There’s plenty happening on the Canberra district wine scene at present. It’s the depth of winter, but the first of the 2008 whites are being released, along with the last of the 2006 vintage reds and what little there is of the 2007s.

New-release samples to date look good. And a tasting of the latest offerings from Ravensworth, Clonakilla and Brindabella Hills (reviewed in coming Sunday columns) inspired us to begin the season’s cellar door visits. It’s a big district, of course, so the reports can only trickle in from week to week. But there’s a bit of excitement out there.

For pure quality, the most exciting wine remains Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier – a beautifully fragrant and plush, world-class example of a style that originated in Côte Rôtie at the northern end of France’s Rhône Valley. The about-to-be-released 2007 vintage is sensational. But, sadly, frost wiped out ninety per cent of the 2007 crop, leaving just 150 dozen bottles for the world. It’ll sell out rapidly at $75 – a modest price for a wine of this provenance.

It’s worth asking for a bottle or two at cellar door. But if you don’t get lucky, Clonakilla’s Hilltops Shiraz 2007 ($25) and O’Riada Canberra District Shiraz 2007 ($35) provide tremendously satisfying drinking. And the 2008 riesling ($25) offers taut, brisk lovely drinking and good cellaring prospects.

Writer of The Canberra Times ‘Male order’ column, Bryan Martin, can’t spruik for his own Ravensworth wines (he makes them at Clonakilla) but they sit with the best in the district. Ravensworth Riesling 2008 ($18) is pure and fresh and a little plumper than the Clonakilla. And his Shiraz Viognier 2007 ($30) is savoury, spicy – in the fine-boned Canberra mould – but a little chunkier and earthier than the silky, ethereal Clonakilla version. There’s no cellar door, however, but you can google ‘Ravensworth’ and order online.

We’ve not yet visited Roger and Faye Harris at Brindabella Hills, at Hall, on the rim of the Murrumbidgee Valley. But we’ve tasted Roger’s idiosyncratic and delicious ‘Aureus’ 2007, a blend of chardonnay and viognier. It’s unconventional but it works and is good value at $22.50, cellar door. The 2006 shiraz is in a different style again from any of the Clonakilla wines or Ravensworth’s. It’s round and plump and very soft in it’s own fragrant, elegant way.

Roger generally makes one of the better rieslings in the district and arguably the best sauvignon blanc – good reason in their own right to visit cellar door.

Out at Murrumbateman, Graeme Shaw’s Shaw Vineyard Estate adds another dimension to the cellar door offering with a range of ceramics imported from Italy and a restaurant overlooking the vines.

In a former career, Graeme built the Kamberra wine tourism complex for Hardys – a relationship that brought him to grape growing and ultimately to winemaking. At cellar door, the early, rustic wines from the 2003 and 2004 vintage are giving way to the far more polished products from 2006 and on (there were no 2005s as Graeme sold the crop).

The reds, in particular, offer huge value at $22 a bottle. Graeme currently offers, from the 2006 vintage, a shiraz, a shiraz-cabernet blend and a cabernet merlot, with a straight cabernet sauvignon due for release shortly.

I favour the shiraz cabernet blend, but these reds are all true to the elegant Canberra style. They punch above their weight and can only add to the district’s reputation. In fact, Graeme recently completed an export deal with a major French wine club. They purchased his remaining stock of 2004 cabernet merlot, half of the production of the 2006 cabernet merlot and signed a ten-year supply deal.

Graeme grows his own fruit on the 32-hectare Murrumbateman estate, but has the wine made by Brian Currie in Bill Calabria’s West End Estate, Griffith. During vintage Graeme and his daughter Tanya travel to Griffith to help.

And in the next few years we’ll see two new Shaw labels: a budget-priced ‘winemaker selection’ range targeted at pubs, clubs and function venues, mainly in country New South Wales; and two ‘reserve’ wines – a shiraz viognier blend and a cabernet blend that he expects will ‘knock the socks off the wine writers’.

And that’s exactly what the Canberra district needs. To date we have only one wine that blows the right socks away – Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier. But there’s room for more. And the more we have, the better the whole district’s reputation. Go for it Graeme.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

They say that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Wynns Coonawarra Estate was never broken. In fact, for all but a short period in the seventies, it produced reliable, long-cellaring reds.

