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