Once again judges at the recent Canberra Regional Wine Show praised the strength of Canberra’s shiraz and riesling. What the commentary didn’t reveal though is the statistical dominance of shiraz from the neighbouring Hilltops region.

Hilltops fielded just nine of the forty-seven wines in the two shiraz classes but won seven medals – an extraordinary 78 per cent strike rate. Even more extraordinary, it won three of the six gold medals – one for every three wines exhibited. And for the second year a Hilltops wine took out the honours as top wine of the show. This year Eden Road Wines The Long Road Hilltops Shiraz 2008 shared the honour with Helm Canberra District Premium Riesling 2008; last year the award went to Chalkers Crossing Hilltops Shiraz 2005.

But the strength of a few wines from Hilltops doesn’t deny the beauty of some Canberra shirazes. Winning three gold and three silver medals from thirty entries – a ten per cent strike rate for each – is impressive. What’s not so impressive is the short tail of six bronze medals, meaning a total medal strike rate of just forty percent. In other words the judges rated the majority of Canberra shirazes as pretty ordinary wines.

That should be a wake-up call for the district. It’s the sort of result expected in emerging regions, where there’s a chasm between the best and the worst and the quality of the average wine is poor. However, the numbers might’ve look better had a number of key makers exhibited in the important 2008 vintage class. Many that might have entered, could not for the simple reason that their wines were either not bottled or just bottled and not yet ready for showing.

Where were entries from leading makers Clonakilla, Mount Majura, Collector, Brindabella Hills and Ravensworth? How do you benchmark a region’s wines without the benchmarks? And what’s the real value of a medal when the champs, especially Clonakilla, don’t run?
Judges don’t get to see the region’s true depth and diversity; other exhibitors miss out on full benchmarking; and the marketing opportunities presented by the show results become more limited.

The Limestone Coast and Hunter wine shows, for example, benefit greatly because local icons Wynns and Tyrrell participate. If, for example, you’re a Hunter semillon, shiraz or chardonnay maker, winning a medal in company with Tyrrells sends a strong message about your quality. Good on Bruce Tyrrell. It takes confidence and guts to put prestigious wines on the line year after year. He doesn’t need to.

In Canberra, our dominant riesling maker, Ken Helm, exhibits every year. His success in the local show and at other events make Helm riesling the local benchmark. Other makers benefit from being judged alongside Ken’s Classic Dry and Premium Rieslings.

Though it’s our dominant class, shiraz could be even richer if we had the local benchmarks in the show. Clonakilla’s shiraz viognier is now seen as a world-class wine; and its cellar mates, the O’Riada Canberra District Shiraz and Hilltops Shiraz are beautiful wines. But they’re not in the show.

It’d be wonderful for the district if one day Clonakilla’s Tim Kirk – an ardent wine show judge and recipient of industry largesse through the Len Evans Tutorial – entered these graceful wines in our show. As well, the National Capital Agricultural Society, organiser of the show,  might consider moving the judging  back by a few months. This would allow makers to finish their previous-vintage shirazes for inclusion in the taste offs.

In this year’s show the three top scoring shiraz gold medallists, all from Hilltops, were Eden Road Wines The Long Road Shiraz 2008, Grove Estate The Cellar Block Shiraz Viognier 2008 and Chalkers Crossing Shiraz 2006. The other three gold medallist, all from Canberra, were Lambert Shiraz 2008, Tallagandra Hill Shiraz Viognier 2008 and Lerida Estate Lake George Shiraz Viognier 2007.

In the riesling classes, Canberra wines dominated, with gold medals for Gallagher 2009, Capital Wines ‘The Whip’ 2009, Helm Premium 2008, Wallaroo 2008 and Brindabella Hills 2002. Centennial Vineyards from the Southern Highland also earned gold for its Woodside Riesling 2008.

High, cool Tumbarumba made a clean sweep in the two chardonnay classes, earning gold medals for Barwang 2008, Eden Road The Long Road 2008 and Barwang 842 2006, as well as several silver medals.

Cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir fared poorly overall. Pinot classes produced no gold medallists, just a couple silvers for Eden Road Tumbarumba 2008 and Mount Majura 2004. And Tallagandra Hill earned a gold medal for its Cabernet Sauvignon Cabernet Franc 2008 as did Barwang for a 1998 Hilltops cabernet sauvignon.

And if you look hard enough, you’ll always find inexplicable anomalies in any show results. Mount Majura’s delicious Tempranillo Shiraz Graciano 2008 failed to rate a medal in the Canberra Regional show but won gold in the Winewise Small Vignerons Awards just a few weeks earlier. And Capital Wines ‘The Whip’ Riesling 2009 won gold in the Canberra show but nothing in the Winewise event.