But by the late nineties, with winemakers restless to do better, small-scale vineyard restoration began. “From 2000 on”, says winemaker Sue Hodder, “we knew that much work was required. And after the difficult 2002 vintage we realised that the pace was not fast enough”.

Under viticulturist Allen Jenkins, the large-scale work began. It was a massive and still not complete undertaking that included retrellising, chain-saw pruning, developing of a heritage nursery (based on cuttings from time-proven vines), grubbing out tired or diseased vines, replanting, converting from sprinkler to drip irrigation, changing canopy management and introducing new pruning techniques.

This vastly oversimplifies the task, of course. But by the time Allen and his team had passed the half way mark in Wynns massive estate, fruit quality had improved impressively. Tighter management of small vineyard plots gave Sue Hodder and the winemaking team a broader palette of fruit characters to work with. Most importantly it meant generally brighter, more evenly ripened fruit with the soft, velvety tannins that winemakers seek but don’t always find.

Modified winemaking, particularly a gentler hand on oak maturation, in combination with higher quality fruit produced notably better wines across the Wynns range in recent years. The changes were most notable in the re-introduced, revamped flagships, Michael Shiraz and John Riddoch Cabernet Sauvignon.

Despite the quality lift there remained a gap between what the vineyards could deliver and the ability of the winery to capitalise on it. That gap was closed this year with the commissioning of a new small-batch cellar at the western end of the winery.

It’s a self-contained unit with twenty-four ten-tonne, temperature controlled, open fermenters and separate crushing and pressing equipment – designed to process small batches of more-evenly ripened fruit.

The old winery had been geared to process fairly large batches of grapes. And its few smaller fermenters were “always in heavy rotation”, according to Sue’s fellow winemaker, Greg Tilbrook.

Tilbrook says that even though the winemakers and grape growers knew that different sections of a vineyard ripened at different times, there simply weren’t enough small fermenters to partition the crop to the level that they wanted.

The arrival of the new winery meant that in 2008 grapes from a larger block, producing, say, forty to sixty tonnes, might be processed in five or six batches instead of two or three.

The impact that this has on quality lies partly in the batch size and partly in better fruit quality. Sue Hodder says small, small, open fermenters, being more aerobic, give winemakers better control over ‘reduction’ (smelly hydrogen sulphide tends to develop in a closed, or reductive, environment). And harvesting small batches at perfect ripeness, rather than large batches with a range of ripeness, gives “brighter fruit with more evenly ripe, supple tannins’, says Sue.

Processing in multiple, small batches gives the winemakers more components and greater variation than they had in the past. And though it means more work, says Tilbrook, it brings home all the work done in the vineyards over the last decade and will affect the quality of all Wynns wines.

From the components the winemakers and viticulturists can learn which wine styles come from various blocks and clones. They can see where quality lies and also identify where things could be better. This quality and style assessment feeds back into vineyard management, which in turn feeds back into wine quality. Indeed, says Sue, Allen Jenkins knows intimately the wine styles from each of his vineyard plots.
And what are the quality factors in Coonawarra red? How important is the terra rossa soil, vine age and clonal selection?

It’s a complex picture. Sue says that while the best wines do tend to come from the terra rossa (well drained soils derived primarily from decomposition of the underlying limestone), vines from the transitional soils just off the terra rossa and some from the black soils further out have produced good quality during the run of dry seasons.

It seems the moisture holding capacity of these deeper soils, a curse in wet seasons, has been a virtue during prolonged hot, dry spells. Some of the traditionally great, unirrigated vines, on shallow terra rossa have suffered.
Even within one vineyard, says Greg Tilbrook, ripening can vary noticeably because of varying soil depth. During the dry spell, vines in shallow soil tend to ripen early, while those in deeper, moister soil ripen later – hence the need for separate harvesting and winemaking.

Having the right clones is important, too. Sue cites examples of poor genetic material overcoming the benefits of a great site and of clones that work in the Barossa not working in Coonawarra.

Like other winemakers around the world, Wynns used material from time-proven vineyards to propagate new plantings – principally from the ‘Johnsons’ block, planted in the 1920s, and the ‘Redman’ block.

While a lot is made these days of century-old vines, Sue says that the average age of vines used in making the famous Wynns Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon is about twenty-eight years. The flagship John Riddoch vines might be slightly older. The vines were planted mainly in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And there are no centenarians in the mix.

