Wine is a Fashion Business
Our wine show system is supposed to set and maintain standards for quality and style our winemakers can shoot for. It hasn’t done that. Instead, our show system has reflected the dominant judges and fashions at various times. Consistency of judging has always been a challenge, more on that subject here: Australian Wine Shows have a bright future? Not if past performance is anything to go by.
Consistency of style has been just as elusive. Take Chardonnay as an example: In the eighties, the judges gave the gongs to rich, blousy, buttery Jane Mansfield styles, in the nineties they seemed to favour less fruit and more coconut oak, and in the naughties they switched to grapefruit cocktails of Twiggy proportions.
The Old World is no better
Even the most regulated wine area in the world has changed its style dramatically. Bordeaux once made a very well defined style of red wine the Brits called Claret. It was elegant, stylish and racy like a Jaguar E-type. If you ordered a Bordeaux red, you knew what to expect. Along came Robert Parker with his millions of blind followers, wielding power over the wine business like Oprah Winfrey did over book publishing.
What did the custodians of the great Bordeaux chateaux do? They rolled over like dogs who like their tummies tickled, pretty well all of them, and ended up making the kinds of wines Parker raved about: big, rich, ripe, fleshy monsters of 15% alcohol. These wines are hard to recognise as Bordeaux reds, because high alcohol blots out a wine’s finer features the same way that too much bodyweight blurs the facial features of a human.
We’re old school but keep our minds open
We’ve seen the same trend in Sauvignon Blanc, where reviewers used to prize freshly mown grass, hints of lantana, cats’ pee and the tangy flavours of gooseberry. Now they seem happy with passionfruit and guava. Are we talking about the same wine style?
We’re old school at BWU$20, trained in the old traditions, and we’ll fight for maintaining meaningful styles. The whole business of wine appreciation, tasting and reviewing is hard enough, but it gets much harder when people keep messing with benchmarks.
We use alcohol as a rough guide to the style within the style. As an example, Chardonnay can be lean and acid and restrained or rich, ripe, peachy, buttery and blousy. 12 – 13% will tell you that the bottle you’re thinking of buying is in the twiggy spectrum, while 13.5 to 14% will suggest more generous proportions.
Same goes for reds: Shiraz from the Barossa or McLaren Vale tends to run to 14.5 to 15% alcohol these days, while a cooler climate Shiraz from the Yarra Valley makes do with 13%. The expression of the grape variety will be quite different, with the South Australian contender serving up ripe plum jam and the Victorian sour cherries.
For an overview of Australia’s major grape varieties and wine styles, GO HERE
