Coonawarra’s prolonged, and at times bitter, boundary dispute of the nineties pales in comparison to what’s being unleashed in France’s Champagne district. For the first time since the 33,500-hectare growing area was defined in 1908, there’s to be a major expansion of the number of communes permitted to grow Champagne grapes. With two communes sacked and forty promoted the number is set to increase from 319 to 357.

While the website of the region’s controlling body, the Comité interprofessionel du vin de Champagne (CIVC), is surprisingly mute on the topic, the world’s newspapers are running hot with the news.

Much of the focus is on the windfall for those within the new boundary and the bitterness sure to be felt by those that just miss out. Several sources, including Decanter magazine and Guardian News & Media, carry this wonderful quote from Gilles Flutet, a member of the body that made the announcement, “If your vines fall on the wrong side of the divide, they will be worth €5,000 a hectare. On the other side they will be worth €1 million.”

For the winners, it’ll be like waking up in the morning to find someone’s replaced your old Vespa with a new Rolls Royce. And the proposed winners are to be announced by the Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO) over the fifteen days following their March 13 decision to expand the region.

The Guardian News & Media illustrates the depth of local rivalries with this quote from Sylvie Le Brun, a farmer from Montmirail, “At a dinner party Saturday everyone was saying, ‘I hope the neighbours aren’t chosen.’”

With a review period to follow the announcement, it’ll be about a year until we see where the final boundaries lie and another decade or more before new planting move into full production.

But even before this relatively small expansion, Champagne was a huge producing region – especially given its position at the luxury end of the market.

While the official maximum area for vines is set at 33,500 hectares, INAO figures show that in 1995 there were 30,659 hectares in the ground. Between 1999 and 2006 this expanded by about 300 hectares a year to reach 32,626 hectares, leaving little, if any, scope for further expansion.

To view Champagne’s scale from an Aussie perspective, in 2006 Victoria had 39 thousand hectares under vines, New South Wales 40 thousand hectares, Western Australia 12 thousand and the whole country 169,000. Champagne, then, has two and a half times more vineyard land than Western Australia and only a little less than either Victoria or New South Wales.

But the comparison becomes even starker when you compare Champagne with a single, Aussie premium region. In a good year, by my estimate, Coonawarra might make fifty million bottles of wine – about one-sixth of Champagne’s 330 million bottle output.

The French drink over half of that. But in 2007 the region exported 150.9 million bottles (up seven per cent on 2006) to over 190 countries, putting leading Champagnes amongst the most recognised luxury brands in the world.

While articles about the region’s expansion talk of surging demand in China, India and Russia, the real action remains amongst the developed nations.

In 2007 the top-ten markets slurped down eighty per cent (121 million bottles) of Champagne’s exports. The UK topped the list at 38.9 million bottles, followed by the USA on 21.7 million, Germany on 12.9 million, Italy on 10.3 million, Belgium on 9.9 million, Japan on 9.1 million, Switzerland on 6.1 million, Spain on 4.6 million, the Netherlands on 4.1 million and Australia on 3.3million (up 12 per cent on 2006).

Now the Champenoise are masters of luxury-goods marketing. They think long term, protect their brand aggressively and spread their sales over many markets (knowing that when some are up, others are down).

This long-term approach probably drives the current expansion plans. If Russia, China and India are small markets now, where might they be in ten or twenty or thirty years? Sales to Russia in 2007, for example, were up forty one per cent on 2006, and those to China up thirty per cent.

But what can we expect from a quality perspective? Why were boundaries guarded so jealously for one hundred years, only to be expanded as production peaks and demand soars?

Old vignerons will always tell you of any wine region that they didn’t plant the worst land first. This is as true in Champagne as it is anywhere.

In all likelihood, in my view, the expansion may swell the volumes of middle-of-the-road Champagne and the pockets of those who make it, but most of the world won’t notice.

There’s already a huge quality chasm within Champagne. Where once, in Australia, we might have perceived three broad quality levels – non-vintage, vintage and de-luxe blends (like Moet’s Dom Perignon), many consumers now know that quality varies widely within any of these groupings.

As well, there’s an increasing recognition of Champagne’s vineyard ranking system, and an appreciation that the best wines come from the top vineyards. We’re increasingly seeing vineyard rankings featured in PR material from Champagne houses. And there’s a growing number of single-vineyard, grand-cru-vineyard only and single-varietal Champagnes coming onto the market.

At Bass Phillip Winery, for example, I enjoyed with proprietor Phillip Jones an extraordinary single-vineyard, all pinot noir Champagne from the village of Ambonnay – Egly-Ouriet Brut Grand Cru 1996 – imported by Prince Wine Store, Melbourne.

Wines like that will only ever be niche players. They’re at the tip of the Champagne quality pyramid and remind us, sadly, that the base of the pyramid is about to become bigger.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

The Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans loved the muscat grape and spread it around southern Europe. From there it colonised the continent, and later the new world. Two millennia on, drinkers everywhere enjoy muscat in still, semi-sparkling, sparkling and fortified wines.

Its full name is muscat-a-petits-grains and its colour ranges from white to pink to brown. Its many Aussie aliases include frontignan, frontignac, fronti, muscat and brown muscat and it’s behind Italy’s delicate, sweet, low-alcohol Moscato d’Asti and Rutherglen’s fabulous fortified muscats.