Unquestionably in my mind the wines are good and getting better. I’ve tried them all, back to the early fifties. They’re up there with the best in the world. And it gets back to location (including climate) and all the work of generations of grape growers and winemakers.

It’s a pity that the Foster’s marketers (Foster’s owns Wynns) seem so out of touch that they have to lie about these great wines. It’s silly enough that their current press ads call Wynns Coonawarra Estate ‘far more blessed’ than Vatican City. But it’s simply false when they say ‘It’s the combination of rich, red soil and hundred year old vines that makes Wynns Coonawarra Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz arguably the best in the country’.

I wonder who signed-off on the ‘hundred year old vines’ lie? Wynns drinkers deserve better than this.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

This story came out of a bottle – Bowen Estate Coonawarra Shiraz 2006 – a fragrant, silky, delicious drop, sufficiently better than recent vintages to prompt a call to the Bowens. This was more than vintage variation, so what was going on?

“It started in 2004”, says Emma Bowen. “We decided on big changes”. For a few years she’d been working alongside her dad, Doug, as assistant winemaker and 2004 was their thirtieth vintage. “We looked hard at what we were doing and asked what are we trying to do now and what do we want to do for the next thirty years”.

They had a general feeling that they could make even better wine than they had been from their 33-hectares of vineyards – running about five hundred metres from north to south, towards the southern end of Coonawarra’s terra rossa strip.

Doug had come to know the vineyard well over thirty years, says Emma. He had always picked the various blocks separately and kept the wines apart during maturation. On the tasting bench over all those years, the quality difference from block to block remained consistent. ‘Every year there was a clear difference from best to worst and it was always exactly the same’, say Emma, ‘and we picked the blocks in the same order each season’.

They wanted all of their wine to be like ‘The Ampelon’ 1998, a one-off release from their oldest shiraz block, a block that year-in, year-out was the first to ripen and always produced wines with the best flavour and texture.

They’d seen what others, including Kay Bros in McLaren Vale, had achieved in propagating new vines from those that had historically produced the best wines – and headed down the same path.

The Bowens ripped out two blocks of vines, one of diseased cabernet and another of shiraz that had been grafted onto merlot. At the same time they’d been marking the healthiest vines in the 2.5-hectare Ampelon vineyard.

Over the following two years they took cuttings from these to replant the two blocks that’d been ripped out. Doug doubled the vine density from four per panel to eight, with two canes per vine instead of four, but the same number of fruiting buds. Earlier trials had shown that this led to earlier ripening (important in the cool, southern end of Coonawarra) as well as being easier and cheaper to prune.

The denser planting gives similar grape yields per hectare but each vine produces only half the fruit of those replaced – twenty to thirty bunches each instead of forty to sixty, says Emma.

Emma and Doug expect to see the first fruit from these new plantings in 2009. Meanwhile a savage frost in spring 2006 wiped out what would’ve been the 2007 harvest on an adjoining 5.4-hectare block that the Bowens had bought in 1996.

The thirty-year-old vines were in poor health and the Bowens intended to pull them out eventually. But after the 2006 frost and ground-softening rain, Doug ripped the whole vineyard out. He replanted it with cuttings in November last year.

While the vineyard rejuvenation started with shiraz, the Bowens also identified their best cabernet sauvignon clone, based on wine quality, and have used this in the replanting program.

Emma says that their Ampelon shiraz clone and favoured cabernet clone, as well as producing high quality, give good yields and ripen early, important in beating the autumn cold.

As well as replanting parts of the vineyard, Doug converted the southernmost block of vines from spur-pruned to arched-cane pruning. As a result, Emma told me, the block weathered this year’s March heat wave and the vines looked in lovely balance – a good indicator of fruit quality, she reckons.

Emma says that all of this underlines what a very long-term venture grape growing is. “It takes a long time to get the understanding of your vineyard and, after thirty years, when you ask what you need to do, to decide to pull out half of it and start again”, she comments.

But all the vineyard changes that are about to yield better fruit, don’t explain why the 2006 shiraz, made in the middle of the rejuvenation, should be so much better than we’d seen for a while.

Emma attributes this to ‘being smarter in the winery, with more attention to detail’. With two palates at work on the tasting bench (Emma’s and Doug’s), there’s a more objective approach to each component and a more critical selection of what goes into each blend.

