Ken Helm and his supporters launched Canberra’s riesling challenge in 2000, opened it to New Zealand wines in 2002 and then to the world, as the Canberra International Riesling Challenge, in 2005. The number of entries grew from 137 in 2000 to 512 from six countries this year, a record.

The results, announced on Friday 17 October and available at www.rieslingchallenge.com, contain few surprises and reflect the considerable diversity of wine styles made from this great variety – from luscious and sweet, to steely and austere, to dust-dry and delicate.

Its ability to age, too, is shown in two of the award winners – a sweet 1991 Rauenthaler Baiken Riesling Eiswein from Germany’s state-owned Kloster Eberbach and Peter Lehmann’s dry Eden Valley ‘Wigan’ Riesling 2003.

Kloster Eberbach’s wine topped the honours list, leading an impressive charge from Germany’s delicate semi-sweet to sweet styles. And Lehmann’s showed yet again Australia’s dominance in the dry styles.

For the first time this year the judges assessed the wines in regional groupings – making it easy to compare medal strike rates. Impressively, in the classes for 2008 vintage dry rieslings, Canberra’s strike rate of 60 per cent compared favourably with the established champs Eden Valley (62 per cent) and Clare Valley (60 per cent) and Western Australia’s Great Southern region (60 per cent).

Nothing, however, beats Clare’s 93 per cent strike rate (although Eden Valley looks respectable on 80 per cent) for the combined 2007 and 2006 vintage dry rieslings.

With five positions, these two regions dominate the Challenge’s list of Australia’s top ten ranked rieslings. But these two neighbouring regions now face serious competition.

Canberra’s Brindabella Hills 2008 (from Roger and Faye Harris’s vineyard at Hall) and Graeme Shaw’s Shaw Vineyard Estate Semi Sweet Riesling 2008 (Murrumbateman) pushed their way into this elite group – the first time Canberra rieslings have been in the front running at the event.

The list also includes one wine each from Tasmania, Mudgee, New South Wales, Great Southern, Western Australia, and one that’s probably a multi-regional blend.

And if you’ve counted eleven wines in the ‘top ten’, you’re correct. How can this be? I don’t know, but the full list is: Peter Lehmann Eden Valley ‘Wigan’ 2008, Roche Eden Valley 2008, Pipers Brook Tasmania 2007, Brindabella Hills Canberra District 2008, Neagles Rock Clare Valley 2008, McWilliams Hanwood 2007, Peter Lehmann Reserve Eden Valley 2002, Robert Stein Mudgee 2008, Shaw Vineyard Estate Canberra District Semi Sweet 2008, Tim Adams Clare Valley 2008 and Trevelen Farm Great Southern 2008.

The dark horse in that race is McWilliams Hanwood Riesling 2007, a wine that sells for less then $10 a bottle. It was judged in the ‘various’ category alongside wines like Jacob’s Creek and other mainly multi-regional blends that don’t qualify for a particular region. They’re generally very good because even though blended to meet a price, they contain high proportion of fruit from leading areas like Clare and Eden.

These wines often drink beautifully when they’re young and regularly outscore prestigious names in wine shows, a fact previously commented on in this column. There are several examples in the Challenge, for example, Jacob’s Creek 2008 and Jacob’s Creek Reserve 2008 earned bronzed medals with scores of 49 and 50 respectively, the latter just one point under a silver. But Leo Burings two fabulous 2008 ‘Leonay’ flagships, on the other hand, failed to rate. I’ll back them for gold a few years down the track.