In Australia we distinguish between muscat-blanc-a-petits-grains and muscat-rouge-a-petits-grains in our official viticultural figures (we harvested a mere 1,027 tonnes combined in 2007). And Rutherglen producers prescribe the rouge version as the only one permissible in the regional product.

But in Vines, Grapes and Wines Jancis Robinson writes that ‘The ampelographer Truel on his historic visit in 1976 demonstrated that all of the colour gradations, many of them encountered in the same vineyard in Australia, are in fact strains of muscat-a-petits-grains’.

It’s distinct from muscat of Alexandria (aka gordo muscat or muscat gordo blanco), a lesser but hardy beast that for years filled our sweeter wine casks and provided names like gordo moselle.

While gordo remains an important bulk-wine contributor, with sixty-three thousand tonnes harvested in 2006 and fifty thousand in the drought-stressed 2007 vintage, muscat-a-petits-grains became a declining niche player, partly a victim of anti-sweet-wine snobbery.

Between 2005 and 2006 the area of muscat-a-petits-grains in the ground declined from a meagre 529 hectares to 462 hectares.

However, the growing number of Asti-inspired Aussie moscatos hitting the market can only be possible if makers use muscat of Alexandria as well as the superior muscat-a-petits-grains.

Anecdotal evidence says supply of the real thing is tight this year. In Canberra last week, Wirra Wirra CEO, Andrew Kay, said the variety was hard to buy. He commented that last year Wirra Wirra released Mrs Wigley Moscato, its first shot at the style, as an experiment at cellar door where it outsold Church Block, the flagship red.

Cellar door was where moscato’s success began for Brown Brothers, too. In an interview for this column last year Ross Brown recounted the company’s continued success with sweeter styles.

Ross recalled a Winemakers Federation of Australia survey revealing that sixty per cent of wine drinkers enjoy a glass only occasionally because they don’t like the flavour. The revelation shocked the WFA but not Brown Brothers. For years they’d understood that wine is a peculiar taste, at odds with the sweeter things that we drink all the time – from mother’s milk to fruit juice.

Browns discovered decades ago a perennial demand for sweet table wines. They’ve catered for this at cellar door where small, experimental blends are later rolled out on a larger scale.

Ross said that consistently over the years sweet, fruity table wines – in a range of styles — have been the winners and remain the biggest selling styles at cellar door. The cellar door favourites, at the time of the interview, were the red Cienna and white Moscato (made from muscat of Alexandria) – both sweet wines weighing in at a modest 5.5 and 5 per cent alcohol respectively.

Brown Brothers success with Moscato was no doubt an inspiration to other winemakers. But it won’t have been the only factor.

Australian winemakers are familiar with the joyful simplicity of muscat, or fronti, as a table wine. It’s light, fresh, sweet and deliciously grapey.

The Italians, though, created the style that’s now catching on here, partly driven by winemakers aware of the Italian version, partly by the success of Brown Brothers and other makers and partly by drinkers themselves, many of whom will have tasted the original Moscato d’Asti.

In Italy they call the variety moscato blanco – the same grape they use in Asti Spumante. Though the frizzante, or semi-sparkling style, also originated in Asti, its region of production now includes the adjoining Cuneo and Alessandria districts.

The wine’s keynotes are a musky grapiness, low alcohol (about five per cent), sweetness, and a zingy acidity and light effervescence that offset the sweetness. They’re not luscious or sweet enough to be dessert wines. In fact, they’re light, fruity, and refreshing enough to enjoy as an aperitif. Any good liquor store will have one or two available.

The Aussie versions tend to be a little higher in alcohol than the Italians, and the best capture much of the interplay between sweet, musky fruitiness and zesty acidity. They’re delicious. But sip carefully, as some are just sweet and cloying.

Though not yet a mainstream style, moscatos are popping up everywhere from the Hunter to Yarra to Barossa and McLaren Vale and across to the west. Some are pink, others white.

Their success shows that we’ll embrace sweet table wines if they’re good. And to be good they must be made from suitable grape varieties. Muscat-a-petits-grains and even the lesser muscat of Alexandria have the credentials. They’ve been putting a smile on our faces for at least two thousand years.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

In 1975, a Neilsen poll, or even a straw poll, would’ve found few, if any, Australian takers for a $50-equivalent pinot noir. Then, as now, wine pioneers, like Main Ridge Estate’s Nat and Rosalie White, seem to be driven by a vision – and a faith that there’ll be buyers if they can make the wines of their dreams.

These are not the broadacre grape growers, not the empire builders, not the finger-to-the-wind makers – but the small-scale, visionary, artisans seeking the best from a small patch of earth.

There’re hundreds of them in Australia contributing a few drops each year to our ocean of wine. Many struggle, or survive on off-vineyard income. But a few, like the Whites, draw closer to their dream wines through tiny, incremental improvements made over decades.

And some time into the journey, probably not less than ten years, quality arrives and with it the followers prepared to follow the dream and pay the artisan’s price – a trusting relationship that builds with high, sustained performance.

Main Ridge is tiny by any measure with just three hectares of vines. On a mild summer’s day, after good rainfall, it’s a little arcadia – emerald green, flowers blooming and with Rosalie and snowy-haired grandson, Angus, in the vineyard.

But imagine it back in 1975 – probably scrubland and pretty remote at that, high up on the ridge and with walk-in access only in the early days. It would’ve been hard yakka and a major gamble.