The result overall make a good shopping list. But these striking inconsistencies tell us to take any judgement with a grain of salt. You can see the full show results at www.rncas.org.au

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

Can we train for The Canberra Times fun ran and drink alcohol? Not together, it seems. One website goes a step further – abstain for 48 hours before exercise, it advises.  OK, so how about a celebratory glass after the fun run? Maybe, but not much, seems to be the Google consensus.

Let’s Google for good news. Ahh, finally hope, for drinking runners: a Danish study, cited on a CNN health blog, “didn’t find that alcohol and exercise were interchangeable, but rather they had a compounded, additional effect together”.

Dr Morten Gronbaek, an epidemiolgist at Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health observed 12,000 people over 20 years – and concluded that “Leasure-time physical activity and a moderate alcohol intake are both important to lower the risk of fatal IHD and all-cause mortality”.

They found that those who exercised and drank moderately were 50 per cent less likely to suffer heart disease than non-exercising wowsers. Non-drinking exercisers reduced their risk of heart disease by 30 per cent compared to non-exercising wowsers – a risk reduction rate shared by couch-bound moderate drinkers.

Dr Gronbaek concluded, “physical activity and light to moderate alcohol intake in middle-aged and elderly people are both preventive and independent from one another”.

Perhaps we can continue to drink as we exercise after all. But not much. The study defined moderate drinking as one to 14 drinks a week, with an optimum for protection of one drink a day for women and two for men. Glad I’m a bloke.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

In the early days of chardonnay in Australia we probably all gagged on an over oaked vintage and heard the usual jokes… splinters in the tongue, build a weekender out of it… the list went on. Perhaps the most colourful metaphor, though, was penned about ten years ago by UK writer Jilly Goolden.

In The Independent there was a regular section called “You ask the Questions”, and one reader asked:
‘Is it true that on a food and drink Christmas special you described a particular wine as having the properties of a “wooden bra”?  If this is true, what exactly would a wooden bra taste of, and when should one wear one?!’

Jilly’s response: ‘A wooden bra!  Yes, I confess, I referred to such a thing in a manner of speaking. What I in fact said is that the oak in a heavily oaked Chardonnay supports the fruit, like a bra, rounding it up and filling it out. I wasn’t saying it smelt or tasted of a wooden bra.  I’m not quite that dippy’.”

By that time wooden bra syndrome barely rated a mention in Australia as our winemakers had moved on ¬– although there were lingering occurrences of another chardonnay support: the silicone implant.

Before I explain that, let’s look at why so many of our early chardonnays tasted so heavily of oak. There are several reasons why this was so.

Firstly, our winemakers had to learn, on the run, how to deal with what was for them a new variety, demanding new skills. (In the early eighties, chardonnay barely rated a mention in our viticultural statistics. Now it runs neck and neck with shiraz as our biggest variety. We crushed 450 thousand tonnes in 209, enough to make about 33 million dozen bottles).

Perhaps the biggest challenge, as Jilly’s metaphor suggests, was to fill the middle palate and add complexity to large volume chardonnays. These really needed a little help, being made, as they were, from the fruit of high-yielding, immature vines.

Without a natural intensity of fruit flavour, winemaker inputs tended to count more than nature’s. Thus we had – as well as the flavours derived from fermentation and maturation in oak barrels or on oak chips – a barrage of flavour- and texture-adding techniques including must holding, hyper-oxidation, lees contact and stirring, fermentation on skins and other grape solids and malo-lactic fermentation.

Several internationally successful commercial chardonnays, conspicuously Lindemans Bin 65 and Jacobs Creek, emerged in this era. However, the ‘wooden bra’ brigade, for a time greatly outnumbered these more subtle creations.

Winemakers had yet to learn how to use oak. It took time to learn that timing was all important; that fermenting wine in oak worked better than putting finished wine in; that all-new oak was too much for most wines; that some sorts of oak worked more sympathetically than others; and that every wine needed its own oak regime.

Despite the ‘wooden bra’ syndrome, chardonnay production doubled every four or so years until the around the turn of the century, such was the demand. It subsequently fell out of vogue with drinkers, overtaken by the Marlborough-led sauvignon blanc express.

But there’s much to be said for chardonnay. In my view it makes the most complex and interesting whites on the planet, and what we make in Australia today bears little resemblance to the oaky versions we made twenty years ago. Our winemakers moved on rapidly from those styles – driven partly by consumer demand and partly by their own perceptions.

When consumers said ‘too much oak’, some winemakers over-reacted by burning the bra. In the mid nineties they gave us the unoaked’ chardonnay. It tried, and failed, to be what sauvignon blanc is today. Len Evans called it a con, and he was right.

Other makers pursued the more palatable, two-pronged approach of refining the bra and, to extend Jilly’s metaphor, using better breasts: mature vines and improved viticultural practice produced tastier grapes and better wines.

By now makers had also learned how to use oak sympathetically to create truly complex wines from this wonderful grape variety.