All that says is that we should take the results of the Challenge with a grain of salt – as we should with any wine show. No show on its own is definitive. But the high scoring wines are very, very good, so a close look at the results, especially of current vintages, makes a useful shopping guide.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

De Bortoli Windy Peak whites $12–15
Pinot Grigio 2008 and Sauvignon Blanc Semillon 2008
Yarra-based winemaker Steve Webber, new chair of the Melbourne wine show, seems to be on a mission with the Windy Peak range. It’s a trickle-down effect from the new depth we’ve seen recently in De Bortoli’s more expensive Yarra Valley range.  The pinot grigio’s out of whack with contemporary Australian white styles. There’s a quirky, tart edge to it, in a pleasant Italian sort of way. There’s some of the same quirky, tart character in the sauvignon blanc semillon, too. But the fruit’s more aromatic and combines tropical sauvignon blanc with grassy semillon. Both wines have good mid-palate texture.

De Bortoli Windy Peak reds $12–15
Pinot Noir 2008 and Sangiovese 2006
Steve Webber and his team have really nailed Yarra pinot in recent years, partly through fermenting uncrushed berries – the fermentation taking place inside the berries, capturing fragrant, pure fruit flavours without hard tannins. Despite its youth Windy Peak – sourced from Yarra, Beechworth, Port Phillip, Mornington and Canberra – captures much of the variety’s magic flavour and silky texture. It’s phenomenally good at this price. The King Valley-sourced Sangiovese is even more of a triumph. It captures bright fruit flavour as well as the earthy, deeply savoury flavours of the variety as well as its dust-dry tannins.

Thomas Hunter Valley whites
‘Braemore’ Semillon 2008 $25 and ‘Six Degrees’ Semillon 2008 $20
Winemaker Andrew Thomas rates the 2008 vintage as ‘disastrous for reds’ but the semillons as ‘nothing short of exceptional’. Who can argue about the whites? The ‘Braemore’ (from the Braemore Vineyard, owned by Ken Bray) is as pure a semillon as I can recall. It’s very fine, very delicate and at just 10 per cent alcohol delivers one of the gentlest imaginable drinking experiences. It’s in the taut, dry, understated style that cellars forever. ‘Six Degrees’ weighs in at an even lower alcohol – eight per cent. It’s zesty, fine-boned and varietal, but it offsets the zesty acid with a lovely burst of sweetness.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Readers familiar with the work of Ralph Steadman might easily mistake the label cartoon on  ‘The Ambassador’ Tempranillo 2007 (a new Canberra label) for an original from this great artist. I did, and was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t.

One glance at the quirky, stout, dinner-suited, moustachioed, florid-faced, red-wine toting ambassador stirred memories of Steadman’s extraordinary wine pictures – the endless stream in British retailer Oddbin’s catalogues; and the sheer brilliance in one of the best wine books ever, in my view, ‘The grapes of Ralph: Wine according to Ralph Steadman’.

It was published by Random House, London, in 1992 and is still available. Amazon offers used copies from $US12.95 and new ones at $US117.29.

Buy it and hang onto your sides. You could split laughing. Open a second bottle and it gets even better. Throughout the book words and pictures mingle in a flow of fact and fantasy at times difficult to separate.
Steadman approaches wine as a drinker:

“ I tried desperately to savour the first tasted on my tongue, but thirst got the better of me and I gulped a mouthful which burst inside me like a warm sensuous bomb. I followed it with a piece of black bread and thought only of France and the sheer joy of booze at the right moment.”

But he’s not just any boozer as we see from this colourful tasting note on Wynns John Riddoch Cabernet 1982 tasted on its home turf, Coonawarra:

“A massive body – it swells to gargantuan proportions – the primal savage emerges – thunder in the brain. Time opens its doors and you come face to face with immortality.”

In 223 pages, Steadman dazzles us with impressions of Bulgaria, France, Germany, Portugal, Lanzarote, Italy, Australia, California, Peru, and Chile, dropping in four amusing interludes on various aspects of wine en route.

I counted 264 illustrations, ranging from tiny line sketches to double-page full-colour landscapes. These embrace wine, vines, grapes, wine tastings, mythology, wineries and buildings, landscapes, and wonderful character portraits.