Nat says that not knowing with certainty what might work they planted cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay – a pretty good guestimate, as only the cabernet failed.

‘We just couldn’t get the green character out if it’, said Nat, so cabernet’s gone. He rates the merlot as ‘ok’ (an understatement), making about a barrel of it every year, as he does of pinot meunier, the cuttings for which came from the Thomson family’s nineteenth century vines at Best’s, Great Western.

Merlot and meunier add colour to the offering. But Main Ridge’s reputation rests on world-class chardonnay and pinot noir. These command around $50 a bottle – difficult to achieve, but necessary for survival on a meagre three-hectare wine estate.

The 2006 chardonnay ($52 a bottle; $48 by the dozen) is full but delicate showing the wonderful patina of subtle flavour and texture derived from barrel fermentation and maturation. Nat’s aim, he says, is ‘to produces a seamless wine with fruit flavours and unctuous texture in perfect balance’. And he does.

But we passed all too quickly through the chardonnays on our recent visit to linger over the pinots. We’ve had a taste for these since the 1997 vintage and probably arrived at just the right moment to see the 2005s, 2006s and 2007s – wines that could be described as good, better and best.

What we saw in these was a vintage-related flavour increase, culminating in the small but very concentrated 2007. These are still in barrel but struck me as sublime.

How did Nat and Rosalie get to this level? Bit by bit. And some of the important changes have come in the last decade and the last five years. ‘You’d think we’d know it all after thirty years, wouldn’t you?’ Nat jests.

An important change was a shift to wild-yeast ferments about a decade ago. Ultimately it produced better wine. But the first attempt in 1997 looked scary at the time. The wild yeast component (only about one third of the total) developed off characters (aldehydes and volatile acidity). But after barrel maturation for seventeen months and blending, delivered the lovely drop that hooked me onto Main Ridge.

It’s now standard practice at Main Ridge. Nat adds that in the tag-team of wild yeasts generations thrive, die and are replaced by others. Those in the dying phase lose the plot and produce glycerol instead of alcohol – adding to the wine’s rich, silky texture, a key component of great pinot.

Another important change, of the road-to-Damascus variety, came on a visit to Burgundy in 2003. Walking through one of the famed Domaine de la Romanee Conti (DRC) vineyards, he noticed discarded bunches on the ground and that they contained both black and green berries.

He queried the French and received what he calls an obscure response. Trade secrets, I suppose. But it turned out to be the key to not having to egg-white fine his pinots before bottling.

For over ten years he’d been able to bottle bright, clear pinot without filtering it. But to remove the slightly hard tannins prior to this required fining with egg whites – a simple process, like clarifying a stock, where protein the egg white bonds with tannin.

Why bother? Well, every fining and filtering takes away desirable aroma and flavour as well as whatever it is your trying to get rid off.

By deduction, I suppose, Nat applied what he’d seen at DRC. He found that by snipping off bunches that contained both black and green berries at veraison (when the berries soften and darken) he ‘narrowed the band of ripening at vintage’.

In turn this produced wines without the hard tannins and these required no egg fining. He’s bottled without fining or filtering ever since. This is, literally, making wine in the vineyard.

Thirty-three years after Nat and Rosalie founded Main Ridge, they’ve got in the cellar just fourteen 228-litre barrels of 2007 pinot noir – about half the usual production. But the standard wine’s limpid, beautifully perfumed, and silky fine, even with a few months’ maturation to go. And the ‘Half Acre’ component, from a small plot within the pinot vineyard and to be bottled separately, is stamped with class – a sublime drop that’ll give Grand Cru Burgundy a run.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

In a sense, the Australian pinot noir story is a small one. The variety represents only about four per cent of our annual red grape crush – and much of that goes to sparkling wine production. But, in another sense, it’s a big story because it’s one of the great varieties and provides succulent drinking when it’s done well.

Even if we accept that New Zealand, overall, does it better than we do (it’s their leading red variety), that’s largely a consequence of our latitude. In other words, as pinot’s a cold-climate variety, Australia’s best pinot vineyards cling to our cooler, southern fringes.

These have been probed for over thirty years now by vignerons seeking cool, humid climates comparable to those found in France’s Burgundy region, home of pinot noir.

And at Chateau Shanahan we’ve been sniffing our way through some of the cool-grown pinots in the last few months, recommending the ones we like. Then in January we drove south to visit a couple of pinot pioneers and a few comparative newcomers, too.

For first port of call we’d pencilled in South Gippsland’s Bass Phillip Wines – home to Australia’s most expensive pinot. But we stopped en route at Nicholson River Winery, some 160 kilometres to the northeast, in East Gippsland.

And what a contrast between the two: Nicholson River with a substantial passing trade, making idiosyncratic wines – a little bit of something for everyone – and delighting in making affordable pinot; Bass Phillip, off the beaten path, and focusing squarely on the top of the market.

Ken Eckersley founded Nicholson River Winery, just a few minutes drive off the Princes Highway east of Bairnsdale, in 1978. He says ‘it began as a hobby based on enthusiasm for wine. But we had to learn to farm, grow grapes, make wine and sell it’.

He planted sixteen varieties and ‘had to learn how to make each of them’. But they didn’t all work and even now, at age 65, he and wife Juliet are substantially restructuring the vineyard. ‘It’s the last throw’, Ken said.

