyalshows.com.au) which wines Collector faced in the taste-off of for the Busby Trophy (best wine or brandy from New South Wales). But in theory it might have been lined up against whites, reds, bubblies fortifieds and brandies.

Collector Reserve Canberra District Shiraz 2008 — Trophies won at the 2010 Sydney Royal Wine Show

  • John Swann Memorial Trophy
    Best dry red wine two years and older in premium classes
  • Leslie Kemeny Memorial Trophy
    Best 2008 vintage red wine from premium classes
  • Dr Gilbert Phillips Memorial Trophy
    Best red wine of the show
  • James Busby Annual Prize
    Best wine or brandy from New South Wales

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Wine among the Jenolan stalactites

People, Wine

Last weekend I visited the most stunning natural cellar – certainly the most extraordinary in Australia and, for natural beauty, even more striking than the famous chalk drives of France’s Champagne region.

In Champagne wine matures in hundreds of kilometres of tunnels carved in the soft chalk underlying the whole region (and baring its bright, white face at Dover, on the English side of the channel).

The temperature sits steadily at around 10 degrees Celsius in dark, humid, physically stable tunnels – some, as at Pommery, run from the bottom level of chalk quarries carved during the Roman Empire. Most, of course, have been carved over the last few centuries.

These are ideal cellaring conditions for a delicate wine like Champagne. I’ve tasted some pretty old vintages in beautiful condition – some brought to Australia by visiting heads of Champagne houses (invariably smiling like they can’t believe their own good luck – we’re such a good market for them); others on visits to the region.

But over there you don’t have to be a wealthy Champagne house to make a decent cellar. I once visited an ordinary suburban home with its garage cut partly into a hill on one side. The owner, winemaker for the tiny producer Salon-le-Mesnil, took to the chalk wall with a mattock and shovel, shaping a spiral, downward sloping tunnel about ten metres long. It was perfect – and it’d be the envy of anyone who’s ever struggled through a metre or two of Canberra’s iron-hard soils.

Natural cellars in warm Australia can’t achieve 10-degree temperatures. But the fourteen degrees, say, of the beautiful underground drives at Seppelt in Great Western, Victoria, is nevertheless ideal for most wine styles. It’s turned out some pretty fine old sparkling and still whites and reds over the last century.

If we accept that constant cool temperatures are best for long-term wine cellaring, the question is how do we achieve this at home and what happens if our cellars are a little warmer.

Over the last three decades I’ve tasted hundreds of wines from semi-undergound Canberra cellars – ranging from a bit of hole dug under the house to extensive areas snugged in under one or two stories and set back in a hillside. I estimate that, on average, these range from a minimum of around 10 degrees to a maximum of 20 degrees over the year, with only small day-to-day temperature movement.

From these cellars, including my own, I’ve tasted plenty of pretty good old reds and whites (lots of disasters, too, but usually attributable to failed corks or poor wine selection in the first place). But I’ve also tasted many of the same wines from temperature controlled corporate cellars (around 14 degrees constant). Almost invariably, these wines are noticeably better – fresher and more vibrant, but still with attractive aged flavours.

The message is clear: the better and more expensive the wines you cellar, the more important the cellaring conditions become. These days the very high cost of moving dirt, rules out completely underground cellars for most of us. Hence the growing popularity of climate controlled wine fridges and even complete cool rooms capable of holding thousands of bottles.

The adoption of screw caps makes cellaring, in general, more reliable. And I assume that humidity becomes less important now that we don’t need to keep corks moist and elastic. However, it’s still essential to maintain a steady temperature – at the very least eliminating big daily swings.

If it’s hard to maintain good cellaring conditions at home, it’s out of the question for most restaurants – attributable to lack of demand, lack of proper storage (and the expensive of providing it) or the cost of holding stock for long periods of time. Some, however, source small quantities of mature wine from auction or direct from private collectors or wine producers.

That’s why it was a surprise last weekend to find an embryonic cellar associated with Caves House, the fabulous old accommodation and dining establishment at the Jenolan Caves.

The house is under the control of the Jenolan Caves Reserve Trust, and therefore an arm of the New South Wales Government – hardly a body associated with fine wining and dining.

I suspect it’s hard slog for the current manager, James Brady, but he’s having a go. One initiative is his little cellar in the caves. It’s hundreds of metres from Caves House. But if you’re a house guest and prepared to select a bottle from the cellar (a very limited selection at present), James will escort you to the cellar.

The bonus is a personal tour of several hundred metres of the spectacular Imperial Cave to find the cellar (a single rack at present) buried deep below the surface at a brisk year-round 15 degrees.

It’s a terrific idea. And if James gets support from his masters, he’d have no trouble expanding the range of wines available and would surely find wine producers happy to sell already mature bottles for the racks.

What could be lovelier than dining on fresh local produce in one of Australia’s grand old buildings sipping a fine old Aussie red?

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Exotics grape varieties galore — but will any go mainstream?

Wine

The Winemakers’ Federation of Australia’s official vintage report for 2009 has little to say about the much talked about ‘alternative’ grape varieties now being explored enthusiastically by Australia’s winemakers.

The report reveals, for example, that our vignerons harvested 117 tonnes of the Italian red, barbera, and 449 tonnes of the CSIRO-bred tarrango. But it offers no insights on perhaps the most talked about red, the Spanish tempranillo. Presumably it’s lumped in with the 15,124 tonnes of ‘other’ red varieties – and this out of a total o 888,312 tonnes.

