After a Checkered Career

Once upon a time, we made no Chardonnay down under. Not a single barrel of it. Around 1970, with the help of a French ampelographer (an expert on grape varieties) we discovered that we had some Chardonnay vines after all. These vines had been mistaken as Pinot Blanc or White Pinot, a close relative. It’s a fascinating story which I’ve pieced together in the post Where did Murray really get his Chardonnay from?

Chardonnay went on a roller coaster ride from shaky beginnings to big buttery, peachy numbers that led to a new movement in the late nineties known as ABC  – Anything But Chardonnay. After a lot of soul searching in our wineries, and a generation change in wine makers, the Jane Mansfield style of chardy gave way to one that resembled Twiggy. Somehow, this weedy, acid grapefruit style has survived even if the ideal is obviously somewhere in between the two extremes..

The problem with wine judges is that they need to be pushed and shoved in the right direction, something the late Len Evans excelled in. Unless that happens, they get stuck on a style like a record needle in a crooked groove. It’s been that way with Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs down under.

Clonal Selection

Wine writers rabbit on about different clones used to make different Chardonnays, and make it sound very complicated. Grape vines are no different from tomato vines or peach trees in the sense that mutations occur in new plants and farmers select the ones with the most desirable properties, whether it’s better flavour, higher yields or better resistance to fungi. The vineyard manager takes cuttings from selected vines for propagation, and thus improves the breed.

In Australia, winemakers use a variety of clones, some from California and some from Burgundy. Most have boring numbers such as 95, 277 and i10V1 In Margaret River, the Gin Gin or Mendoza clone has become the choice of winemakers. The story goes that Houghton imported this clone in 1957, but in those days Houghton made no Chardonnay to my knowledge, and I can’t see them importing cuttings from the Argentine back then.

The odd man out here is Mountadam, the Eden Valley vineyard David Wynn and his son Adam planted with cuttings from the Marble Bar clone, which was brought to South Australia in the1860s.

‘Chardonnay? Choose Australia, Decanter readers urged’

Our winemakers have been trying hard to make Chardonnays that can stand proud alongside the great white Burgundies of France, and they’ve succeeded brilliantly. The headline comes from a 2011 Decanter magazine article. At the conclusion of a tasting of top Aussie Chardonnays, Decanter panellist Pierre Mansour declared:  ‘… with the issues [white] Burgundy has had in recent years, I’d urge Decanter readers to look to Australia – these wines are brilliant.’

The culprit in Burgundy was Premox, shorthand for the premature oxidation that was turning many bottles of really fine white Burgundy in cellars around the world into really ordinary sherry. Up to 1 in 4, according to some reports. No one could spot it in young wines, and the cause is still unknown.

The main advantage for us down under is cost, of course.  Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay costs $85, a white burgundy of similar quality will set you back $300 to $500. Better still, we make some pretty good chardies for around $20 and even less – see this week’s Best Buys.

I was going to write lots more on this subject but found a really excellent summary written by Clive Hartley for Winestate: Chardonnay – a wine that needs the Midas touch

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We challenge our French Wine Loving Friends to a Duel at Dawn

‘I never buy wines that cost less than $100,’ said my friend Paul. ‘With French wines,’ I shot back, ‘that’s the minimum you have to spend to get a decent bottle. With Aussies, there’s no need to spend more than $20.’

That’s how this challenge came about. Paul let out a derisory laugh. I said, ‘Let’s put some bottles on the table with their fancy labels covered up, and see what’s what.’ Paul’s friend Jeffrey thought it was a great idea, and he’s much more reliable. I suspect Paul goes to too many tastings these days, judging by his Delphic utterances and cryptic emails. Jeffrey also has a cellar full of Frog Grog, but I get lucid emails from him even around midnight.

Why are they Stalling?

Some of my wine friends go back to the days of Len Evans and Bulletin Place, not just Paul and Jeffrey. They have cellars that match the tomb of Tutankhamen in the value of their contents. I have to add that my friends are generous to a fault when it comes to sharing their prized collections.

That doesn’t mean they’re not wine snobs, and it doesn’t mean they play straight either. In the space of 3 months I’ve been unable to get them to agree on a date for the event, or a venue.

Why are they stalling? Are they afraid of the outcome? Do they fear the awful truth? That they’re wasting money on fancy labels that occasionally produce fine wines – when the vintage weather is perfect, the wine maker in the right mood, and the winery free from nasty bacteria?

Mortal Dramas on Mount Olympus

Do they have to sift through their samples to weed out the duds first? Duds, I hear you ask, in wines that cost $100 a bottle and more? ‘Over the last eight years or so,’ Jancis Robinson announced in 2009, ‘it has become apparent that fine white burgundy, the sort of wine that costs hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds a dozen, has a serious problem.’