Chardonnay was the first winner and remains Nicholson River’s flagship – the rich and delicious 2005 currently selling at $35. But Ken’s pinots are good, too, although he reckons ‘the snobs have captured pinot. I like to make a nice pinot noir and sell it at $15’.

And he does – the 2004 walked out the door during our visit. This is big-value, estate-made wine, as good as pinot gets for that price. Ken’s Nicholson River Pinot Noir 2005 ($35) delivers, too. If not as polished as some at the price, it has real depth of pinot flavour that goes on pleasing – the bottles we later drank in Melbourne seemed never big enough. See www.nicholsonriverwinery.com.au

A day later and a degree further south on a remote dirt road in Leongatha South we pull up outside Bass Phillip. Is this really the home of revered pinot? Ramshackle cottage, overgrown grounds, piles of timber – deliverance country, it seems, without the banjo player.

Instead, proprietor Phillip Jones steps forward and we’re talking Burgundy, pinot noir, yields per vine, wine quality, humidity and the fertility of Gippsland soil – ‘grass grows in the hinges of my ute’, says Phillip.

The cool maritime climate here suits pinot and the constant humidity is a blessing and curse at the same time. Jones says that as grape skins are porous, humidity limits the loss of volatiles and, ultimately, means better aroma and flavour in the wine. Conversely, in dry climates, he believes, pinot loses flavour through transpiration.

He argues that all of the world’s great vineyards, bar Champagne and Burgundy, are near water – but that those two exceptions nevertheless enjoy humid vineyard environments because of their water retaining and expiring soils.

Here in Leongatha the constant humidity, says Phillip, makes mildew a perennial problem. It’s there on the neat vines and tiny, green/grey berries, resisting sprays and capable of desiccating the crop if not controlled.

Exposure to sunlight is one method of control, so throughout the vineyard the team’s plucking leaves to open the leaf canopies and expose the fruit. A biodynamic regime limits what spraying can be done – and Jones laments that its most ardent believers live in dry climates.

In five hours of talking and tasting, we barely touch on winemaking. For Phillip Jones, wine quality comes from the vines, vineyard locations and grapes. That’s where good pinot flavour comes from.

His vineyards are densely planted, in the Burgundian style – typically at nine thousand vines to the hectare although in one they’re packed in at seventeen thousand. The Aussie norm is about two thousand.

To maximise flavour, Jones targets a grape yield of about one third of a kilogram per vine – equivalent to around three tonnes per hectare. He bases this on the long-term Burgundian experience where the maximum permissible yields, defined as hectolitres per hectare, range from the equivalent of just under half a kilogram per vine for grand cru wines to a little over one kilogram for basic Burgundy.

And all this focus on grapes pays off in wines that can be strikingly Burgundian in style – intensely perfumed and flavoured and a joy to savour. Despite a tiny output, Bass Phillip produces an at times confusing number of pinots, including Issan, Village (now Crown Prince), Premium, Estate and Reserve – based on individual vineyards or plots within vineyards.

The best cellar beautifully as we saw during our visit in a 1997 Jacques Raymond Selection and 1991 Bass Phillip Premium, one of the best Aussie reds I’ve ever tasted. The market likes Bass Phillip wines, too – the 2005 Reserve recently fetched $288 a bottle at Langton’s auctions.

These are cult wines now, and deservedly. But there’s terrific value in the lovely, about-to-be-released Crown Prince 2007 ($49). The wines are difficult to find, so it’s best to call the winery on 03 5664 3341.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Pinot noir is but a blip in Australia’s wine consumption statistics. But it’s one of the most satisfying varieties to drink when winemakers get it right, as they increasingly do. And though style and quality vary enormously, my experience is that those at the top mercilessly test their own wine against global peers, especially the classics from Burgundy, France.

As I judge, taste, visit wineries and interview winemakers, numerous Burgundy producer names pop up. But there’s one name – Domain Armand Rousseau – that every winemaker seems to revere.

It’s a name familiar to some older Canberrans as local wine merchants, Farmer Brothers, imported Rousseau’s wines (as well as Domaines George Roumier and Tollot-Beaut) from the early eighties until thee demise of Farmers in 1994.

Particularly memorable are those years when an Aussie dollar fetched eight French francs and the pool of world billionaires was much smaller than it is today. As an employee and then partner of Farmer Bros, especially in the pre-fringe benefits tax days, drinking top Burgundy (and not just Rousseau) became a daily experience.

It was a similar exposure to great Burgundy that inspired pretty well all of our now acknowledged local pinot noir producers. And though it’s more expensive to indulge a Burgundy taste today, a new generation of makers finds inspiration in the same journey.

So what is it about pinot, and more especially Burgundy, and in particular Domaine Armand Rousseau Burgundies, that ignites such enthusiasm? The answer is in the glass.

Even as a newcomer to pinot (assuming a modicum of wine interest), Rousseau’s wines are delicious. They tend to be pale in colour but very bright; they have a striking purity of aroma and flavour; and despite their pale colour, there’s a silky richness and persistence to the flavours that becomes more pronounced as you move up the quality scale from the village Gevrey-Chambertin through the ‘premier crus’ and on to the remarkable ‘grand crus’, including Chambertin and Clos de la Roche – nine wines in all, produced from 13-hectares of vineyards.