I notice among the whites, too, the report still records the harvest of 222 tonnes of palomino and pedro ximenez (leftovers from last century’s fortified wine production) but not of savagnin (the correct name for what we thought was albarino), nor the apparently fast-expanding, drought resistant vermentino; and that it still calls ‘gewürztraminer’ ‘traminer’, as if the two were synonymous.

But as our battered wine industry reforms itself over the next few years (reportedly 40 thousand hectares of vines need to be removed), we’ll definitely see and hear a lot more about emerging alternative varieties.

What the WFA figures reveal, though, is the enormity of the task should any of these newcomers make serious inroads into established varieties. The volumes that need to be replaced should any niche variety go mainstream are massive – making it difficult to visualise our future industry. But change it must with a surplus of 100 million dozen bottles and growing.

In 2009 we harvested 1.7 million tonnes of wine grapes – 888.3 thousand tonnes of red and 817.7 of whites. Shiraz, cabernet and merlot contributed 779.3 thousand tonnes, or 88 per cent of the red total. Chardonnay alone, at 398.6 thousand tonnes, accounted for almost half the white total.

By all accounts the surplus of chardonnay is huge. Sauvignon blanc overtook it as our preferred white tipple in 2009 – mainly at the hands of imports from Marlborough, driven by New Zealand’s overproduction, our strong dollar and, of course, our love of the flavour.

As we reduce our area under vine, and cut back on some varieties like chardonnay, how will the emerging varieties perform? Perhaps there’s a hint in past performance of niche varieties.

The white variety, marsanne became a big seller for Victoria’s Tahbilk decades ago, and it’s been adopted by many other wineries,  but few with significant success. We harvested only 1,678 tonnes of it in 2009.

Likewise, the white verdelho, so suited to our warm areas and present in Australian vineyards for about 150 years, remains a perennial niche player at 15,051 tonnes. And last decade’s darling, viognier, seems stuck at about 13 thousand tonnes a year (with a good deal of that going into red blends).

Some of the ‘emerging’ red varieties, have been with us for decades. Of these, barbera and sangiovese appear in the WFA vintage report at 117 tonnes and 3,921 tonnes respectively – confirming that currently they are minor players indeed.

Two niche red varieties deserve separate mention. Grenache (15,170 tonnes in 2009) and mourvedre (6,165 tonnes) have been with us for about two centuries, surviving swings in wine fashion (fortified to table wine) and are becoming increasingly important, notably in the Barossa, in blends with shiraz. In such regions, shiraz is certain to remain the star player but grenache and mourvedre will remain key support players.

I reckon the biggest change we’ll see in volume will be a retreat in the area of chardonnay under vine. It’s already lost its place as number one quaffing white, supplanted by sauvignon blanc. But it won’t disappear – rather it’ll retreat to cooler areas and continue to make complex, full bodied wine, the best of which will continue to be our most prized and expensive white wines.

This won’t be replaced by today’s champ, sauvignon blanc, as most of Australia simply doesn’t grow the variety well. New Zealand will continue to dominate this part of the market, but cool Australian areas, too, will carve a niche. Sauvignon blanc volume stood at a significant 63,253 tonnes.

As our winemakers search for drought and disease resistant varieties, especially along our ever-drier river lands, they’ll be looking for more than vine adaptability. It’s one thing to grow healthy vines that require little irrigation, but another to make from them wines that people enjoy drinking.

It’s worth the search. And it’d be a fair bet to say that the palette of wine flavours and textures we enjoy should continue to expand. Bring on the saperavi, nebbiolo, graciano, albarino, fiano, tempranillo, montepulciano, sagrantino, nero d’Avola, verdicchio and so on. But expect that most will remain as niche players.

Will any of them, though, become mainstream, to stand beside shiraz, cabernet, pinot noir, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc? It’s quite likely. Don’t forget that Italy has hundreds of indigenous varieties and some, like montepulciano and sangiovese are very widely grown – in fact, satisfied most local demand until the classic French varieties gained a foothold in recent decades.

And in Spain, tempranillo reigns, often in tandem, with grenache. Plenty of commentators, myself included, see tempranillo as a potentially great success in Australia. It grows well and makes juicy lovable dry reds.

While some larger companies see great potential for the white vermentino (it apparently grows well here), we know little yet about how Australian drinkers like it. And a white that many makers see with the potential is another Spanish variety, albarino. It’s much loved in Spain and successfully exported.

Though our early efforts with it have been marred by the discovery that our albarino was, in fact, the almost identical variety savagnin, it remains on vignerons’ radar. But it’ll be some time before we have volumes of the real thing.

It’ll take a few years for the bargains and carnage being wrought by the current oversupply to settle. But we’re already enjoying, and will see increasingly, a parade of exotic varieties among all the familiar ones.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Near and yet so different

Vineyard, Wine

We’re all familiar with the idea of regional wine specialities, like Coonawarra cabernet, Barossa shiraz, Marlborough sauvignon blanc and Mornington Peninsula pinot noir. And with a growing focus on regions, we’ll enjoy increasing numbers of intra regional specialties – like Andrew Seppelt’s wonderful shiraz-grenache-mourvedre reds of the western Barossa reviewed here two weeks back.

As we move into sub-regional wines – including those from individual vineyards within a sub-region, and even wines from a few rows of vines within a vineyard – we begin to hear the French word terroir. It evokes a sense of place and attributes distinctive wine flavours to geography – all the physical and human factors contributing to its production

While the notion seems far-fetched to some, there’s no denying just how different two wines can be, even when they’re made by the one vigneron from one grape variety grown in neighbouring vineyards. How can vineyards in such close proximity produce such varied flavours?

