Turn your back on a pinot noir vine and it’s likely to mutate. No kidding. Not that it has much chance to these days because, like all grape vines, they’re bred pure from cuttings — avoiding natural reproduction and the mutation that does with it.

Thankfully French monks maintained pinot’s purity through the Middle Ages. And that’s why we still enjoy beautiful reds from thoroughbred descendents of Burgundy’s ancient pinot noir vines.
But somewhere in Burgundy all those centuries ago, brother someone-or-other let his guard down – turned his back probably – long enough for the vines to do as unwatched vines do. And a pale pinot mutant emerged.

Though the Burgundians turned up their noses, the mutant soon reached Switzerland, then spread through central Europe, notably Germany and Hungary — where it’s known as rulander and szurkebarat respectively – and, later northern Italy.

It wasn’t red like pinot noir, but grey, sometimes with a pinkish or even purple hue. And so it came to be called grey pinot. Perhaps because that’s as drab sounding as, say, sandy creek – we use the posher sounding (to English speakers) French and Italian names, pinot gris and pinot grigio.

You’ll find stacks of Aussie wines with these names today. But the sad truth is that for far too many of them grey pinot, or perhaps bleak pinot — or maybe even drab pinot — might be more suitable.

It’s not that it’s a rotten variety. It’s not. Really. But it’s fussy about where it’s grown. Get the right place – somewhere cool like Canberra or Mornington or Tasmania (or Alsace or Oregon or Central Otago) and pinot gris can make attractive, distinctive wines.

Finding these, though is somewhat more difficult than finding good shiraz, cabernet, riesling or chardonnay. In fact, it’s even more difficult than finding good pinot noir. So, in that regard the mutant appears to be a chip off the old block.

Of twenty lined up on the tasting benches at Chateau Shanahan this week – nineteen Aussie wines and one Kiwi — only eight appealed. Even given the under representation of the Kiwis and the absence of several Aussie stars, the disappointment reflects past experience with this variety.

Amongst the wines that failed to impress, the biggest shortcoming appeared to be a lack of clear, vibrant, varietal character. So that’s probably a failure of viticulture. For whatever reason – clonal or site selection, vine management, crop yield etc – the grapes simply lacked flavour.

Sprinkled amongst this tendency to blandness was the odd winemaking fault – two counts of oxidation and one of pongy hydrogen sulphide – and winemaker attempts to compensate for poor fruit.

This approach seldom works as winemaking artifice is designed to compliment fruit character, not become a substitute.

Based on the twelve ordinary wines, it’d be tempting to say that brother what’s-his-name was right to ignore pinot gris. But the eight good wines (as well of many other lovely previously tasted examples from New Zealand, Alsace, Oregon and Australia) say emphatically that pinot gris ought to be pursued by winemakers and drinkers.

The three wines reviewed in ‘Top Drops’ are outstanding examples of what can be achieved. And four others just missed out on this top ranking. They were: Ninth Island Tasmania Pinot Grigio 2005, 10 Minutes X Tractor Mornington Peninsula Pinot Gris 2005, Redbank Sunday Morning King Valley Pinot Gris 2005 and Miceli Iolanda Mornington Peninsula Pinot Grigio 2004.

Bay of Fires Tasmania Pinot Gris 2005 $27
Bay of Fires is the premium Tasmanian brand of The Hardy Wine Company, made in Tasmania by Fran Austin. Fran’s pinot gris – sourced from the Coal River Valley near Hobart and from the Tamar River, north of Launceston – possesses some of the underlying textural richness experienced in Alsacian pinot gris. This boosts the body of what is otherwise a particularly fragrant and exceptionally lively and delicate pinot gris. My only quibble is that it’s pretty alcoholic at 14 per cent and this gives the wine a slightly distracting heat and astringency in the finish.

Majura Vineyards Canberra District Pinot Gris 2005 $16
Local vigneron, Frank van de Loo says on his back label, “we pick our pinot gris when the berries have taken on a deep purple-pink colour as they develop the rich, musky flavours that make the variety so appealing”. That’s an honest summary of one of the biggest, juiciest wines in this week’s pinot gris tasting. But it’s not just big and ripe. There’s a wonderful intensity to what I saw as pear-like fruit flavour, as well as vibrancy and freshness. As in the Bay of Fires wine above, alcohol weighs a little too heavily on the finish.

Pewsey Vale Eden Valley Pinot Gris 2005 $22.95
Pewsey Vale is both a brand and a vineyard within the S. Smith & Son group (aka Yalumba) controlled by Robert Hill-Smith. The vineyard, located on the elevated slopes of the Eden Valley — a short drive from the Barossa winery — produces all of the fruit for the brand, including what was clearly outstanding fruit for this wine, my favourite of this week’s line up. Made by Louisa Rose, it delivers the variety’s silky richness without becoming fat or coarse. It has a lively acidity that seems to carry the fresh fruit flavour and, at the same time, provide a fine, firm backbone.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2006 & 2007

Surrounded by cries of doom and gloom and real pain being suffered by many winemakers and grape growers, it’s easy to overlook the huge and continuing success of Australia’s wine industry.

In many ways it’s a model, market-focused, export-driven agricultural industry, delivering, in the main, highly-value-added exports – totalling $2.8 billion dollars in the year to February 2006.

However, our industry faces substantial medium term difficulties as global overproduction drags on export performance and local overproduction squeezes margins in a stagnant domestic market.

