A short overview of Australia’s main grape varieties and wine styles
The Eyes Have it
A wine can tell you a fair bit about itself just from the way it looks:
The colour of a wine is a good indicator of age – with whites, the lighter and brighter, the younger the wine tends to be. The darker the colour, the older it’s likely to be. Young reds should be deep purple to dark red. The more brown tinges you see, the older the wine is likely to be.
Colour is less of a guide to wine style. In whites, a brass to golden colour may suggest a bigger, oak matured white such as Chardonnay or Fume Blanc. In reds, a light, transparent colour may indicate a Pinot Noir or Grenache.
You can also tell something about the alcohol content of a wine by checking the ‘legs’ on the side of the glass. The more pronounced they are, the higher the alcohol (glycerol) as a rule.
By a Nose
The nose can tell us about the variety or style, as we see below, but it can also give us hints about a wine’s age. Young whites tend to have a fresh nose – a bit like spring – while older whites tend to suggest more autumnal tones. With reds, fresh fruity notes suggest youth, while hints of tar, leather, licorice and dried herbs suggest more development.
You can smell oak as well, usually as nutmeg, vanilla, coconut or pencil shavings or cigar box characters. On the palate, oak likely plays a role when you taste caramel, coconut, vanilla, cinnamon, clove, smoke, tea, mocha and even toffee. American Oak is more porous than French oak and therefore leaves a more obvious mark on wine (red especially). French Oak adds more subtle nuances of pencil shavings to reds. In whites, French Oak can recall the smell of apricot or peach kernels
Oak is a big subject of its own since there are many more varieties, half a dozen in France alone, and then there’s Yugoslavian oak and more.
When tasting blind, you should check both colour and smell to help you get a more accurate take on a wine.
Varieties and Styles
Riesling – (when young) limes, talc, hints of minerals, intense concentration of fruit on the mid palate and a fine, long line of acid. When more mature, we expect hints of hair oil, buttered toast and honey, still with that fine line of acid. Drink with chicken dishes, especially roasted ones.
Rieslings can be rich and ripe, lean and green, or somewhere in between. 11 –12% suggests a tart number, possibly with a long future, while 12 – 13% is the perfect range for classic Aussie Riesling, the style our winemakers call the dry Spätlese style – late-picked and fermented dry.
Chardonnay – Some of you are old enough to remember a wine scene without Chardonnay. You couldn’t buy any Aussie Chardonnay until the late 1970s. Who planted the first vines down under is still shrouded in mystery as you can read here. As we said above, Chardonnay can be lean and acid and restrained or rich, ripe, peachy, buttery and blousy.
The current fashion is for the lean Twiggy style, with grapefruit and grassy overtones. We remain resolute supporters of a different style – not the buttery, peachy, blousy style but a medium that combines finesse with flavours of stone fruits and cashews. Mountadam High Eden Chardonnay is a great example. 13.5 – 14% is ideal for that style. Chardonnay works well with veal dishes and lean pork.
Semillon – Hunter Semillon is traditionally picked unripe to retain enough acid for the long haul (10.5 to 11%). That makes it a bit of an acid trip when young, with sharp notes of unripe lemon and green apples, sometimes undercooked peas and capsicum … They can be stunning after 20 years when they’ve turned into golden, toasty, tasty whites that go well with crumbly old cheeses. The ones that don’t come good tend to smell like wet dogs, wet straw and old tennis shoes.
In Western Australia, Semillon is mostly blended with Sauvignon Blanc to produce a down under version of the white Bordeaux style. Alcohol tends to be around 13 – 13.5%, and the blend works well with more flavoursome seafood dishes.
Sauvignon Blanc –you guessed it: here we look for gooseberries, lantana, freshly cut grass and cats’ pee; tangy, fresh, herbaceous flavours and a good line of long acid. The real deal is perfect with all kinds of seafood. There are some good examples from across the Tasman – Dog Point, Seresin, Lawsons, St Clair … Savvy doesn’t do so well in OZ – it does better in the west, blended with Semillon.
Pinot Gris/ Pinot Grigio – The notional difference is this: Gris should be the Alsace style – ripe, rich and often a touch sweet. Grigio, the Italian flavour, should be leaner and drier to ‘cut’ their oily foods. They tend to pick their Pinot Grigio before it gets too ripe and loses its acid. In Australia & NZ, PG is all over the shop. The richer examples show ripe pears and apples, and go well with pork dishes. Alcohol is your best style guide here: the richer wines will be 13.5 – 14.5%, and the leaner styles 12- 12.5%.
Marsanne, Rousanne, Viognier – the three amigos from the southern Rhone have yet to show their full potential down under. Marsanne and Viognier have made some good wines on their own (Tahbilk, Yalumba), and blends of this trio have shown great promise (the blend is common in the Rhone Valley). 13-13.5% tends to make for the best balance between fruit and acidity in our climate. These wines tend to compliment tasty Mediterranean foods.
On its own, Marsanne makes a pretty blunt sort of wine that needs years to develop the honey and mead notes we prize. Roussanne is more aromatic, and tends to suggest almonds and pears. Viognier makes the famous wine of Condrieu in Hermitage. It produces wines with strong flavours that should hint at apricot kernels or ripe apricots when more developed. Australian wines made from Viognier tend to develop quite fast.