Terroir lies at the heart of the French wine naming system, based on regions, varieties suited to those regions and, in the case of Burgundy, a complex subdivision that finally draws a line around sometimes-tiny individual vineyards.

It’s easier to grasp the bigger picture behind that system than to perceive the finer, individual vineyard differences. Northeastern France, for example, is the domain of pinot noir and chardonnay in a big sweep from Reims in the north almost to Lyon in the south.

In the north, around Reims and Epernay, sparkling Champagne eventually triumphed as the regional specialty, principally because it’s too cold to make still table wine reliably.

While Champagne is a single appellation, the wines are not all equal. Behind the best wines lie the best vineyards – and these are officially graded, even if the vineyard names seldom appear on labels (though this is changing).

The best Champagnes from the best vineyards are unique. No other sparkling wine has the same combination of flavour intensity and finesse. Unfortunately there’s a lot of ordinary material parading under the name, so it’s a matter of caveat emptor.

A little to the south, at Chablis (the northernmost part of Burgundy), pinot noir drops out of the equation altogether, leaving chardonnay to make a white like no other in the world. Drinking Chablis has been described as like “sucking pebbles” – an evocative, if desperate, way of conveying its unique, lean, delicious, mouth watering, bone-dry character.

To me it’s the best value, most distinctive chardonnay on earth. And mere ‘Chablis’ does the job. You don’t have to move up the scale to ‘Premiere Cru’ or ‘Grand Cru’ (all based on defined individual vineyards) to enjoy the regional flavour. But the increments in quality are there when you buy wines from leading producers.

Further south, in Burgundy proper, chardonnay and pinot co-exist along the slopes stretching from Dijon to Macon, south of which the gamay grape takes over in the plump and juicy wines of Beaujolais.

Burgundy’s awe inspiring pinot noirs and chardonnays, like Le Chambertin and Le Montrachet respectively, make up only a small portion of total production. These vineyards are good enough to have individual appellations under French law. But even lesser Burgundies bear a general resemblance to these wines, albeit across a comparatively wide spectrum of styles. What’s notable is that there’s a general regional style and, within that, a range of distinctive sub-regional style, and within those sub-regions individual vineyards that produce superior wines over time.

Like Champagne, though, there’s a lot of dross trading under the Burgundy name, so it’s an expensive area to explore without expert guidance.

In Australia, too, chardonnay and pinot noir make a natural pair in our cooler regions. They’re the dominant varieties, for example, in Tasmania, the cooler parts of the Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Macedon and even in our neighbouring Tumbarumba region.

Unlike their French counterparts, however, our winemakers are not constrained by rigid laws specifying what they can and can’t grow. Over time regional specialties emerge, often after decades of trial and error. But even where regional specialties emerge, unlikely varieties thrive on particular sites and winemakers continue to experiment, with both traditional and new-to-Australia varieties, typically Spanish or Italian.

On the Mornington Peninsula, for example, pinot noir has emerged over the last forty years as the dominant specialty, followed closely by chardonnay. Pinot now makes up about forty per cent of Mornington’s annual grape crush and the best rate, to my taste, among the purest and finest in Australia.

The Mornington producers have already noted sub-regional flavour differences in their pinots based on variations in latitude and altitude. But what’s more intriguing, and harder to explain, are the flavour difference in wines from neighbouring vineyards.

Over the Christmas break we enjoyed two sub-regional tastings – the Western Barossa, and three individual vineyard 2007 vintage pinot noirs from Mornington producer, Ten Minutes by Tractor.

The Wallis, McCutcheon and Judd vineyards are all, literally, ten minutes by tractor from the winery at the cool, elevated, southern end of the Peninsula. Each was planted in the mid nineties and each has had some underperforming clones replaced by better ones between 2003 and 2007.

There are minor altitude differences between the vineyards and variations in soil and aspect; but one vigneron makes all three wines using the same techniques and same oak barrels – suggesting that the flavour variations may be attributable to a complex of factors (yes, this is where terroir becomes a possibility).

Shortly after opening the wines, the two older male tasters preferred the Judd Vineyard wine for its exuberant fruit and power over the delicate, understated McCutcheon and the firmer more savoury Wallis. On the other hand, a younger female taster found the Judd wine overwhelming. She was an inexperienced wine taster but perceived quite big difference among the wines.

After sipping away for a while both of the male tasters preferred the perfume, elegance and purity of the McCutcheon wine, elevated the solid, savoury Wallis to number two position and relegated Judd to third place – a lovely wine, but a bit bigger and more obvious than the other two (we finally saw what our your female companion had perceived at first sniff).

We were getting picky, as all three are outstanding by any measure — pure, varietal, complex and silky smooth. Chris Hamilton from Ten Minutes by Tractor tells me they offer this three vineyard tasting at cellar door and there’s no clear winner. People are fascinated by the flavour difference, but each wine has its followers.

The wines are available at cellar door (see www.tenminutesbytractor.com.au) and at fine wine outlets.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Brats mellow to greats

Wine, Wine review

In the mid eighties Penfolds released the first edition of The Rewards of Patience, containing reviews of Grange Hermitage (as Grange was then called), and the rest of the Penfolds red family, back to the earliest vintages, including the experimental Grange of 1951.