Colour sketches breath life into leading Italian wine makers robed in medieval, renaissance, and papal costumes (eg: a Florentine Angelo Gaja, “the Lorenzo de Medici of Italian wines”). And there’s brilliance in sketches of wine paraphernalia, circa 1490, by ‘Leonardo da Steadman’ (I think that’s what it says. It’s written backwards).

Steadman portrays national identities without creating mere stereotypes. And the landscapes radiate almost as much warmth as the people.

His twenty-eight page Australian section sketches an exotic landscape that seems to have fired his imagination.

The opening double-page painting shows a vast blue-grey, red-streaked landscape with Ularu and the Olgas thrusting through. Six pages dominated by Aboriginal themes follow, one with the caption: Homage to Australian Wine inspired by Aboriginal art – the only true culture to emerge from the Australian continent in the last 40,000 years.

We also glimpse animated wine bottles: one in Ned Kelly helmet a-la Sydney Nolan, dancing on a vast plain; two portrayed as ‘Kangarouge at Play’; and vignettes of imaginary wine figures, including ‘Barossa Pearl’. She ran a soup kitchen while her preacher husband travelled the outback warning against the evils of abstinence.

It’s a profound book, as engaging now as it was on its release in 1992. Mere prose can never capture its wealth of ideas.

Whatever happened to cabernet, former king of the reds? By volume it’s running a distant second to shiraz. And in the publicity stakes it struggles to a poor third behind tiny-volume pinot noir.

Yet, when Australia’s modern table wine boom began forty years ago, cabernet sauvignon was revered as one of the four ‘noble’ grape varieties, along with riesling, chardonnay and pinot noir.

In this era our ubiquitous workhorse, shiraz, rated as an also ran, despite the standing of Penfolds Grange Hermitage – a shiraz – as our greatest red wine.

Those early boutique wineries, inspired by the originals from Bordeaux, tended to focus on cabernet. And the wine buzz through the late seventies and eighties was on the likes of Bill Pannell’s Moss Wood and Kevin Cullen’s Margaret River cabernets, along with the top wines of Bordeaux and, for a time, leading examples from California.

Shiraz was always there in our vineyards, especially in the warmer regions, but it didn’t attract the same respect as cabernet until the late eighties and early nineties. At about this time Grange creator Max Schubert, received UK-based Decanter magazine’s winemaker of the year award; a band of Barossa makers, dubbed the ‘Rhone rangers’, asserted the beauty of their traditional varieties, led by shiraz; and the world had begun to take fresh stock of superb shirazes from Cote-Rotie in France’s northern Rhone Valley.

It was also at this time that Canberra’s Clonakilla made its first straight shiraz, having blended it with cabernet for almost twenty years. Even that was partly an accident – a fortunate one that highlighted the variety’s quality and suitability to Canberra’s climate.

As shiraz gained respect globally, Australia took ownership of the variety, principally because it suited our growing conditions, we had lots of it and we had over a century of experience making it. Cabernet slipped to the backburner. But cabernet didn’t, and won’t, disappear.

The gap between the two varieties really opened up during the planting boom of the nineties. In 1995 we harvested 62,080 tonnes of cabernet sauvignon and 77,080 of shiraz. This year, with the full impact of the plantings, we picked 253,852 tonnes of cabernet and 435,850 tonnes of shiraz.

If cabernet’s not doomed, I do believe that in Australia it’s destined to fall further behind shiraz and may even lose some ground to pinot noir (our pinot harvest grew from 13,600 tonnes in 1995 to 47,104 tonnes in 2008).

This is because the average quality of our shirazes seems to be greater than the average quality of our cabernets. Where shiraz seems to be adapted to a wide range of conditions, cabernet is fussier. Too often cabernet is a little green, a little astringent and lacking in mid-palate flesh. Shiraz, on the other hand, tends to be soft, juicy and easy to love.