For all that we read of ‘funky’ pinot (a euphemism for smelly), the best young Burgundies, in my experience, offer pure, bright and clearly varietal aromas and flavours, across an interesting spectrum.
Since ‘funkiness’ is usually associated with winemaker inputs (or lapses), and the best pinot makers bend over backwards not to interfere with the grape flavours, the purity of top pinot should come as no surprise.

What is surprising, though, is that despite its comparatively pale colour (although it can be deep), pinot delivers one of the biggest tannin loads of any variety – bigger even than cabernet. It’s just that with pinot the tannins are generally soft, and often accompanied by a high level of naturally occurring, silky-feeling glycerol.

Words can never convey the loveliness of these wines. But clearly, from what they’ve inspired, they work!

And once you’ve tasted pinot as good as those made by Rousseau and other top Domaines, it’s not easy to be satisfied with anything less. This becomes a powerful force for aspiring new-world winemakers.

It’s a big jump from humid, cold Burgundy in eastern France to warm, dry Australia. And in the thirty odd years since the first wave of Burgundy-inspired vignerons set up shop, we’ve seen the pinot focus shifting towards the areas that we now know do it best – notably the Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Gippsland and Macedon in Victoria and Tasmania.

And just to show what long-term learning this wine business demands, thirty-plus years on the pioneers continue to tweak wine quality through changes in vineyard and winemaking practice. They still drink Burgundy, too.

For other established maker it can be wholesale change – not tweaking – as they replant vineyards to better clones and radically change winemaking practice.

There’s a new wave of pinot makers, too, some of them very good. Where the early, pioneers tended to carve vineyards in remote, untried terrain, drip-feeding capital from their full-time professional salaries, a new well-capitalised genre, builds on the pioneers’ learning. These, too, take their inspiration from Burgundy.

By now, I’m sure you’re wondering why all the fuss and bother over making the very best – when top-end wine makes up a tiny proportion of what we drink. Well, there are a couple of angles on this.

There’s the ‘wine snob’ element for those that’ve tasted and loved the best and want to relive the experience. And there’s the recruitment and trickle-down effect.

What we have now, because of the effort of our pioneers is a generation, albeit small, of pinot drinkers for whom Aussie or Kiwi pinot is the benchmark. They’ve never tried Burgundy. And as we succeed at the top end, we invariably produce wines that don’t make that cut and end up in more affordable blends. These expand the market.

As well, we have producers, like Montana in New Zealand, intentionally scaling up pinot production for mass consumption – and basing the scale up on the work their doing at the top end.

Because pinot’s such a lovely drop and offers so much pleasure, I recently visited a few of our successful, inspirational pioneers in Victoria. Their stories follow.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Kamberra’s state-of-the-art winery, abandoned by Hardy Wine Company a year ago, might have become a white elephant. Instead, both the winery and the Kamberra wine brand are to live on under Canberra’s Elvin Group.

The group bought the Watson winery and tourism complex and 83-hectare Holt vineyard last year. But speculation about the fate of the Kamberra brand, winery and vineyard persisted until Cooper Coffman Wine Company made Kamberra its home this week.

Under a long-term lease arrangement, Cooper Coffman is to make Kamberra branded wines for Elvin as well as its own wines and wines under contract to local grape growers.

With the capacity to process 2,200 tonnes of grapes (equivalent to about 165 thousand dozen bottles of wine), Kamberra is by far the largest (and best-equipped) winery in the district – and the new owners plan to get it humming.

Winemaker Martin Cooper says that he established the business in 2006 with investment banker Chris Coffman, a hard-nosed wine nut with a taste for Aussie shiraz.

The trigger for Coffman, Martin said, was an experimental 2005 vintage Eden Valley-Heathcote shiraz, made during his time at McWilliams. With the blessing of boss, Jim Brayne, this was Martin’s shot at a top-end shiraz. It pushed Coffman’s buttons — and Jim’s too, it seems – as the wine made it into McWilliams flagship red blend, ‘1877’.

In 2006 Brayne again supported Cooper’s creative flair. This time he worked with only the Eden Valley shiraz component — sourced from a former Hamilton family vineyard planted in 1895. This one hasn’t been blended away, though, and is due of release in May as Cooper Coffman’s inaugural flagship red – Eden Road V06 Eden Valley Shiraz 2006.

Must be good, because in December 2006 the new company purchased the vineyard, located near Springton, from Mark Hamilton. It looks to be a gem and contains, as well as the old shiraz vines, grenache planted in the 1920s and riesling planted in 1971.

It also has a wonderful old gravity-fed winery, complete with jarrah fermentation vats, that hasn’t been used since 1982.

Martin’s work with McWilliams had also brought him into contact with fruit, wines and grape growers from the Tumbarumba district. He admits to having ‘jumped the fence’ at times to check the fruit on Southcorp’s (later Foster’s) 87-hectare Tralee vineyard there.

This is one of the oldest vineyards in the area and contains 26 individual blocks, spread over three major hill sites and varying in altitude from 650–750 metres above sea level.

Southcorp had bought the vineyards from founder Ian Cowell, one of the first people to recognise this cool region’s potential for growing sparkling wine. Cooper, though, seeing more potential for table wine on this ‘beautiful spot’, arranged to buy it and plans to focus on pinot noir and chardonnay – the dominant varieties on the site.