Grange was moving into a purple patch at the time, gaining international recognition ahead of a great flourishing — marked in particular by the release of the sensational 1990 vintage in 1995. Its price shot up. And despite increasing competition, it continued (still continues) to hold number one position in Australian wine auctions.

Its success continues despite last year’s attack by Winewise magazine, accusing Grange of being old fashioned; and a more generic urging by some writers here and in the UK for Australia to move to more elegant, lower alcohol wines. We’d heard all this before in the 1970s. And it’s just as wrong now as it was then.

Consumers roundly rejected the thin, lacking wines made from unripe grapes in the name of elegance — just as they will no doubt do should anyone be silly enough to go down that path again. But out of that error of judgement by our winemakers grew, gradually, a greater confidence in the qualities of our opulent warm climate reds, particularly shiraz.

And it turned out that elegance, in its true sense, was indeed a character of many wines from our emerging, cooler growing areas, like Mornington, Tasmania, Yarra Valley, Canberra, Margaret River and Coonawarra. Over time these grew in number and quality and joined our ever-improving warm climate styles.

And what the critics of the Penfolds style (Grange in particular) often lack is the perspective of long-term aging. For these were, and continue to be, wines that need decades of cellaring. They start as opaque, purple-rimmed wines brimming with fruit, oak and tannin. Even though these are harmonious enough, the total flavour volume and tannic grip can be overwhelming for many years.

Like a lot of others immersed in the trade, I see comparatively few wines of this style among the thousands of reds tasted each year. The market teems with lively, soft, easy to drink reds, quite often made specifically for very early drinking.

And, of course, the elegant, supple shirazes now made so beautifully in Canberra and other cool areas slip down easily in youth, even though some appear to have long-term cellaring ability. But we don’t yet have a thirty or forty year old Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier to confirm that, as we do with Grange.

What we may not see in a young Grange, unless we’ve also tasted very old vintages, is that great periods of time in the cellar render it less opaque, less tannic, less oaky, more complex and increasingly fine – and, yes, even elegant. I was reminded of this over the Christmas break when we opened two old Penfolds reds from our cellar – prompted to do so by the refreshingly cool weather. The wines were Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1982 and Penfolds Bin 80A Coonawarra Cabernet Kalimna Shiraz 1980 (inspired by Max Schubert’s legendary Bin 60A 1962).

These were like children in a way — wines that I’d come to know intimately throughout their lives, beginning when they were bold, purple, tannic oaky brats back in the eighties; and now after a couple of year’s absence moving int0 full, but not declining maturity.

I see that the Rewards of Patience is now in its sixth edition — and all but the first edition of 1986 track the progress of these two wines.

The second edition, 1990, notes Bin 80A 1980 as ‘a wine of great power and breeding with a long life in front of it — a classic in the making’. This was an opinion I shared sufficiently at the time to buy a case of it.

The same edition was equally unequivocal on the progress of Grange 1982 — “Generous, lifted ‘fleshy’ fruit is typical of the ’82 vintage. A distinctive and great Grange”. The tasters recommended a drinking window from the early 1990s and as far out as 2002.

By the third edition in 1994, the tasting panel was seeing Bin 80a 1980 as intense, concentrated, herbaceous, cedary, elegant, of remarkable structure and showing “strong Coonawarra district character”. They recommended drinking it out to 2010.

By this edition 1982 Grange was no longer one of the greats but, rather, “reflects the super-fleshy fruit characters of this vintage”. The tasters suggested regular monitoring (I think this means drinking) within a drinking window of “now to 2005”.

The tasting panel for the fourth edition in 2000 adopted more floral, less meaningful tasting notes for the Bin 80A, demoted it from the ranks of the ‘greats’ and wound back the drink window to 2007 and commented “best drunk soon”.

But the same group held a slightly higher view of the 1982 Grange, pushing the drinking window to 2008 and once again commenting on the distinctive “sweet, ripe fruit”. They thought it “might hold for many years” but not improve.

Just four years later in the 2004 fifth edition, Bin 80A was once again one of the ‘greats’ and its drinking window was now out to 2020. This once powerful red was now “a soft, well-balanced wine”.

This edition adopted a more kindly view of the now 22-year-old 1982 Grange. The tasters recommended drinking out to 2010. They described it as “a supple, refined wine with sweet cassis/cedary flavours”.

In the sixth edition in 2008, Bin 80A, now 28-years-old held its ‘great’ status and its drinking window was pushed out further to 2025. Though it had been described as a “soft, well-balanced wine” four years earlier, it was now “a well-concentrated, solid wine with attractive mature fruit and strong tannin structure”.

The reviews once again commented on Grange 1982’s rich, fleshy fruit, describing it as “idiosyncratic” and recommended drinking it by 2010.

Almost two years after the assessments made in the sixth edition, the Chateau Shanahan team noted the sweet fruitiness of the 1982 Grange. It’s been part of the wine since it was born and I recall that very early on we sometimes wondered if it would live as long as other Granges. Well at just on 28 years it’s soft, juicy, oh-so-complex and wonderfully vibrant, yet ethereal and aged. What a joy it was to drink and share with the family. It has many years to go.

The Bin 80A, too, opened wonderfully. In aroma, flavour and structure it’s still clearly led by cabernet sauvignon (two thirds of the blend) and very much a Coonawarra style — despite the Kalimna (Barossa) shiraz in the blend. This one has mellowed — having moved from power to elegance and grace in its thirty years. It, too, will age for many more years.