With a tendency for people now to enjoy a glass or two of wine on its own, the growing preference for shiraz is understandable – and good for Australia’s vignerons given our propensity to grow it.

Over time this will probably see cabernet retreat to the areas (like Margaret River and Coonawarra) that do it best. As well, we’ll probably see more of it blended with shiraz – a proven combination in which shiraz fills the flavour hole and cabernet shores up the structure.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trophy winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Canberra’s regional wine show, judged on Monday and Tuesday this week, attracted a record 254 entries from 46 producers in Canberra and surrounding regions, including Hilltops (Young), Tumbarumba, Southern Highlands, Gundagai and the south coast.

It’s an extraordinarily varied catchment for grape growing – and hence wine flavours – with vineyards spread over a significant range of latitudes (Mittagong in the north to Gundagai in the south) and, perhaps more importantly, from altitudes of near sea level at warm Nowra, to around 900 metres at chilly Tumbarumba.

That geographic spread also means a wide range of soils, aspects and, of course, the all important wide diurnal temperature ranges and low humidity of inland sites, versus the more humid, small temperature range of coastal sites.

This all contributes to the diversity of wine styles in our local show. And, in general, our judging scores correlate closely with the theory of what varieties ought to work in the various locations – albeit with a few surprises now and then.

The show delivers different benefits to drinkers, producers and the industry as a whole. For a producer there’s the chance of glory, as nothing grabs attention like a gold medal or trophy. But the show also provides a benchmarking opportunity, both in the judges’ scores and at the exhibitors’ tasting held after the judging.

In these small regional shows the benchmarking tends to be more intense than it would be in a show open to all comers. For example, our region’s fine-boned shirazes don’t run the risk of being ‘shaded’ by burlier styles from warmer regions like the Barossa or McLaren Vale.

It’s harder work judging a more homogenous group of wines. But ultimately the judges reward a range of subtly different wines.

For the industry, the overall results, over time, reveal the strengths of the various parts of the region. This, in turn, can make the show a springboard for regional marketing. As chair of judges, Brian Croser, said last year the show has the ability to ‘inform and inspire the way a region manifests itself – to identify its strengths and how to tell the world’.

For drinkers there are immediate as well as long-term benefits. In the long run, wine shows tend to lift overall quality. Regional shows, in particular, highlight technical faults that can be, and usually are, eliminated with a bit of attention.

The catalogue of results, of course, provides a terrific guide to quality across the district – with the caveat that not every winery exhibits.

Attend the public tasting that follows the judging and you can cover as much ground in one night as you could in weeks of cellar door visits. The trick is to grab a catalogue as soon as you arrive, identify the styles you’re interested in, then hit the tasting tables.

Naturally there’s a rush on the trophy winners. But remember that there’s a fine line between trophy winners and gold medallists, and often between silver and gold winners. Bronze medallists, too, are way above average wines.

The public tasting is on tonight from 5pm–7pm at the Terrace Restaurant, Exhibition Park, Watson. You need to buy tickets in advance. Cost, including a tasting glass, is $15 (or $12 for RNCAS or Wine Selector members). Phone 6241 2478 or visit www.rncas.org.au for details. The website also has a PDF of this year’s show results.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Cork producer Amorim’s new, emotional appeal for us to come back to cork is unlikely to wash with consumers or the wine industry. It’s like the abusive partner seeking one more chance

Be prepared to have your heartstrings tugged by Amorim, Portugal’s leading cork producer. On 6 August they launched a campaign spruiking the virtues of corks over screw caps.

Amorim’s website (www.amorim.com) says the Australian campaign is “to promote the environmental qualities of cork oak forests and natural cork products…Rolled out under the banner ‘Save Miguel’ the campaign is designed to inform consumers of the social, environmental and economic benefits of using cork”.

