At a recent series of pinot noir tastings at Mornington, the opening brackets showed just how variable styles can be. Were these style differences, we were asked, a result of human intervention or attributable to ‘terroir’ – the French the French term, for which there is no English equivalent, meaning roughly ‘the sum of the effects that the local environment has’ on the vine, its fruit and, ultimately, the character of the wine it produces.

I don’t think we solved the riddle of terroir. But we saw that Australia produces very fine pinot in a variety of styles – and that there are certainly observable differences in wines from neighbouring vineyards produced by the same maker, using constant winemaking techniques.

Indeed, the clearest examples of vineyard-derived flavour differences were in the two brackets from France’s Burgundy region.

In the first French bracket, Thierry and Estelle Violet-Guillemard showed us five 2006 vintage wines from their five hectares of vineyards in Pommard, a village just to the south of Beaune.

These were light to medium coloured wines showing subtle but definite variations in aroma, flavour and structure – from the gentle, elegant Pommard 2006 (the basic village classification) through four, more highly-rated individual vineyard wines, La Platiere, Clos de Derriere St-Jean, Pézerolles and the distinctly richer, more supple Les Rugiens.

The distance from vineyard to vineyard is not great (check Pommard on Google Earth to see how small it is) yet Thierry attributed the differences we could smell and taste to ‘terroir’ – a plausible but unprovable hypothesis. The evidence for ‘terroir’ is our ability to sense differences and the very long-term consistency of those differences. What we don’t understand is the why – what is it specifically that makes the wines of one vineyard different from wines from another?

Perhaps the biggest cause, even across comparatively small distances, is temperature variation. We certainly found evidence for this in two brackets of 2006 vintage Mornington Peninsula wines. Wines from cooler sites tended to be paler and more delicate than those from warmer sites.

For whatever reason, it was a delicious progression – all in the comparatively fine, delicate pinot mould. The style bookends in the first bracket were the amazingly fragrant, taut and delicious Main Ridge Estate Half Acre 2006 (from the Red Hill sub-region) and the much deeper, riper, rounder, softer (and still delicious) Kooyong Single Vineyard Ferrous 2006 (from the Tuerong sub-region).

In between, roughly ascending order of body, were Ten Minutes by Tractor McCutcheon Vineyard 2006 (Main Ridge); Port Phillip Estate Morillon 2006 (Red Hill South); Lindenderry 2006 (Red Hill) and Paradigm Hill 2006 (Merricks).

Similarly, the second bracket of Mornington wines offered a lighter-to-darker spectrum – my favourite in the group being the lighter, finer Eldridge Estate 2006 (Red Hill), similar in its fruit flavours to the Main Ridge Estate wine.

But that’s only a personal preference in a thoroughly delicious line up, again the others, in roughly ascending order of body: Morning Sun 2006 (Main Ridge); Montalto 2006 (Red Hill South); Scorpo 2006 (Red Hill South); Hurley Vineyard ‘Harcourt’ 2006 (Balnarring); and Yabby Lake 2006 (Tuerong).

Before we got to the French or Mornington wines, though, we’d tasted those six amazingly varied Aussie pinots mentioned at the beginning. These ranged in style from the light-coloured and fragrant Paringa Estate Reserve Mornington Peninsula 2006 (Red Hill) to the very deep and powerful Coldstream Hills Yarra Valley Reserve 2006.

Again, I preferred the more restrained, pure Paringa style and the utterly contrasting (though still pale coloured) Bass Phillip 21 South Gippsland 2006 – an idiosyncratic drop that divided opinion but, to me, drank like nectar.

The other marvellous wines in this bracket were Kelvedon Estate East Coast Tasmania 2006, Stefano Lubiana Southern Tasmania 2006 and Bindi Block 5 Macedon Ranges 2006.