These are great wines. And great wine takes time.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Andrew Seppelt’s sensational Barossa wines

Wine, Wine review

Murray Street Vineyards’ new-release reds are sensational — generous, juicy, seamless wines, made by Andrew Seppelt and sourced from low yielding vines sprinkled along the Western rim of the Barossa Valley.

They stand comparison with the best shiraz and blends from any part of the globe. And yet they’re just a small part of a wider movement towards sub-regional and individual vineyard labelling in the Barossa — a movement led by an amazing pool of talent exploiting the wealth of great vineyards, some dating almost to the beginning of European settlement in 1842.

But from a distance the Barossa might seem like one, big, homogenous region, churning out rich, warm, soft shiraz. While there’s a grain of truth in the generalisation, in reality it’s a complex valley of varying landscapes, producing a diversity of styles within that generally big, ripe, soft mould.

And if shiraz is the Valley’s signature variety, it’s commonly blended with the other Rhone varieties, grenache and mourvedre (known locally as mataro) — varieties that also stand on their own, sometimes with distinction.

Were we to tour the Barossa by helicopter, we’d start in the south at the separate Lyndoch Valley with its slopes, flats and feeder valleys; then north over the ridge into the southern Barossa proper with its rolling landscape, eroded by the North Para River; over the Gomersal plateau with black, cracking soils, inhospitable to vines, and its magic, sandy western ridge; through to the rising and flatter central and northern valley to the Kalimna sand dunes; east to the rim of the recently (geologically speaking) uplifted ranges of the Eden Valley and across to the lower,  more eroded western rim, including the Marananga and Seppeltsfield bowls. Doing the tour by Google Earth isn’t a bad approximation.

And were we to walk this roughly 30-kilometre by 12-kilometre landscape with geologist David Farmer we’d see about fifteen distinct land surfaces, including the southern angular-rock type soils, the cobbled soils of Roland Flat, the Kalimna dunes and the Gomersal Ridge sands.

Throughout this infinitely varied landscape, scores of winemakers like Andrew Seppelt are now defining the sub-regions by the wines they make — and currently debating formal boundaries and names (existing parish boundaries, for example, offer convenience but don’t gel, necessarily, with wine styles or natural land surface delineations).

But whatever names or boundaries the sub-regions ultimately adopt, the reality is that the division of wine styles in the Barossa is no longer restricted to north, south, east, west and the Eden Valley (part of the Barossa ‘zone’ but already an approved and separate ‘region’).

Andrew Seppelt’s patch of the Barossa stretches from Gomersal in the south, then north to Greenock and Kalimna — all on the valley’s western rim, an area pioneered by his great-great-great grandfather, Joseph Ernst Seppelt in 1851 and carried on from 1868 by his eldest son, Oscar Benno Seppelt.

The Seppelt family ultimately lost control of the Seppelt brand and the historic Seppeltsfield property. But Andrew’s Murray Street Vineyards, owned jointly with his wife, Vanessa, and Bill and Pattie Jahnke, lies just to the south of the old family property at Greenock.

Andrew writes, “Murray Street Vineyards is the result of a 10 year dream of my wife, Vanessa, and I. Believing that the Barossa is the best place in the world to grow shiraz, mataro, grenache, viognier and Marsanne, we set about sourcing fruit from the most extraordinary soil types in the Barossa Valley. Additional planting were made on the ancient, weathered slate slopes of Gomersal to complement the sandy clay loams of Kalimna’s lower reaches and the ironstone of the upper Kalimna hills”.

From a palette of shy-yielding vines (2.5 to 5 tonnes to the hectare), aged from five to about 90 years, Andrew produces an excellent, full-flavoured viognier marsanne blend (2009 vintage, $35) as well as the five sensational reds mentioned in the introduction.

‘The Barossa’ 2007 ($35), a blend predominantly of shiraz, with mataro and grenache, shows the lifted, alluring fragrance of grenache. It’s generous and soft, the tone set by grenache but enriched by earthy shiraz and spicy, tannic mataro. It’s a joy to drink now but has the depth to age well in the medium term.

‘Greenock Shiraz 2007 and Gomersal Shiraz 2007 (both $55) express variations on the shiraz theme from vineyards just a few kilometres apart. They’re both rich, full and soft, but the Greenock wine has a savoury edge and slight firmer tannins; and the Gomersal wine is more fragrant with a scrumptious, juicy palate.

Sophia Shiraz 2006 ($75), named for Andrew’s great-great grandmother, is a truly great shiraz blended from the best fruit from the Gomersal and Greenock vineyards – vibrant, deeply fruity, tender and solid.

Sophie’s fellow flagship, Benno Shiraz Mataro 2006 ($75), offers yet another variation on the theme. Like Sophia, it’s built on the best shiraz from Gomersal and Greenock but contains, as well, mataro from Gomersal. The influence of the mataro is profound – boosting the aroma, making the palate more buoyant, adding spicy flavours and firm, fine tannins.

This is a must-try Barossa variety. Older readers might recall Penfolds Bin 2 Mataro, a wonderful drop. And in recent times I’ve tasted extraordinary all-mataro wines from Dean Hewitson (two wines, one from southern Barossa vines planted in 1853) and Rolf Binder, from vines just behind his Veritas winery to the west of Tanunda.

For more information about Murray Street Vineyards see www.murraystreet.com.au

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

A wine vignette of Tasmania’s Derwent Valley

Wine

A visit to Tasmania highlighted the huge contrasts in Australia’s wine industry. Just two weeks before Foster’s set a price of $150 tonne for Riverland chardonnay, Tasmanian growers were boasting prices of up $5,000 a tonne for theirs.