However, as the oak tide receded, some chardonnays became more buxom through the ‘silicone implant’ effect of malo-lactic fermentation. This natural process of converting malic acid to lactic acid tends to produce unctuous buttery flavours. A little bit adds complexity and texture; but too much is too much.

For mainstream chardonnay makers that was just another lesson to be learned on the way to the finer styles we now enjoy. Most of the broad learnings were in place by 2000. But we’ve continued to improve since then and today our top chardonnays are world class.

While the best tend to be fermented and matured in oak, vibrant, delicious fruit is the core flavour. Oak and all the other tastes, aromas and textures associated with time in barrel work harmoniously with the fruit. Chardonnay has moved on. The oak jokes no longer apply.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

As wine drinkers we’ve never had such choice as we do today – the offerings of more than 2,300 Australian and 500-odd New Zealand vignerons, as well as a widening range of imports. Paradoxically, as the number of wine brands expands, liquor retailing continues to consolidate as Coles and Woolworths carve up the trade – and now account for probably more than half of Australia’s take-away liquor sales.

The two giants club each other in capital city press ads each Thursday, fomenting local competition. Together with our local independent retailers they offer a good range of wines – remembering that different outlets offer a different focus.

But what we find at even the best intentioned retail outlet barely touches what’s out there in the wineries. Discovering these gems is rewarding. But like most forms of mining the search involves lots of sifting to uncover pay dirt. These top tips may help you find drinking pleasure in our great regional specialties.

Recognise the keys to quality
Marketing, advertising and packaging send a thousand cues quite often relating to everything but what’s in the bottle. And what’s in the bottle?  Wine made from grapes. The most important information to find (and it’s not always on the label) is the grape variety or varieties used in making the wine, the origin of those grapes, who made the wine and the vintage.

With an appreciation of the types of wines made by the main grape varieties and a feel for regional differences comes understanding. Regional specialisation is now well advanced in Australia and yields some of the greatest drinking pleasure.

As winemaking influences how wine tastes, it helps to acquire some understanding of cellar styles. And, of course, vintages make a difference, especially in marginal grape-growing regions. The further up the price and quality ladder you go, the more you need to know, and the more benchmarks you need in your head to make good value judgements. Take the time to learn as you move up the ladder. Be prepared to expand your frame of reference.

Check regional show results
While our capital city shows attract the most publicity, the results are largely irrelevant to wine drinkers as the same wines seem to win the major gongs. The real action these days is in regional shows open only to local wines. Many of these (Canberra, Limestone Coast and Barossa, for example) post their results on the web. The results give an overview of what varieties do well in a region. And if you’re buying on the strength of the results, you can safely drill down past the trophy and gold medal winners to silver and bronze medallists, too – these will be above average regional wines. The main caveat is that some of the better producers don’t show their wines. So, take the show results as a good, but not definitive, opinion.

Check, as well, results of the Winewise Small Vignerons Awards, held each year in July, at www.winewise.net.au

Read the reviews
Most newspapers and magazines offer wine reviews. You’ll find some reviewers more in tune your palate than others, so follow them if you have time. But as this slow-drip approach gives regional glimpses rather than overviews, James Halliday’s comprehensive annual Wine Companion can be a useful resource ¬– especially the overall rating of wineries. Caveats: I find some of the ratings for very small makers to err on the side of generosity. For wine reviews in general, scores out of 100 give a false sense of precision and tend to cluster misleadingly in a small range.

Visit the winemaker’s website
Websites vary, but many convey a great sense of place and provide wonderful detail on the complex pieces that make up that delicious glass in your hand. It’s a story of passion, people, place and often decades and generations of endeavour.

Visit regional websites
Wine region websites vary in quality and the detail they give. But it’s always worth a Google.

Google and gurgle
With location at the heart of a wine identity it’s not surprising that the world’s biggest selling wine books are wine atlases, including Hugh Johnson’s superb Wine Atlas of the World, first published in 1971, revised and updated several times, and still going strong. A good map tells so much at a glance – especially detailed contour maps of the calibre offered by Johnson. I’ve navigated by them in France.

These days we have an immediate resource at hand in Google Earth. Try, for example, searching ‘Mount Crawford South Australia’ and in a flash you’ll be hovering above the hills on the south-eastern edge of the Barossa, with Domain Day in the cross hairs immediately below. Zoom in for a detailed view of the vineyard, complete with bird netting. Zoom back out and in a few seconds you can take in the whole Barossa zone – the valley floor stretching from Williamstown and Lyndoch in the south and up through Tanunda to Nuriootpa in the north, flanked by the Eden Valley hills to the east, and back to Mount Crawford at the southern end of the hills.

The Google and gurgle method won’t help you buy wine. But it’ll increase your understanding and boost your drinking pleasure. With a glass in hand you can tour Coonawarra, Margaret River, Marlborough – anywhere. And if you have a specific road address for a winery Google can take you right to the spot. Caveat: Google doesn’t have high-resolution shots of every region, but it’s getting better all the time.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009