The culprit was Premox, short for the premature oxidation that was turning many bottles of really fine white Burgundy in cellars around the world into really ordinary sherry. Up to 1 in 4. At the conclusion of a tasting of top Aussie Chardonnays, Decanter panellist Pierre Mansour declared:  ‘… with the [premature oxidation] issues [white] Burgundy has had in recent years, I’d urge Decanter readers to look to Australia – these wines are brilliant.’

In 2014, Jane Anson in a Decanter Magazine piece asked: ‘Premox: has the crisis moved to red wine?’ The top Bordeaux reds that gave rise to this question were from 2003, a hot vintage.

Bordeaux experienced more of these in the last 10 years, and by 2010 had declared 3 ‘vintages of the century.’ On the sidelines towered Robert Parker, urging Bordeaux proprietors to pick ever later and make riper reds. This advice could have serious consequences over the next decade. ‘I have seen issues with a number of expensive, classified wines that are potentially storing up trouble for later,’ Professor Denis Dubourdieu at the Institute of Oenology (IS VV) in Bordeaux told Jane Anson.

Am I clutching at Straws?

Of course I am. None of the Chardonnays the Decanter panel raved about costs anywhere near $20, and let’s be honest: a good Bordeaux red is a beautiful thing not easily undone by a wild colonial boy. It’s much the same with a good white Burgundy. Red Burgundies are a better chance since they make more promises than politicians during an election campaign, and break them more often. My problem is that I don’t know my way around these wines any more. I gave up buying them back in the nineties, when the quality was a lucky dip, and the prices just kept going up and up.

Our opponents will cheat. They’ll bring along a first growth Chassagne-Montrachet and tell me they bought it for $100 en primeur. They’ll produce an obscure but great Pomerol I’ve never heard of and tell me that it’s a $100 village wine, knowing that I’ll never know the difference. What can I do?

I could do the same, because they’ll never know how much the wines I bring along are. I might just stretch the $ limit to $25. Even if I went as high as $30 or $35, the fact that affordable Aussie wines beat the stuffing out of those Frenchies will be undeniable.

What wine styles are we comparing?

I’m thinking red and white Bordeaux, red Rhone and white Burgundy. Cabernet blends, Semillon Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Shiraz & Shiraz blends. I think about 10 – 12 wines on each side should be enough to decide the contest, 20 – 24 in total. Age is an issue too. I don’t want to compare wines that have just been bottled. Wines that are around 5 to 7 years old make a lot more sense because their qualities will have had a little time to unfold.

So what I’m going to do now is publish this post in an effort to shame the other side into action, to stop them stalling and get this challenge off the ground at long last.

Kim

This post was first published early in 2015, and it’s a great snapshot of the wine business with many links to interesting stories. That’s why I’m running it again.  

Looking way back

How Australia became a country of wine drinkers is a fascinating story, which began with Barossa Pearl and Ben Ean Moselle. However, we tend to forget the role played by the wine merchants of the sixties and seventies who brought interesting wines to a thirsty new generation: Johnny Walker, Harry Brown, Douglas Lamb, Doug Seabrook, the real Dan Murphy and others. We told their story in Unsung Heroes – Wine Men who changed the Way we Live.

In 2014, Wolf Blass celebrated his 80th birthday which prompted us to set his record straight in Wolf Blass turns 80 – Fact and Fiction. It might help to listen to Richard Fidler’s Interview with Wolf a few years ago. Here Wolf tells ABC listeners that Australian wines were awful when he arrived, that he changed all that and turned the industry upside down all by himself. He never mentions Ian Hickinbotham, Max Schubert, Jack Mann, Roger Warren, Colin Preece, Ron Haselgrove or Maurice O’Shea.

The unsung hero in the Wolf Blass story is John Glaetzer, Australia’s most decorated winemaker by a country mile. Why didn’t you know that? Because John is a quiet, modest, down-to-earth kind of guy who doesn’t blow his own trumpet, which left Wolf enough space to run the entire brass section. John was happy to take a backseat and never got in the way of Wolf’s huge ego.

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From the Barossa. From the young Turks.

This is an older post with a mature flavour, and it’s about a really bold marketing campaign. I came across this wine with a really different label in a bottle shop at Crows Nest in Sydney: Count (Graf) Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s face graced the label, sporting a spiked German helmet from the old Kaiser’s time. I grew up in Germany and I was surprised that Australians had grown up enough to look beyond the crass stereotypes of World War I to the genius of German engineering.

I wrote to Kym Teusner down in the Barossa, since his name was on the back label where it said ‘winemaker’, asking where the branding had come from for this range of wines. His response was: ‘Nicholas Crampton is the marketing brains, I just make the grog.’ Kym is a man of few words, but he put me in touch with Nicholas who used to be a brand manager at Fosters and now runs Echelon http://www.echelonwine.com.au/ .