Cooper Coffman began managing the vineyard in June last year. And by the time they finalised its purchase from Foster’s in December the new vineyard manager, Michael Wildsmith, had already pulled out seven hectares of low-lying, frost prone vines and begun renovating what had been a ‘severely drought affected vineyard’.

They’ve renamed it Tumba Hills vineyard and plan, over the long term, to replant it to the best clones, make lots of individual-site batches and, ultimately, produce single-site pinot and chardonnay as well as across-the-site blends of both varieties.

While Cooper Coffman doesn’t own vineyards in the Hilltops region (Young), Martin knows growers with dry-grown cabernet sauvignon – source of robust reds with distinctive, gritty tannins. Martin sees another project in blending these with sangiovese – in the style of Italy’s so-called ‘super Tuscans’.

And from Canberra, the Cooper Coffman team has access to grapes from the large Holt vineyard – a potentially rich source of shiraz and viognier. Martin feels comfortable with this big Canberra commitment as the fruit can feed into their existing ‘Sydney Red’ and ‘Sydney White’ export brands.

The plan is to bring grapes from all of these areas to the Kamberra winery and to make, mature and bottle the wine on site. Elvin is even building additional barrel storage and warehousing space to accommodate it.

In the long run, Martin hopes, ‘the regions will speak for themselves’.

And for Canberra grape growers, Cooper Coffman offers a contract winemaking service for ‘those wanting to abide by our philosophy’, said Martin.

In short, what we now have in Canberra is a substantial winery committed to making and marketing top-end wines from three local regions – Canberra, Tumbarumba and Hilltops -– and from South Australia’s Eden Valley region.

Importantly for Canberra and the region, the winery changes from being a provincial outpost of an American-owned corporation to the headquarters of a vigorous, new local producer with an international focus.

But it could be a dry argument for a while as we’ll have to wait for the new wines to come on stream. The first of what promises to be a series of exciting regional specialties is due to start in  May with the release of Cooper Coffman’s Eden Valley flagship, Eden Road V06 Shiraz 2006. I’ll report back when it’s released.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

Since humans developed language tens of thousands of years ago, we’ve found expression for phenomena only now being explained on many levels, right down to the molecular, by scientists.

Almost instinctively, and certainly by experience, we understand that one man’s meat is another’s poison – an adage that applies in spades to the world of wine.

When scientists recently announced, for example, that cheese mutes the flavour of wine, wine trade veterans simply said, we told you so — and quoted the old wine merchant adage, “buy on apple; sell on cheese”. Those who trade in wine have known for centuries that apples sharpen the palate and cheese dulls it.

More pertinent to the meat/poison divide, though, is emerging evidence that our differences on what tastes good or bad isn’t just a matter of opinion. It seems to be in our genes. And it’s not just a matter of pleasant and unpleasant, but a whole range of individual experiences based on what we see, smell and taste.

The Aussie wine industry has long known, through observation and measurement, that we all have different thresholds for recognising certain aroma/taste elements in wine — especially for potential faults such as excess volatile acidity (vinegar) or trichloroanisole (TCA), the molecule behind cork taint.

Where palates can be sensitised to recognise the latter, there are other tastes and aromas that we either sense or don’t sense. Mousiness – a bacterial fault derived from the spoilage yeast brettanomyces – is a real life example.   It can make one taster gag while another smells nothing but wine. The ability to sense mousiness, I’m told, lies in the genes.

Yet long before scientists identified the blind spot as being in our genes, wine show judges had learned that the shortcomings of individuals needed to be addressed – just one of the reasons for using three-person judging panels.

And only last year, following five years of work, the Australian Research Institute revealed yet another example. They discovered the chemical behind the peppery aroma of shiraz, alpha-ylangene

But to the twenty per cent of people unable to sense the compound (another of the Institute’s findings) it’s of little comfort knowing that ‘a single drop is enough to make an entire Olympic-size swimming pool smell peppery’.

With taste at the centre of the wine industry’s existence, it’s not surprising that the venerable Institute of Masters of Wine amongst others, has become interested in the phenomenon of the super taster – a class of taster categorised by scientists researching genetically determined ability to taste.

Super tasters have an acute ability to taste the very bitter synthetic substance phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) in tiny concentrations – where others taste little or nothing.  Within the human population the concentration at which we sense PTC varies by a factor of one thousand.

In a Science a Go Go article in September 2005, Rusty Rockets, reported that, according to Professor Patrick MacLeod, president of the Institute of Taste, at least half of the 347 olfactory genes identified in humans are polymorphous, “meaning they have a great potential of variation amongst themselves” and giving “credence to the claim that no two people will ever taste or smell the same odor the same way”.
At about the same time, in glug.com.au, Richard Farmer reported that Professor MacLeod’s experiments have also revealed “the colour of a wine – which is visual information – can truly change the taste of the wine. This is not an illusion. A white wine that has been tinted red with an odourless dye will taste different and creates a different pattern of neural activity in the brain”.

According to Rockets, Professor MacLeod also points out that a “single molecule can provoke a response in a single cell that is then transmitted to the brain”—suggesting that “the human sensory system for odors has achieved maximum sensitivity”.

The combination of acute olfactory sensitivity, genetic variance and the diversity of sensory cues influencing what we smell and taste begins to explain why wine remains infinitely variable and fascinating, It also says that behind divergent opinions lie utterly different individual experiences.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2008

As we move towards vintage 2008 Australia’s wine industry is in dramatically different shape than it was last year.