Assuming production of 70 dozen bottles a tonne, that’s a per-bottle grape cost of 18 cents for Riverland chardonnay versus $5.95 for top-end table and sparkling wines – the sort that after winemaking costs, producer and retailer mark-ups and tax fetch $50-plus a bottle retail.

That’s not the stuff, generally, of broad-acre farming. But it gives the flavour of Tasmania’s wine industry – craft based, with comparatively high production costs and correspondingly high bottle prices, though in the main more in the $20–$35 a bottle range than $50-plus.

While pinot noir and chardonnay constitute more than two thirds of the state’s grape plantings, that’s not the only game. Indeed, every winery tells a different story, offering more than the two main varieties and suggesting a far more varied future for Tasmania.

But beneath the outward confidence and high quality on display, profit margins are so tight, says vine consultant Fred Peacock, that even a small shock could prompt many growers to walk away from their vines.

The fragility that Fred sees, however, isn’t apparent at cellar doors we visit around Hobart – in the Derwent, Coal River and Huon Valleys and over on the east coast.

Along the Derwent, for example, we visit just three wineries and find three utterly different operations.

At Moorilla Estate, Hobart’s oldest vineyard, founded by Claudio Alcorso in 1958 and now owned by David Walsh and partners, recently reduced production by three quarters to boost quality. It’s a well-capitalised operation focusing more on fine art than wine.

The new winemaker, Connor van der Reest, oversees construction of a new winery geared to small batch production from Moorilla’s Derwent vineyards (now pressed by suburban Hobart) and extensive plantings in the Tamar Valley to the north. The Tamar vineyards vary by 200 metres in altitude and include pinot noir, chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, riesling, gewürztraminer, pinot gris and even shiraz – with the reds planted on the lower, warmer slopes.

Conor emphasises the main game for the site – David Walsh’s extraordinary museum of modern and ancient art (MONA), due to be opened in 2011. Everything revolves around the art collection – the beautiful Ether building, housing the art collection, Source restaurant, cellar door and Moo Brew Brewery, with the new winery in its lee; and eight magnificent accommodation pavilions – four dedicated to artists Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley, Charles Blackman and Sidney Nola (their art on display in each) and four to architects Roy Grounds, Robin Boyd, Esmond Dorney and Walter Burley Griffin.

Conor’s new to Moorilla and charged with turning wine quality around. You can see it already in the whites and in the reds now maturing in barrel. It’s a bit early to get too excited, but it’s probably safe to predict Moorilla becoming one of Tasmania’s best producers very quickly, given its resources and will to excel.

It’s a must visit already and will only get better. Food at Source Restaurant is outstanding, up there with Hobart’s best.

At Stefano Lubiana Wines, Steve and Monique Lubiana make stunning, well-marketed table and sparkling wines from their 19-hectare estate. They moved here from Mildura in 1990.

Here the effort’s in fine-tuning already exemplary quality apparent in riesling, bottle-fermented sparkling wines, pinot grigio, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir and merlot. The two pinot noirs, in particular, are beautiful wines: the fine and fruity 2008 Primavera ($27) and the sensational, taut and savoury 2007 Estate at $45. And Steve’s opulent, fine-boned 2005 Tasmania Chardonnay, at $39, is in the same league.

And at nearby Derwent Estate, Pat Hanigan established vines in 1993 on a sheep and cattle farm that’s been in her family since 1913. Pat produces superb chardonnay grapes, good enough for Penfolds $130 flagship, Yattarna. She praises the help she’s had from Foster’s (owner of Penfolds) in developing her own wines, available at cellar door.

Fred Peacock, one of Tasmania’s leading vine experts rates the Derwent Estate chardonnay vineyard as one of the best sites in the state. He helped Pat choose the site and attributes the outstanding fruit quality in large measure to the underlying limestone.

Now Fred has a theory about high calcium soil and chardonnay quality – something that grew from his earlier years managing apple orchards and the superior keeping quality of fruit from trees growing in calcareous soils. But we’ll return to Fred’s theory in a later article.

Let’s end, instead, with a question. If Tasmanian vineyards now underpin two of Australia’s greatest chardonnays – Hardys Eileen Hardy and Penfolds Yattarna, both multi-region blends – what value is there for Tasmania, or in the longer run Australian wine, in persisting with the blends?

We’re moving to regional marketing. It’s the international language of fine wine. So why don’t Foster’s (owner of Penfolds) and Constellation (owner of Eileen Hardy) commit their very best Tasmanian chardonnay to their Tasmanian brands — Heemskerk and Bay of Fires respectively. Why dilute their Tasmanian offerings by bolstering multi-region blends that few international consumers are likely to understand?

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2010

Christmas wine gifts — regional vignettes

Wine

You don’t have to be a wine lover to love a bottle of wine for Christmas. And with Australian regions now offering such a diversity of styles, a gift of regional, varietal wine ticks so many boxes: it’s lovingly grown and made by people with a passion for what they’re doing; it can be shared and savoured with friends and family; it can be put aside as a memento for later enjoyment; and it can have a great story to tell.

My wine shopping lists looks not at individual makers but a tiny vignette of distinguished regions with world-class wines to offer.