Newer white varieties are appearing on wine label such as Vermentinio, Arneis and Fiano. None of these has yet shown any consistency of style. Grüner Veltliner is the most promising to my mind, but perhaps the least evolved down under.
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Cabernet Sauvignon is the nobleman who rules over the great Medoc reds. These wines used to show cool restraint, fine tannins and good aging potential. They used to be austere in their youth but these days even the Bordelais are picking their grapes much later and making riper Cabernets, as we’ve done in Coonawarra. Cabernet should makes us think of dark berries (or blue fruits as wine scribes call them) such as blackberries, black currants and cassis. Cabernet aged in new oak will show hints of vanilla and pencil shavings. Bigger Cabernets can add chocolate and coffee.
13 – 14% is a good range for striking the right balance between flavour and elegance. Cabernet is a versatile variety, making quality reds from the cool regions of Tasmania to the heat of McLaren Vale and the mild climate of Margaret River. Big Cabernets go well with a good steak, elegant ones do better with lamb.
Merlot is almost always found by Cabernet’s side in the Medoc region of Bordeaux, where its job was to make the stern nobleman more approachable. This blend has become popular down under as well, especially in Margaret River. Merlot is more dominant across the river in St Emillon and Pomerol, and can make great wines on its own as Chateau Petrus has shown. That’s the exception.
Down under, Merlot tends to make ripe reds that taste of plums and are soft and smooth across the palate. Cool climate Merlots can have green, sappy notes but these are now seldom seen. Most of our Merlots and blends tend to be early developers, which suits most of the market. 13.5% is about perfect for this variety, which goes well with lamb and beef cheeks.
Pinot Noir is a temperamental opera diva. It can produce the most seductive, silky red you’ve ever tasted, a wine that slips down the hatch like a little Jesus in velvet pantaloons, ‘comme l’enfant Jesus en culottes de velour’ as they say in Burgundy. And on an off-night, the diva can produce all the wrong notes and make wine that reminds you of battery acid.
Australian and Kiwi winemakers have had to learn many tricks to coax the best performance from this prima donna, but it’s still a hit and miss affair. It’s the same in Burgundy, and that makes it the most expensive wine in the world since you have to buy 3 bottles to make sure you end up with one decent example. Good Pinot Noir should seamlessly blend the aromas and flavours of strawberries and cherries with those of a forest floor, rotting twigs and dank leaves into a silky, beguiling red.
Look for 13 – 14% and reasonable colour. Duck is the perfect food with Pinot Noir, lamb cutlets will work if the wine is big.
Shiraz (also called Petit Syrah and Hermitage) produces a wider range of styles than most varieties, depending on where it’s grown. In cooler regions, the fruit tends toward the fresh cherry spectrum with white pepper and spices like nutmeg and cloves, supported by fine acidity. In hotter regions, it tends to produce ripe, warm fruit in the poached plum spectrum, with hints of black pepper, dark chocolate, smoked meat and alcohol heat. Tar and leather nuances often develop with age.
Shiraz form France’s Rhone Valley tends to have more acidity and earthy, slaty, herbaceous aromas and savoury elements than our ripe, warm and cuddly style of South Australian Shiraz. Hunter Valley Shiraz tends to develop earthy, spicy and leathery notes with age. Shiraz goes well with steak, beef casseroles and roast beef. 13.5 to 14% is perfect but 14.5 to 15 has become the norm. Sad, because the variety’s finer attributes wilt under the hot breath of alcohol.
Grenache Noir is another Rhone Valley grape that makes up the blends of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. On its own, it can be sweet and silky and seductive, with raspberries and cherries backed by herbal notes of oregano, liquorice and tobacco. It’s the most common variety grown in Spain where it’s called Garnacha. The wines tend to have a lighter, semi-translucent colour yet tend to be full flavoured and high in alcohol.
Mourvèdre (Mataro) is yet another Rhone variety that comes from Spain where it’s called Monastrell. It’s the perfect foil for the lush and fruity Grenache, with dense, dark fruit, and meaty, gamey savoury notes infused with dry herbs. Mourvèdre adds those earthy notes to the wines of the Rhone, where it is known as the dog strangler (Etrangle-Chien) because of its tannin toughness.
In the Barossa Valley, Mourvèdre makes more generous reds with hints of violets. It’s usually blended with Grenache and Shiraz to make the popular GSM style, but Dean Hewitson and Kym Teusner produce unblended wines from this variety. GSM reds go well with roast lamb or braised shoulder of lamb – sweet meat with lots of flavour.
Only a few decades ago, Grenache and Mataro were considered inferior by our doyens of wine. If there’s one thing we have to thank Robert Parker for is for showing us up as a bunch of ignorant colonials – our growers pulled out most of their old Grenache and Mataro vines in a short-sighted SA government-backed vine-pull scheme in the late eighties. Yes, wine is a fashion industry.
Malbec is about the least fashionable red variety on the market, unless you live in Argentina where the grape has made a strong comeback. Malbec tends to make a densely coloured but easy-drinking red that tastes of plums and ripe berries. Can be a bit green and sappy when not fully ripe.
Malbec has fallen from favour in Bordeaux where it is one of the 5 permitted varieties for the grand crus. It is a great blending grape, and Stanley Leasingham used to make a terrific Bin 56 Cabernet Malbec in the seventies and eighties. Tim Adams who learnt to make wine there, still makes a lovely Cabernet Malbec.
This is a work in progress
Kim