There’s a couple of winemaking tricks, too, admits Emma, including a bit of juice run off, to concentrate the wines. But, ultimately, she says, all of this richness and texture ought to come from the vineyard – and she expects it to.  ‘Texture and depth of flavour will go to another level in shiraz’, she believes, ‘and I hope for the same in cabernet sauvignon’.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Majella, one of the great Coonawarra estates, built its reputation on rich, complex, elegant reds, built to satisfy and last. Then three years back Majella’s owners, Brian ‘Prof’ Lynn and his brother Anthony, released an early-drinking style, The Musician, a vibrant and aromatic cabernet shiraz blend from the 2004 vintage.

It was a jaw dropper at the time, offering pure, brisk Coonawarra flavours at a modest $17 a bottle. Subsequent vintages continued in the same mould. But they’ve been topped, in my view, by the just-released 2007. It’s the juiciest, loveliest red you can imagine – a wine that says heaps about modern Australian winemaking, regional specialisation (in this instance Coonawarra cabernet) and the French notion of ‘terroir’ – and what it might mean in an Australian context.

Regional specialisation (Coonawarra cabernet, Canberra shiraz, Clare Riesling, Mornington Peninsula pinot noir, and so on) touches on the ‘terroir’ concept. But for the French that’s only a starting point. True believers in terroir say not only that wine flavour comes from a complex interplay of geology, soil, climate and culture but that the discerning palate tastes all this in wine. Some even say, less plausibly, that it’s possible to taste the soil in the wine.

At the other extreme, some see terroir as bollocks. They might accept climate’s role in wine flavour, but argue that it’s largely human intervention in vineyard and winery that determine a wine’s flavour. But to them, I say show me the chardonnay that tastes like Chablis but wasn’t grown there; show me the luxury Champagne look-alike that tastes like the real thing; or show me a red that tastes like Majella’s Magician but isn’t from Coonawarra.

These distinctive, inimitable and easy-to-discern examples give terroir credibility. It’s also what fascinates many wine lovers; is the basis of France’s wine naming system; and has become the international language of fine-wine.

It’s also become Australia’s official export branding push as regional specialities, individual ‘icon’ wines and single vineyard wines attempt to build on ‘brand Australia’, established largely on cheaper, multi-regional varietals over the last twenty years.

And this is where a wine as strikingly regional and varietal as Majella’s Musician can have an impact beyond the small volume in the market. How could this be? And does it mean that Majella’s $17 drink-now blend is better than its long-cellaring $28 shiraz or cabernet, or the $66 flagship Malleea?

The answer is no. The more expensive wines are unquestionably better, especially in the long run. But most people buy wine for immediate enjoyment – something that the highly aromatic Musician provides in buckets.

What makes it different from the other wines then, if it’s from the same vineyards and made in the same winery by the same winemaker?

The answer probably lies more in the winery than in fruit sourcing, though that plays a role says winemaker Bruce Gregory.

All of the grapes come from the Majella vineyard, located at the southeastern end of old Coonawarra. The Lynn’s planted their first vines here in 1968 and extended the vineyard during the nineties boom.

Bruce says that cabernet for the Musician tends to come from the younger vines (a relative term here, as they’re more than ten years old) while older plantings provide the smaller shiraz component.

Bruce grades each batch of grapes as they come in during vintage. But all of the reds undergo a similar fermentation regime for the first five to seven days.

At this stage Bruce presses the reds earmarked for premium products into oak barrels to complete their ferments. Magician components, on the other hand, remain in stainless steel tanks.

Bruce says that this creates an important difference between Musician and the other wines. As ‘barrel fermentation builds palate structure at the expense of aroma’, he explains, the premium blends become denser and more complex while Musician retains its high-toned fragrance. The vibrant fruit character shows in the palate, too.

With fermentation complete, the Magician components go for maturation older oak barrels for about a year – an important step in stabilising the wine, softening the tannins and adding some complexity without inserting much oak flavour or aroma.

The final blend includes, as well, a small proportion of oak-fermented wines that’d earlier been earmarked for the more expensive labels. This builds palate richness without taking away the aromatic highnotes.

While Musician is a blend of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz, cabernet dominates the aromatics and flavour. Bruce says that shiraz makes a subtle difference to the aroma. If you smell the final wine, he says, you smell cabernet, but it’s not the same as the cabernet component on its own.

On the palate, though, shiraz adds structure and fleshes out the mid palate, which can be a little lean in straight cabernet. But, again, it’s a subtle, if crucial, influence.