Barossa Valley – shiraz, grenache and mourvedre (aka mataro)
An hour north of Adelaide, and home of big, warm, soft reds made from one, some, or all of shiraz, grenache and mourvedre, quite often from extremely old vines. Look in particular for wines from individual vineyards. Like sleuths, an army of enthusiastic winemakers now criss-crosses the Barossa sourcing outstanding material from venerable old vines that once contributed their fruit anonymously to regional or cross-regional blends. You can now taste the fascinating Barossa wine story from vines dating to first European settlement in the mid nineteenth century and from all of the little nooks and crannies of this fascinating area.

Clare Valley – riesling
Riesling is the signature blend. The best are dry, vibrant, delicate and fruity when young and age well in good cellars, particularly reliably now that we have the screw cap. The Clare has no official sub-regions, but there’s a considerable range of riesling styles attached to locally known names like Sevenhill, Clare (the town itself), Watervale and Polish Hill. Prices vary between $15 and $45 for very high quality wines.

Adelaide Hills – chardonnay
This region comprises a high, cool slice of the north-to-south running Mount Lofty Ranges, bordered by McLaren Vale to the south and the Eden Valley to the north (and Clare is further north on the same ranges).
It makes a number of varieties well, including delightful, fine-boned shiraz, and Stephen George’s beautiful Ashton Hills pinot noir. But to me its high achievement to date is opulent, fine, complex chardonnay, produced in the broader region as well as in its two official, and cooler, sub-regions, Lenswood and Piccadilly Valley.

McLaren Vale – shiraz
McLaren Vale, bordering Adelaide’s southern suburbs, makes a bit of everything, but nothing finer than its ripe but delightfully savoury shiraz. It’s another of our very old producing regions with many winemakers exploring its diverse sites.

Coonawarra – cabernet sauvignon
It’s about four hours’ drive south of Adelaide and one from the Robe, on the Southern Ocean. The cool maritime climate favours cabernet sauvignon, the clear champion of the area. But the warm northern end grows good shiraz, too, and historically some of Coonawarra’s best wines have been blends of shiraz and cabernet. Nevertheless, cabernet reigns and the best are powerful but elegant, long-lived examples of this noble variety.

Grampians – shiraz
This western Victorian region producers many wine styles, but none better than shiraz. We’re now considerably south of South Australia’s McLaren Vale and Barossa regions, meaning a significantly cooler climate. In turn, this means considerably different styles of shiraz – flavours lean to the peppery and savoury with a more elegant structure than we see in those from the warmer north.

Macedon Ranges  – pinot noir and chardonnay
The elevated, cool Macedon region, on the Great Divide, an hour’s drive north west of Melbourne, specialise in pinot noir and chardonnay. As the altitude, and therefore growing temperatures, vary considerably, Macedon makes outstanding table and sparkling wine from the two varieties – bubblies from the cooler sites and table wine from the warmer ones. The bubblies can be straight chardonnay, straight pinot noir or, more commonly, a blend of both. The best chardonnay and pinot noir table wines stand with the best in Australia.

Mornington Peninsula – pinot noir and chardonnay
This is another beautiful and unique Victorian region, a little south of Melbourne, with Port Phillip Bay to its west and Westernport Bay to its east. Pinot noir and chardonnay are the stars, although the region’s producers have pinned their star to the pinot noir banner. With the affluent Melbourne market nearby, thirty years’ of hard graft by the local growers, some very well funded, means very rich pickings. This is definitely one of Australia’s most exciting cool-climate growing regions.

Yarra Valley – shiraz, pinot noir, chardonnay cabernet sauvignon
Because of its size and diversity, the Yarra hits the excitement button with a wider range of varieties than most. Few regions could say, “my best shiraz, best pinot, best chardonnay and best cabernet are all as good as the best in the country”. The Yarra can.

Tasmania – riesling, chardonnay and pinot noir
Surrounded by the Southern Ocean and with its southerly location, Tasmania produces small crops of high quality wine grapes – two thirds of them chardonnay and pinot noir — used in both table and sparkling wine production. More than eighty small makers now turn out exciting wines, and larger producers increasingly source Tasmanian fruit for top end bubbly and table wines. While the real excitement lies in chardonnay and pinot, riesling hits the high notes, too.

Rutherglen – fortified muscat and muscadelle (formerly known as tokay)
Rutherglen, in Victoria’s hot northeast makes robust table wines. But its greatest achievements are the complex, sometimes profound, barrel aged fortified wines, culminating in the very old ‘rare’ category. There’s the intensely grapey, luscious muscat and equally luscious, but less grapey, muscadelle. Until recently muscadelle was labelled as ‘tokay’. But when the Hungarians claimed the name, our makers coined ‘topaque’, used by some makers. Others prefer to call the wine by its varietal name, muscadelle.

Canberra – riesling and shiraz
While fine, spicy, elegant shiraz (sometimes with a splash of viognier) is our standout wine style, made successfully now by many local producers, our rieslings are increasingly on the money.

Hunter Valley – semillon, chardonnay and shiraz
It’s a perennially niche region but it makes graceful, long lived wines from semillon chardonnay and shiraz. The semillons begin life austere and lemony but, with age, they develop a delicious toasty and honeyed depth – a distinctive style that people either love or hate. The chardonnays are generous and round but finely textured, utterly delicious and age well. Hunter shiraz is medium bodied, beautifully soft, almost tender, and develops an earthy, gamey complexity over time. The Hunter is something of an enigma – a region this far north should be too warm to make such graceful wines.