Amorim’s Australian press release claims that cork can play “an important supportive role” in the wine industry’s “greater emphasis on environmental sustainability”.  It also claims that “a decline in cork manufacturing – which could result from an increase in the use of alternative wine closures – would jeopardise the future of cork forests and lead to a loss of habitat and increase emissions of CO2”.

These cork oak forests of the Mediterranean basin, says the press release, “help offset a massive 10 million tonnes of CO2 every year”. Further, Amorim estimates that more than 100,000 people depend on the Mediterranean cork industry and that the forests prevent soil degradation and support biodiversity.

See where this is going? – if Australians continue to choose alternative closures over cork, we’ll contribute to global warming, soil degradation on a vast scale, the extinction of biodiversity and to mass unemployment across the Mediterranean basin. Amazing for a country that drinks less than two per cent of the world’s wine.

But it’s behind the campaign’s ‘Save Miguel’ banner that Amorim cuts to the chase. Forget the ‘alternative closures’ mentioned in the press release. The target is clearly aluminium screw caps – and a hint of panic at how successful they’ve been.

At the campaign’s website, www.savemiguel.com, a Rob Schneider video finds Miguel, a Portuguese cork oak tree. Schneider asks, “So what’s troubling this big guy?” and answers, “Our obsession with doing things cheaper and quicker. I’m talking about screw tops on wine bottles”, and continues, “The industrial factories that make screw tops are the same factories that Miguel and his family of cork trees are protecting us from”.

So we get more guilt and the big ‘cheaper and quicker’ lie cocooned in the emotional message. The success of screw caps has never been about cheaper and quicker.

Screw caps had been around for decades but gained acceptance only after a complacent cork industry denied problems associated with its product – cork taint (a mouldy smell and flavour in wine derived from 2,4,6 trichloroanisole, a compound sometimes found in corks) and oxidation.

During the nineties frustrated winemakers around the world sought solutions to these serious quality issues. Synthetic plugs offered hope early in the decade, but failed to deliver.

By the mid nineties, Australian winemakers had turned their attention to screw caps. They’d been encouraged by the wonderful aged-but-fresh condition of wines sealed under screw caps in the seventies and opened twenty years later.

Trials began again in the mid nineties. But the landmark re-launch of the screw cap came after the 1999 vintage when a group of Clare Valley riesling makers, taking a stand on quality alone, found huge retailer, wine media and consumer support.

The New Zealanders had been heading down the same path – moving to screw cap entirely to preserve wine quality. Thus, the screw cap movement began at the top of the quality pyramid in Australia and New Zealand and trickled down to cheaper wines as the decade progressed.

The fact that about seventy per cent of wine sold in Australia is now under screw cap (industry sources say this is the highest rate in the world) is surely a reason behind Amorim’s attention – even if we drink less than two per cent of the world’s wine.

Another reason, of course, is that when we export wine, we export with it the screw cap’s compelling message about wine quality. Export markets are embracing this. And partly because competitors copy good ideas, we’re also seeing a gradual take-up of screw caps by other wine producing nations.

And will Amorim’s be-our-green-partner approach seduce the Australian wine industry? Will our industry return to the “only wine closure that is truly environmentally friendly – renewable, recyclable and biodegradable”?

It’s really a bit like the abusive partner looking for one last chance. The cork industry did nothing for too long. The wine industry felt beat up. Frustrated, it moved on to a better product (one that consumers love, too) and won’t be going back.

Ironically, one cork product that appears to overcome the old technical problems, DIAM (made be Oeneo Closures), could hardly be called a ‘natural’ product. It’s made from cork that’s ground up, stripped of aroma in a process using supercritical carbon dioxide, and glued back together with polyurethane. It’s winning friends around the winemaking world, including some makers in Australia.

That’s the kind of solution the cork industry needs if it’s to hold back the tide – not just of screw caps but of whatever other seals come along now that the cork monopoly has been broken. There’s not much point playing on our heartstrings, dear cork producers, if your product spoils our wine or isn’t as good as what the competitors offer.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008