The result is a wine that may seem simple and delicious but is really out of the ordinary. It’s finally about the fruit of an exceptional vineyard in one of the world’s great cabernet growing areas.

Over time the other Majella reds, especially the cabernet and Malleea, reveal unique Coonawarra aromas and flavours in full glory. But Magician, in stripping out some of the winemaking artefacts, delivers it all right now.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Last month without any fanfare Canberra’s Theo Karelas and family, owners of Lake George Winery, acquired Madew Wines, on their northern boundary. The purchase brightens the outlook for this unique and historic stretch of vineyards.

Yet two years ago the future of Lake George as a Canberra sub-region appeared to be defaulting to Lerida Estate and its energetic owners, Jim Lumbers and Anne Caine. The neighbouring Lake George Winery was in decline and the for-sale Madew Wines had ceased production.

But in late 2006 Theo Karelas decided to revitalise his Lake George property, setting the scene for the Madew purchase just over a year later.

Karelas and his son Sam had bought Lake George from its founder, Dr Edgar Riek in 1998. But in an interview last year Sam said that while he’d made the Lake George wines after Riek’s, departure he had no background in winemaking. As well, working in the family’s Four Olives Deli Café at Manly, Sydney, left little time for the vineyard.

It needed full-time care, he said. And the family’s determination to give it that coincided with Hardy’s plan to exit Canberra. This, in turn, caused Hardy’s Kamberra winemaker, Alex McKay, to consider his options for the future.

With enormous respect for Alex’s talent and fearful that he might leave Canberra, Edgar Riek approached the Karelas family. They seized the opportunity. And after discussions with the family early in 2007 Alex agreed to make the Lake George wines and oversee a rejuvenation of the vineyard.

With the help of Riek and former Kamberra Winery colleague, Nick O’Leary, Alex achieved this substantially during winter 2007 and reaped a record, high-quality harvest in 2008.

Meanwhile the Karelas family had been negotiating with David Madew and settled on the property in time for vintage. Alex shifted the Lake George winemaking gear into Madew’s shed and made the Lake George wines there. There was no fruit from the Madew vineyards.

The Madew purchase included the land, vineyards, winery, house and the grapefoodwine restaurant/function/cellar door building. At about the same time, says Sam, his family purchased a vacant forty-hectare block on Madew’s northern boundary to allow for further vineyard expansion.

Sam expects to have a cellar door up and running in the stone cellars under grapefoodwine in the next few weeks. After that the number one priority will be to rejuvenate the vines, which appear to have been untended for several years.

For this, Sam says, ‘Dad and I have given total control to Alex and Nick. They are the best in the district’.
Alex McKay says he hasn’t completed a survey of what’s in the Madew vineyards yet. He believes that the mix is ‘not too redundant’ and probably about seventy per cent white, thirty per cent red.

There’s a fair bit of riesling, a variety which has, in the past, produced good wines. And tastings of the very small amount of Madew stock suggested that the vineyard produced generally high-quality fruit.

It’ll be all hands on deck there this winter to prune (probably with a chain saw), graft and re-trellis where necessary. Alex believes that the severe pruning will probably mean a 2009 crop of only about twenty to thirty per cent of normal.

But by pruning severely and limiting the yield next year, the vines will be healthier in the long run and yield normally in 2010. He says that because Sam and Theo will do what it takes to get the wines right they’re prepared to accept the small 2009 harvest.

Of the forty hectares on the new block adjoining the Madew property, Alex believes that perhaps twelve to six hectares could be planted to vines.

The Madew name won’t be retained and the combined properties will operate as Lake George Winery. Sam estimates current combined plantings at about seventeen hectares, with potential, across the three blocks to increase this to perhaps about thirty-seven hectares.

Lake George Winery, then, will embrace two of Canberra’s earliest vineyards – Lake George itself, founded as Cullarin Vineyard by Dr Riek in 1971; and the former Madew vineyard, founded as Westering vineyard by Captain Geoff Hood in 1973.

The substantial grapefoodwine building will serve several purposes. The cellar door is moving downstairs into the stone cellar, which will serve, too, as a barrel cellar; and the upstairs restaurant will continue as a function venue, with Lynwood’s Robert Broadbent running the kitchen. Sam says this may become a restaurant again in the future.

With the cellar door due to open and the first of the wines made by Alex McKay expected to come on sale in the next few months, we could be in for a treat.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008