In spring 2006 as vines budded for the 2007 vintage, I was in the Barossa and Langhorne Creek hearing daily of cancelled grape contracts as large winemakers, with storage tanks full, anticipated a third consecutive bumper grape harvest.

Then, out of the blue, frost struck eastern Australia, decimating the embryonic 2007 crop. Drought wrought further damage and, in the end, vignerons crushed 1.4 million tonnes of grapes – half a million tonnes down on the 1.9 million tonnes each of 2005 and 2006.

The oversupply became a shortage overnight. And as the drought continued, vintage 2008 seemed almost certain to be even smaller 2007’s.

At a wine industry conference in Melbourne last month the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation’s Laurie Stanford projected the 2008 harvest at 1.22 million tonnes and predicted an even smaller crop in 2009.

By my estimate the projected 2008 harvested might leave our winemakers about half a million tonnes short of replacing current consumption of Australian wine (1.1 million tonnes for exports; 0.6 million tonnes domestic).

So, with exports still bubbling along and domestic consumption growing modestly, where does that leave Aussie wine drinkers? Will we go without? Will we have to pay more?

The answers you get depend on whom you ask.

Tony Leon, General Manager of the Woolworths owned Dan Murphy brand, was in Perth opening the chain’s seventy-third outlet when I called. A projected turnover of $1.5 billion this year makes Dan the dominant force in Aussie liquor retailing, and a good litmus for the market.

Leon says we won’t go dry, but things will change. One way or another, he reckons, there’ll always be wines at the prices people want. But the day of the $1.99 and $2.99 cleanskin are over. These will jump by $1 to $2 a bottle.

And he believes that strong premium brands are likely to increase in price. For example, the Penfolds Bin Range reds, probably won’t be seen at under $20 next year – and certainly not at the $15 and $16 we enjoyed in 2007.

While Leon predicts that import volumes will increase substantially in percentage terms, their absolute volume will be small. ‘They won’t move the needle’, he said. But he also expects to see imports in some wine casks.

He expects our insatiable thirst for sauvignon blanc to continue into 2008. And to meet demand the next cleanskins of this variety will be from Chile and France – as there’s none to be had in Australia’s bulk market.

And what wines will we want most in 2008? In red wine, says Tony, we want straight shiraz or straight cabernet sauvignon. But we’re developing a taste for pinot noir, but the rapid growth in demand is off a small base.

Similarly there’s a buzz about the white pinot gris. It could grow from about one per cent to three per cent of white wine sales.

Canberra’s Jim Murphy, of Jim Murphy’s Market and Airport cellars, expects that the strong Australian dollar will curb imports to the USA and that this, in turn, could take the pressure off domestic supplies.

Jim says that there have been no price rises yet in the important $5-$10 a bottle range nor in the $15-$30 sparkling wine range – a sweet spot for the Christmas trade. With Christmas deals now done and dusted this suggests stable prices until the New Year.

He adds that there are enough small and medium wineries now to allow him to pick and choose what to stock.

A closer look at the grape supply figures, though, suggests where the price pressures might come in the new year, even if they’re not showing yet.

The real pain for growers is in the Murray Darling basin, source of something like seventy per cent of our wine grapes. These are the backbone of our cask industry (representing a little under half of domestic wine sales), and also of our under-$10 bottled wine market and much of our export push to date.

Most of next year’s grape shortfall will be because of water shortages in the basin. This year, for example, South Australia capped water allocations at 16 per cent, rising to 22 per cent in December.

The ABC reported a few weeks back that ‘many growers say that is not enough’. It went on to report that one Barmera grower vowed to use 40 per cent and said, ‘God help whoever comes out here on my property to tell me you’re not going to do that.’

Meanwhile that River Murray shortage is forcing larger wine companies to change focus. We may well see imported wine in wine casks. And Hardy Wine Company’s Sheralee Davies told me that their could be some rationalisation of their cask products and that there’d be a global push on top end and regional products – from the $15 Oomoo McLaren Vale range to flagships like the $60 Eileen Hardy Chardonnay and $100 Thomas Hardy Cabernet Sauvignon.

Premium growing regions, it seems, won’t be as badly hit as the Riverland and many may deliver normal crops, thanks to late but effective spring rains.

In Canberra, Tim Kirk of Clonakilla, Murrumbateman, and Jim Lumbers of Lerida Estate, say that fruit set suggests a healthy vintage. And Anne Caine, President of the Canberra District Wine Industry Association, reports good fruit set across the district, thanks to June rain and recent follow up falls.

What we’ll also begin to see increasingly in 2008 and beyond is the effects of concerns about global warming.

Increasingly, the industry will measure its carbon footprint and take steps to reduce it. This will be driven partly by international retailers, partly by legislators, partly by consumers and partly by producers themselves.

We’ve already seen the introduction by Foster’s of premium wine in PET bottles into the Canadian market and to a lesser extent in Australia. At one-tenth the weight of glass these deliver major savings in transport and recycling costs.

And Hardy’s has introduced one-litre tetra packs into its UK Banrock Station range. These will hit Australian shelves next year.

At the recent Wine Industry Outlook Conference, delegates learned of a new carbon-footprint tool developed by Australian company, Provisor. Wineries from Australia and other countries have agreed to adopt the tool as a means to giving standardized assessments across the industry.