Margaret River – cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay
With Coonawarra, Western Australia’s Margaret River is Australia’s cabernet capital – although quite often it’s at its best coupled with merlot. Surprising for a region where vines can shoot as early as June, Margaret Rivers makes some of our most complex, interesting chardonnay, although I suspect it’s not a region-wide success.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

Brilliant regional wines emerging from Oz wine wreck

Uncategorized, Wine

Australian winemaking 2009 – it’s a tale of two industries: mature, vibrant, small and medium producers with their strong regional identities; and the headline-grabbing wreckage of the ‘brand Australia’ juggernaut.

A recent Winemakers’ Federation of Australia (WFA) report, Wine industry must confront the reality of oversupply, detailed the horror behind the chilling headlines.

The report concluded “at least 20% of bearing vines in Australia are surplus to requirement, with few long-term prospects. On cost of production alone, at least 17% of vineyard capacity is uneconomic. The problems are national – although some regions are more adversely affected – and are not restricted to specific varieties or price points”.

The quiet panic behind a decline in exports and domestic sales of Australian wine manifested itself most obviously in the sell off of vineyards and wineries by two of our largest wine producers, Constellation Wines Australia (formerly BRL Hardy) and Foster’s.

Constellation simply continued the dumping of assets that began with their departure from Canberra, announced late in 2006. But the asset dumping increased in scale towards the end of 2008 as they put three wineries up for sale – Goundrey, in Western Australia, the historic Leasingham Winery in Clare and the Stonehaven Winery at Padthaway. Only the Goundrey winery sold. The other two were mothballed in the absence of buyers.

Earlier this year, borrowing a well-worn political phrase, Foster’s said it would sell 36 ‘non-core’ vineyards and close three wineries. This came on top off widespread value destruction following their acquisition of Southcorp Wines for $2.5 billion in 2005.

While many of the problems facing Foster’s may have been self-inflicted, the larger backdrop of the global financial crisis and a rising Australian dollar exaggerated the effects of incipient oversupply – and sucked the industry along with it.

Australian exports peaked in October 2007, says the WFA, and have since declined by eight million cases and 21 per cent in value. This coincided with a decline in domestic sales of Australian wine and an even larger rise in the volume of imports, spurred by the rising dollar.

The combination of rising supply and falling demand leaves Australia with a surplus of more than 100 million cases. And this is set to double over the next two years because we’re producing 20–40 million cases a year more than we sell.

This, of course, explains the amazing range of wine bargains being thrown at us from all directions – the big, direct-importing retailers; wine club operators, including the Wine Society, Cellarmasters and Wine Selectors; the more aggressive independent retailers, including cleanskin specialists; and even the auction houses, notably GraysOnline.com

While Coles and Woolworths continue to dominate liquor retailing, the wine surplus encourages to the growth of alternative channels as the wine clubs and clean skin specialist boost sales of labels totally under their control.

Indeed, this aspect of wine selling (and it includes the big retailers with their direct imports and private domestic wine labels) concerns winemakers deeply. WFA points the finger at supermarkets, declaring “excess supplies have allowed supermarkets to move from customers to competitors by launching their own low-price products, without the need to invest in capital infrastructure or long-term health of the industry. This clutters the market place and eats into margins”.

But if the retailers exploit the surplus (and we all benefit from lower prices while it lasts) they didn’t create it.

Unquestionably, the strong Australian dollar makes many producers internationally uncompetitive through no fault of their own. But the WFA says that producers in many regions bear production costs that are simply too high for the quality of fruit they produce.

While this means bargains galore as producers seek to offload surplus wine, ultimately it isn’t unsustainable, meaning that many enterprises will go bust. Thankfully, the WFA calls on the industry to sort out its own problems. It doesn’t seek government subsidies other than exit packages for small growers and wineries along the lines of those for small block irrigators – in other words, one-off help to get out of the industry, not a subsidy to perpetuate oversupply.

While the low margins forced by massive oversupply affects the profitability of most makers, there’s a multi-faceted, energetic and mature industry that’s not oversupplied and has a pretty clear vision of where it’s headed.

We have only to drive up the Barton or Federal Highways to see this regionally based industry on our doorstep. It’s been hard yakka, sustained over decades, but producers like Brindabella Hills, Jeir Creek, Helm, Shaw Vineyard Estate, Clonakilla, Lark Hill and Lerida Estate have successfully built brands and customer bases – some in overseas markets.

The same story unfolds across Australia from east to west, and from the high country in Queensland in the north to the coolest reaches of Tasmania. Down there a few weeks back, Steve and Monique Lubiana told me they continued to export successfully despite the rising dollar – a benefit of selling a strongly branding, high quality luxury product. Of course, not all makers can be up there.

But if we sniff around, we see not just regional specialties, but minute subdivision of these regions. A good example is the small army of small, mostly young makers criss-crossing the Barossa Valley making tiny quantities of beautiful shiraz, grenache and mourvedre from ancient vines whose fruit no longer goes to the anonymous blending vats of large companies.

Ironically, given the pain they’ve felt, both Foster’s and Constellation continue to make cutting edge wines like Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay and the magnificent Tasmanian based House of Arras bubblies made by Constellation’s Ed Carr.

As overproduction winds back, it’s possible to see for Australia a new industry based on what various regions do best. That may mean our exit, domestically and internationally, from very low price points and that much of our cheaper quaffing wine could come from better-watered countries – a future where we drink Chilean cask wine but bottles of Cowra chardonnay, Yarra Valley Pinot and Barossa shiraz.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009