Other wines tasted with meals during the two-day Mornington event added to the exciting pinot line up. Here are some that appealed: Foxys Hangout Mornington Peninsula Reserve 2007, Merricks Estate Mornington Peninsula 2004, Nazaary Mornington Peninsula 2004, Tucks Ridge Mornington Peninsula 2007, Phaedrus Mornington Peninsula 007, Morning Sun Mornington 2007, Jones Road Mornington Peninsula 2006, Silverwood Mornington Peninsula 2006, Freycinet Bicheno Tasmania 2006, T’Gallant Tribute Mornington Peninsula 2006, Domain Epis Macedon Ranges 2007, Stonier KBS Mornington Peninsula 2006 (stunning!), Wantirna Yarra Valley 2006, Elgee Park Mornington 2006 and Seaforth Mornington Peninsula 2006.

To me the tastings said that after thirty-odd years of serious pinot making Australia has an extraordinary depth and quality emerging from dozens of outstanding makers. International visitors, Jancis Robinson said that our pinots could make a few jaws drop in the UK – a sentiment supported by Burgundian winemaker Frederic Mugnier. He said it was his first visit to Australia and he’d had a pre-conception of our wines being big, dark and alcoholic – but was surprised instead to find wines of such elegance.

Frederic’s wines (from the villages of Nuits-St-Georges and Chambolle-Musigny) were the real showstoppers. But that’s another story. And we’ll revisit ‘terroir’ before too long.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan

There’ll be no ‘paradox of thrift’ should any of Uncle Kevin’s largesse wash up at Chateau Shanahan. We’ve developed a taste for expensive pinot noir so we’re hoping to stimulate the economy most nights. And we’ve got our sights on a long list from Australia, New Zealand and Burgundy.

It’s an old craving, fanned recently by three nights and two and a half days of pinot tasting at Mornington Peninsula’s International Pinot Noir Celebration. The locals down there make some of the best pinots in Australia – and had the confidence to show their wines alongside top examples from other Australian regions, New Zealand, Chile, California, Oregon, British Columbia and even Burgundy, pinot’s home.

The Aussie wines – and not just those from the host region – scrubbed up beautifully in a range of styles, from pale and delicate to deep, dark and brooding.

Indeed, the tastings, attended by about 170 people, focused on these style differences and whether they could be attributed to nature or nurture. Were the flavour differences shaped by humans? Or had they more to do with ‘terroir’, the French term, for which there is no English equivalent, meaning roughly ‘the sum of the effects that the local environment has’ on the vine, its fruit and, ultimately, the character of the wine it produces.

The concept is an article of faith in Burgundy, pinot’s home, where the variety has been noted since 1395. As Burgundian winemaker, Frederic Mugnier, reminded us during discussions, over many centuries the Cistercians of the Abbey of Citeaux systematically mapped and described in fine detail the vineyards of Burgundy, providing the basis of today’s classification system.

Their concept of beauty in simplicity, said Mugnier, underpins the Burgundian approach to pinot, a variety that he believes expresses the site on which it’s grown. And in a region where land surfaces vary noticeably in short distances, this results in countless ‘terroirs’ producing wines that differ, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.

UK critic Jancis Robinson said our tastings would look at three levels of ‘terroir’ – macro (different world regions), mezzo (different regions in one country) and micro (different vineyards in one region).
Like Fred Mugnier, Robinson sees pinot as a delicate and fine variety that ‘interprets’ the site on which it’s grown and she assumed, correctly, that the room was full of ‘terroir’ true believers.

She made the point that there are bad ‘terroirs’ as well as good ones, where vines struggle so humans intervene to get a half decent result – for example, a winemaker might make up for poor fruit flavour with a dose of spicy new oak. And there are good ‘terroirs’ where humans overwhelm delicious fruit flavours with heavy-handed winemaking.

After Jancis’s talk we moved on to a series of thoughtfully structured small tastings, knowing what the wines were but, for most of the groupings, not their serving order.

We began with a little, high-quality snapshot of Australian pinots from South Gippsland, Macedon Ranges, Yarra Valley, East Coast Tasmania, Mornington Peninsula and Southern Tasmania.