What we can say for 2008 and beyond is that we won’t go dry; we’ll drink more imports; we’ll see a lift in basic wine quality; competition will keep a lid on prices, as it always does; and we’ll see a rapid greening of the industry – partly to survive, partly to gain competitive advantage and partly in response to consumer and government demands.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

Rutherglen’s luscious, luxurious Tokays and Muscats may not the underpriced secrets they used to be. But they are, at least, as stunningly, deliciously brilliant as ever and readily available.

They’re wines to savour slowly and, like good Cognac or single malt Scotch, half the pleasure is in the aroma. And that means that one glass goes a long way.

I’ve had the fortune to judge some of our greatest fortifieds at many wine shows over they years, notably at Cowra with Rutherglen legend, David Morris, leading the panel. But the greatest display I’ve seen was in Rutherglen just after the local wine show a year or two back.

Show Chairman, Chris Pfeiffer, organised a couple of wine workshops for about sixty winemakers and grape growers in town for the celebrations and the old muscats and tokays proved irresistible.

After a morning’s warm up on shirazes and shiraz blends, we moved to the serious business of fortified wines. Industry luminaries David Morris, of Morris Wines, and James Godfrey, of Seppeltsfield, led the session. But with venerable old Rutherglen families like Buller, Killeen, Gehrig, Campbell and Chambers in the audience, we were never going to go short on experience.

Before slipping into the truly luscious stuff, a little foreplay on a range of fino, amontillado and oloroso sherry styles seemed appropriate. Samples of fortifying spirits and current vintage base wines showed the building blocks. But a taste of mature Australian and Spanish versions of the three styles reminded us of how rewarding it is to drink these extraordinary wines.

Fino, the most delicate of the sherry family, matures at length in old oak barrels under a protective layer of ‘flor’, or yeast cells. The pale lemon coloured wines that emerge give no hint of their often-considerable age. However, the intensity and complexity of aroma and flavour are remarkable in their special savoury, tangy way.

And with the removal of Australia’s ‘minimum 17 per cent alcohol’ law in 1995, the best local versions – bottled at around 15 per cent alcohol – have a delicacy equal to that of the original Spanish styles.  Two that appealed strongly on the day were the readily available Seppelt DP 117 Fino (made by James Godfrey) and, from Spain, Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla – a particularly delicate, sub-category of fino. Lightly chilled, these are superb aperitif wines.

Of the richer, darker Amontillado styles, the older Australians – Seppelt DP898, Seppelt DP102 and Morris 35 Year old – showed the wonderful, drying nutty finish of prolonged barrel ageing. These are simply glorious. The Spanish Gonzales Byass Elegante Amontillado was a touch lighter in colour with a lovely, honeyed rich palate and very fine, dry finish. Amontillado is the classic consommé or soup wine.

The old Oloroso’s were remarkable, the Aussies showing medium brown colour with the distinctive olive-green meniscus of great age. These were intensely rich and sweet with powerful, aged nutty flavours and grippy drying finish. Fruitcake, nuts and a roaring fire is all these need. Of the two Spanish versions, I preferred Hidalgo Secco Napoleon – a subtle but intense dry style of some delicacy.

Palates suitably titillated, we moved to Rutherglen’s great Tokays and Muscats, working through contrasting samples of current vintage wines, various blending components and, finally, the finished, bottled product.

Within a familial regional theme, both the Tokays and Muscats show considerable style variation from make to maker. This became increasingly clear as we stepped up through the formal quality grades comparing the Morris and Seppelt product.

Even the current vintage base wines, barely fermented and fortified, showed an essentially different winemaking approach: the Seppelt samples, largely because the maker opts for a low pH winemaking approach, were significantly paler than the Morris wines and notably firmer, and less rounded in the mouth. This is neither good nor bad – just a style difference.

Now, Rutherglen Tokays and Muscat have four formal classifications. The progression is: Rutherglen, Classic Rutherglen, Grand Rutherglen and Rare Rutherglen. While these are based on richness, complexity and flavour, increasing age is, perhaps, the biggest single quality factor behind increasing quality. Broadly then, ‘Rutherglen’ will be the youngest commercial material and ‘Rare’ the oldest.

However, the wines are skilful blends containing components of varying age, from various sized oak barrels, from various parts of the winery. This can be complex, as David Morris demonstrated with samples from the 1993 vintage drawn from barrels at different heights in the stack.

The winemaker’s art is in blending numerous components, some of very great age (we tasted one syrupy-rich 70 year old sample) to produce consistent bottlings from year to year.

In the end, though, whether you prefer the slightly more subtle fruit character of Tokay or the powerful grapiness of Muscat, Rutherglen’s fortified specialties reliably grow in intensity and interest as you move up the formal scale.

At the tasting, however, just as we’d exhausted our superlatives on Seppelt and Morris ‘Rare’ Tokays and ‘Muscats, the organisers knocked our socks off with extraordinary ‘Museum’ bottlings. These are truly heavenly and deserve to be savoured drop by drop from brandy balloons that capture their profound, aged, luscious complexity.

While you won’t find the museum wines in bottle shops, you could get lucky at a cellar door tasting in Rutherglen. But you can buy the wonderful ‘Grand Rutherglen’ and ‘Rare Rutherglen’ versions in bottle shops. They are great and unique Aussie wines that go beautifully with Christmas pud, fruitcake and nuts.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007