Each day we read stories of pain being felt by jilted grape growers. And the stock market bares every detail of Evans & Tate’s struggle for survival; the marked earnings and share price decline of McGuigan Simeon Wines; and scepticism about Foster’s ability to absorb Southcorp Wines.

For wine drinkers, overproduction manifests itself in lower prices, a proliferation of new brands and the rise of the clean skin. These unbranded wines have been around for decades, but the current surplus sees clean skin reds in particular cutting a swathe through popular brands and driving prices down sharply across all quality levels. For some reason whites seem less effected.

The surplus also appears to be finding a home in export markets. And as bulk wine (as opposed to bottled wine) exports gather unprecedented momentum, Australia’s dollar per litre return declines.

In August 1999, winemakers received an average of $4.63 per litre for the 230 million litres exported. In February, 2006 volume had grown to an impressive 711 million litres. But the value had declined alarmingly to $3.93 per litre.

In its February, 2006 report the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation commented, “Bulk wine shipments dominated growth this year.  While still only representing 23% of the total mix, bulk wine shipments grew 40% to reach 165 million litres this year compared to 118 million litres in the previous year.  By contrast, bottled shipments grew 3% to reach 531 million litres, up from 516 million litres”.

Much of this may prove to be opportunistic and pass when the current surplus dissipates – and may indeed hasten its end.

Some producers, however, have misgivings about bulk wine exports. One that I spoke to feared that in the UK market – where the average value per litre has fallen from $4.26 in February 2000 to $3.57 in February 2006 – that the arrival of sound but unexciting Australian wine at very low price points creates a perception that we’ve dropped our standards. This, they say, is damaging established brands.

But the other side of the coin is that the surplus has played a part in gaining access to the giant US market – notably through the rampant success of Yellowtail and to Germany, the most price conscious market in the world, where bulk sales have more than doubled but average a return of just $2.10 a litre.

And in the emerging Chinese market, bulk exports grew sixfold to 2.1 million litres while bottled wine sales leapt 62 per cent to 380 thousand litres in the year to February, 2006.

Given the global surplus, it’s not surprising to see our own industry’s bumpy ride. But the fact that sales continue to grow after such a prolonged period of phenomenal expansion – exports grew from 130 million litres worth $471 million in 1996 to 711 million litres worth $2.8 billion dollars in the year to February — suggests that our home grown surplus may come to be seen as a comparatively small, if painful overshoot in productive capacity.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2006 & 2007

They say that history never repeats itself.  But in the Barossa Valley, the grape oversupply crisis of the mid 1980s could be about to repeat itself.

This time around, it’s not just the small growers being caught in the spiralling price decline, but the owners of the broadacre plantings of the 1990s.

It’s in tough times like this that whole regions, not just affected individual growers, begin to look for solutions to the age-old boom-bust cycle of the industry.

For market-orientated thinkers, the Barossa poses a big but not unique branding problem. Indeed the concept of building and sustaining a brand Barossa can be transposed to any winegrowing region – including Canberra.

In the Barossa’s case, local vigneron and marketer, David Farmer, wonders how, after the area’s renaissance in the late eighties, so little of its output appears on Barossa denominated labels.

In the autumn edition of Barossa Living, an excellent new regional colour mag, editor Peter Fuller, quotes leading winemaker Robert O’Callaghan as saying, “… we still have a crazy situation, that despite all of the marketing and promotional work we’ve done for the region, less than thirty per cent of Barossa fruit is branded Barossa – the rest goes to other regions to prop up their wines and gets no acknowledgement”.

Since the eighties, O’Callaghan’s Rockford Wines has led the way in acknowledging the part played by the Barossa’s very old vines in making distinctive, powerful but graceful reds.

And O’Callaghan’s leadership in producing and proselytising the regional specialties continues to light the way for other winemakers – as it did twenty years ago.  For example, those robust Kym Teusner grenache shiraz mourvedre blends reviewed here last week, like O’Callaghan’s early wines, are the product of a passionate young winemaker seeking fruit from distinguished old vines – and paying the grower adequately.

Despite the activity of these small, regionally focused makers – and prices of up to $8000 a tonne being paid for the very best old vine material – the question remains as to why seventy per cent of the Barossa’s fruit finds its way into anonymous multi-regional blends.

Part of the answer lies in the region’s dramatically expanded plantings, spurred by the shortages as the export boom took off in the mid nineties. The valley, like so many other Australian growing regions, simply overshot the mark – devaluing the currency, so to speak.

But even before the oversupply hit, the Barossa’s strength in boosting the flavour of multi-regional blends, by its very anonymity, helped, over time, to commoditise Barossa grapes. So much for brand Barossa.

While these multi-regional blends have been at the heart of Australia’s export success, Farmer criticises the larger companies for their dearth of Barossa branded wines.

While the whole story is somewhat more complicated and must take into account varieties – chardonnay for example – that don’t particularly express Barossa regional character or good varieties that are overcropped and poor quality, it’s unquestionable that making and marketing regional specialties builds value for everyone in the process – as benchmark wines like Rockford Basket Press Shiraz demonstrate.

And from the benchmarks flow less expensive but still expressive regional specialties.

There’s a lesson here to be learned by Canberra vignerons. If the Barossa, after 160 years, still struggles for a regional identity in the minds of consumers, Canberra, as a comparatively young district should diligently seek and acknowledge what it does best then vigorously and consistently promote it.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2006 & 2007