Diversity

Australia is a land of enormous contrasts, ‘a sunburnt country of droughts and flooding rains,’ in Dorothy McKellar’s famous words. It’s the same when it comes to wine: on one hand, the variety is enormous from Margaret River to the Hunter Valley, with truly diverse regions in between. Many of these have been cultivated in the last 4 decades by young men and women with crystal clear visions of what they sought to achieve, making truly individual wines and working hard to capture the characters of their regions.

The Great Divide

It runs down the east coast of our continent, and it has an equivalent in the wine business. On one side, we have artisans hand-making wines in small quantities, on the other we have corporations making industrial wine much the same way oil refineries make fuel: Treasury Wine Estates, Jacobs Creek, Australian Vintage (McGuigan), Casella and more.

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Barossa Vintage 2016 Declared

It didn’t look good late in November last year when dark clouds form the huge Pinery Fire darkened the skies. The bushfire had started in the Balaclava / Roseworthy area 60 kms north of Adelaide, and swept south-east toward the Barossa where it singed the edges of some vineyards. According to Business Insider, the fire killed two people, tens of thousands of livestock, destroyed 87 homes, 300 farm sheds and outbuildings, and burnt more than 85,000 hectares.

source: Business Insider

It was a dry, early growing season with warm, cloudless summer days and cool nights until some welcome rain freshened up the vineyards late in January. Milder weather slowed things down and allowed phenolic ripeness to catch up with sugar ripeness. The vintage was declared on February 23 in the traditional style by the Barons of the Barossa marching down the street and then handing various awards to deserving wine people.

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I like these trade tastings at the Oaks hotel in Sydney are compact and manageable, and the wineries well chosen. Y&R is a distributor mainly to the restaurant trade, so some wines aren’t easy to find on retailers’ shelves. Also, the vintages served here may not be out in retail land yet. That makes these events more useful as a guide to how and where wineries are going, checking old favourites and discovering new labels.

I loved the Chard Farm Pinot Gris 2015 from Central Otago for its wonderful restraint and texture, but I can only find the 2014 at Just Wines for $26 in a straight dozen. Kemenys sells the Rabbit Ranch 2014 PG for $19, and the Pinot Noir 2013 for $22; it’s the same story at Dan M’s. The Pinot Noir we tasted was the 2014, and it’s in the usual fruit-driven drink-soon style i.e. very easy to like.

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I wrote a post last year on this subject under the heading Who Makes my Wine, and Who Cares? The only people who care as far as I can see are reporters looking for another story about Woolworths and Coles strong-arming their suppliers and squeezing out their competitors – horror stories about winemakers who say they can’t go public for fear of reprisals, stories about tax avoidance by buying in bulk, and stories about wine merchants the big guys push to the wall. This week, Channel 7’s Today Tonight got into the act as well.

‘Independent merchants across the country are closing down,’ writes Max Allen in the Australian: ‘two of Australia’s leading retailers, Randall’s in Melbourne and Ultimo Wine Centre have been bought out by Coles; others are sure to follow.’ David Prestipino in the Sydney Morning Herald says: ‘By developing their own private-label and exclusive wines, Coles and Woolies are now competitors to the very wineries (and consumers) they are meant to serve.’

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Greater brains than mine have been scratched to come up with a reason why Riesling is so hard to sell to people.  There’s no question in my mind that Riesling makes Australia’s best wines, year in and year out. The quality of so many wines in the $15 to $20 range is breathtaking, and the Aussie style of Riesling we’ve evolved is distinctive from Tassie to the Great Southern.

Why am I beating this drum again?

Because I went to the Riesling tasting put on by GTW (Gourmet Traveller Wine) at Mojo in Waterloo last night, and there was hardly anybody there. 20 people tops, when these events hosted by Peter Bourne – fourth from the right – usually attract 100.

This was a more instructive tasting than usual because the wines were presented in pairs, one bottle of the current release and a second of an older vintage – between 5 and 15 years of age. It was fascinating to compare the two and see how they had matured. The wines from Tassie impressed me with their richness, and those from the Great Southern in Western Australia surprised me with their staying power.

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The West Australian says: ‘After a week of boasting about their cooking abilities, My Kitchen Rules “villains” Gianni Romano and Zana Pali proved they could put their money where their mouths were.’ We’re talking about big mouths, especially Zana’s, and black eye lashes the size of the trigger hairs on a Venus Fly Trap.

Apparently the sharp newlywed lawyers from Melbourne have been saying harsh things about their competitors, and everyone wanted them to fail when their turn came. They failed alright but not in the kitchen. We’ve seen black wine glasses before, but this time even the water glasses were black.

How come people who cook fancy meals with great skill don’t know the most basic things about wine? That you serve wine in a clear glass, for example? Do they not drink wine with the fancy meals they work so hard to prepare?

Don’t wine lovers care about the food they eat? Do they drink Krug champagne with a Domino’s Pizza? Do they serve Fish and Chips with a bottle of Grange?

As the next picture shows, Manu and Pete are dumbfounded – they can’t believe they’re expected to drink out of black glasses again.

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In the UK, new guidelines being proposed recommend reducing your consumption to 14 units a week. A single bottle of wine at 13.5% equates to 10.125 units of alcohol,’ Andrew Jefford at Decanter magazine tells us. He calls some of the advice of Britain’s Chief Medical officer toxic, and reminds us that she has written off the cardio-protective properties of red wine as ‘old wives’ tales’.

Many countries have published what their medical authorities consider safe drink limits:

Why the Research is Rubbish

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‘Winemaking isn’t a matter of life or death – it’s much more important than that!’ Leo Buring

Leo Buring was a trained oenologist, a winemaker and viticulturist, wine judge, wine educator, local government councillor, businessman and promoter, yet far more people know the wine by his name than the remarkable man behind the label. Leo Buring was a visionary of enormous energy, as we shall see.

PHOTO CREDIT: MAX DUPAIN

From the turn of the century through to the sixties, Australia was a cultural wasteland. Few Australians enjoyed good food and wine in those decades unless they travelled overseas. Medical doctors, lawyers and graziers did, and they were about the only ones drinking fine wine back home, supplied by a few merchants in the know.

Most Australians went home to a dinner of meat and three veg, and a bottle of Resch’s Dinner Ale. Unsung Heroes – Wine Men who changed the Way we Live is the story of the wine merchants who introduced us to table wine wine and more interesting food in the late fifties. Leo Buring’s life came to an end just as the new era began: 1961. He was 85.

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Global Warming

‘In the Italian Alps, ski stations have had to resort to artificial snow,’ reports phys.org, ‘ cherry blossoms have been spotted in Dresden in Germany, and daffodils are flowering in England.’ Last week, the Royal Dornoch golf range in Scotland reported that the mowers were back out to cut greens in mid December. It was a mild Christmas from Helsinki to Moscow.

London, Christmas 2015

The 2015 harvest in Rioja was one of the hottest ever, reports Huon Hooke.  Excess heat produced wines high in alcohol and low in acidity with high pHs. Some wineries will not produce a 2015 Reserva as a result.

Down Under, the Australian Grape and Wine Authority (AGWA) is contemplating making it legal to us the ‘black snake’ (the water hose) more liberally to keep alcohol levels on the right side of sanity. Philip White writes that the pre-Christmas heatwave in South Australia saw some wineries start the 2016 harvest before the end of 2015. As I write this, the Hunter Valley has been hit with flooding rain for days. Who’d want to own a winery down under?

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