The follow up was a big-picture new world group – from Willamette Valley Oregon, San Antonio Valley Chile, Martinborough New Zealand, Anderson Valley California, Waikari New Zealand and the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada.

From there it was on to micro ‘terroirs’ tasting five pinots from Pommard, a Burgundy sub-region. The wines were all from the same vintage and all from the same maker.

We followed this with two Mornington brackets, examining the marked style variations of this one region, and finished with a line up of Frederic Mugnier’s wines from two Burgundy sub-regions, Nuits-St-Georges and Chambolle-Musigny.

These were formal tastings with facilitators directing discussions between 170 of us on the floor and a panel of winemakers for each bracket. With informal tasting over lunch and dinner, we tasted perhaps 70 top-notch pinots during the event.

We’ll look at some of these next week.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

I’m writing from the Mornington Peninsula, an area viewed by local vignerons as the heart of Australia’s pinot noir country. They’ve adopted pinot as their signature variety. And in a show of unity rare in an Australian wine region they’re taking this single, strong message to the world.

It’s a comparative small wine-growing region, where 61 wineries crush 6,000 tonnes a year of grapes from 940 hectares of vines. But it’s highly specialised as pinot noir accounts for 43 per cent (2,576 tonnes) of that output.

To put that in perspective it’s interesting to look at production in other areas specialising in pinot. The output of France’s Cote d’Or region (Burgundy), for example, dwarfs the Mornington figure – pinot accounts for about 45,333 (60 per cent) of the annual 75,333 tonnes crush.

And while the nearby Yarra Valley crushed significantly more pinot than Mornington, it’s 4,200 tonnes represented 22 per cent of the total of 19,000 tonnes – indicating that the Yarra’s far less specialised.

The story changes dramatically, though, when we shift a few degrees south to Tassie, where pinot represents 45 per cent of wine grape production – 1,264 out of 2,807 tonnes. However, much of this is destined for sparkling wine production, not red table wine production. Still Tasmania remains an increasingly important source of top-notch red wine made from pinot noir.

But the most stunning concentration of pinot production in the southern hemisphere is in New Zealand’s Central Otago region at 45 degrees south. Last year’s pinot production of 7,509 tonnes represented 80 per cent of the area’s 9,495 tonne harvest.

And in America, Oregon’s Willamette Valley vignerons processed 17,463 tonnes of pinot in a total crush of 25,869 tonnes.

Part of the marketing push by the Mornington Peninsula Vignerons Association is the annual International Pinot Noir Celebration, a two-day symposium and tasting, attended this year by about 170  wine industry folk and writers from around the world and a sprinkling of die-hard pinot drinkers.

They’re all pinot nuts and opinion makers, drawn there by the range and quality of wines up for tasting (not just from Mornington) — and discussions, led by some of the best Australian, New Zealand, French, American and Canadian winemakers and writers.

This year’s tastings included wine from France’s Burgundy region, California’s Anderson Valley and Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the United States, Chile’s San Antonio Valley, the Okanagan Valley in Canada’s British Columbia and several Victorian, Tasmanian and New Zealand regions.

But at the opening of the Celebration, keynote speaker Jancis Robinson, suggested a few surprise pinot-producing regions that might be included in future tastings.

These could include wines from Ontario – once too cold for grape growing, but not any longer – and perhaps some from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The Germans, she said, are “mad about pinot noir”, known there as spätburgunder.

It’s now Germany’s second most planted variety after riesling, she said, and some of them are very good. She’d recently attended a tasting of very old German spätburgunders and French Burgundies (1920s to 1950s vintages) in the twelfth century Kloster Eberbach. The German wines fared reasonably well, she said, and some of the 1940s vintages looked more youthful than the Burgundian classics.

Jancis said she viewed the world’s growing interest in pinot as a search for lighter, more refreshing wines. She then moved on to the event’s theme – does good pinot result from nature or nurture – to be addressed in a series of masked tastings.

Over the next few weeks we’ll look at these and review a range of very different and very exciting pinot noirs.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009