Creating a BOLD new Brand

Nicholas explained that it had started with the simple thought of joining a couple of ‘artisan of the Barossa’ winemakers – Kym Teusner and Corey Ryan from Sons of Eden – and creating a more personality driven brand. ‘Both the guys have a significant German ancestry [about 6 generations], said Nicholas, ‘and I thought it a good place to start when looking for a name that brought it all together.’

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‘To put it simply – we lost. We couldn’t afford the numbers of QCs that our opposition had … The boundary issue was imposed on us by the Geographical Indications Committee of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation. … [now we] have to live with some poorly framed legislation, with the greed of some big multinational wine companies and a questionable decision by the AAT and the Federal Court.’ Brian Lynn, Majella Wines

Decades ago, the late Bill Redman said: ‘From 1890 to 1945 you can write failure across the face of Coonawarra.’ Most of the wine was distilled into brandy, and in the 1930s the South Australian government offered ex-servicemen in the area a bounty of four pounds and ten pence an acre to remove their vines and convert the land to dairy farming. The vineyards of Coonawarra were soon  reduced to 121 hectares from 365 hectares at the turn of the century.

In 1951, a far-sighted David Wynn decided to buy the stone winery and cellars built by John Riddoch back in the 1890s. At the time, the Redmans were the only people making wine in Coonawarra – a Shiraz they sold in bulk to Woodley Wines, and later to Thomas Hardy, Reynella, Leo Buring, Yalumba and Mildara. With red wine sales booming in the sixties, these companies soon rushed in to buy land and plant vineyards. A quarter of a century later, Coonawarra was building a reputation for producing Cabernets that rivalled the great reds of Bordeaux.

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You tend to get a bit jaded doing what I’m doing. Then a few wines come along that jump out of the glass and smack you around the head. That’s what happened when I opened that bottle of Blue Poles Allouran 2011 for the Bordeaux blends tasting last week. Look at me, look at me, look at me it said as it assaulted my senses with an array of heady aromas.

Merlot became a dirty word after the movie Sideways, at least for serious wine lovers. For the rest of the world, it became a hugely popular soft red. Most Merlot made is soft, sweet and mushy. And cheap, yet the best Merlots in the universe cost more than the mighty Chateau Lafite. Petrus is the most expensive, and the tiny estate of Le Pin is right behind it. We’re talking $4000. Per bottle.

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It’s a different wine company from most, that’s for sure

It’s older than most for a start. It’s a big business producing almost 1 million cases of wine a year, yet it’s a family business and a privately held company. Yalumba’s chief winemaker is a woman, Louisa Rose. There are half a dozen winemakers at Yalumba. They all have their own domains, but these aren’t defined in the usual way.

For example, Yalumba owns 2 Eden Valley Vineyards producing Riesling: Pewsey Vale and Heggies. Louisa Rose makes the Pewsey Vale, and Peter Gambetta makes Heggies Riesling. Louisa Rose also makes the Heggies Viognier since she has championed and developed this variety into several successful lines for Yalumba.

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There are lots of Winners, but wine lovers aren’t among them

The exaggerated wine scores and winery ratings are misleading. I’m indebted to one of my subscribers for these numbers, which show clearly what I mean:

1998 Wine Companion

• 1717 wines reviewed
• 90-93 points – 422 wines – 24.6%
• 94-100 points – 234 wines – 13.6%

2012 Wine Companion

• 5813 wines reviewed
• 90-93 points – 2160 wines – 37.2%
• 94-100 – 1972 wines – 33.9%

It’s known as ‘bracket creep’ in the trade, and it really screws up the system. We’re talking about a point system consumers rely on, and one that retailers exploit to sell their wines.

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Once Cabernet Sauvignon was as scarce as hen’s teeth

In the 1950s, there was Shiraz and little else in terms of red wine. From the Hunter to the Barossa and the Swan Valley, Shiraz was king for red table wines and port. We had some Grenache and Mataro in the Barossa, but they were regarded as inferior varieties. Funny that, given the demand for them these days.

There was very little Cabernet, and that’s why Max Schubert used Shiraz for his Grange. Max visited Bordeaux, where Christian Cruse took a liking to him and showed him everything Max could possibly have wanted to know about making the grands vins. The cépage or varietal mix of these wines must’ve read like a foreign dictionary to Max: Apart from Cabernet Sauvignon (called Carbinet by some winemakers down under), there was Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Malbec. The last one would’ve rung a bell because there were a few vines in the Clare Valley.

When Max decided to make his grand vin back home, there was little Cabernet, let alone Merlot or Cabernet Franc, and Malbec was already on the way out in Bordeaux so Max used the ubiquitous Shiraz. He used American oak instead of French barrels for similar reasons: availability, and cost. More on Max and his battle to realise his vision in Max Schubert, Ray Beckwith and the Making of Penfolds.

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