Once we could tell where our wines came from
In the sixties and seventies, Coonawarra made fine ‘claret style reds’ that were often compared to the elegant reds of Bordeaux. There were mint and wintergreen characters, and Owen Redman said he could smell the pines in his reds. You would never confuse a Coonawarra Shiraz with one from the Barossa in those days, let alone the Hunter.
In the 1980s, Lindemans made Coonawarra reds with ripe, jammy, stewed overtones and a few years later Doug Bowen’s once well-balanced reds hit 15% alcohol. Most makers in the area followed suite and began making big, ripe reds that were hard to pick as Coonawarra reds. And it hasn’t changed, as the 2005 Brands Coonawarra red in front of me proves with 15% on the label. More details here.
What happened? Global warming? No, it doesn’t work that fast, and this change began in the eighties in line with the industry’s move to machine pruning and machine harvesting. The new regime enforced major changes in vineyard and vines:
- Rows were planted further apart = more sun and faster ripening
- Trellising was changed to suit the machines = more sun exposure again
- Later picking to reduce the ration of unripe to ripe fruit.
Winemaking techniques also changed, from yeast selection to fermentation, to increase fruit intensity and flavour while reducing tannin and acid levels. These changes were designed to make youthful red wines more appealing to wine drinkers, but their wholesale adoption contributed to the standardisation of wine production. Like milk, wine loses much of its character once it’s pasteurized and homogenised as we shall see.
The Blass Factor
Until the seventies, everyone accepted that our wine areas made recognisable wine styles from grape varieties selected long ago. Yes, Penfolds, Seppelts, Lindemans and Hardys had their blended house styles but their Hunters were Hunters, their Barossas were Barossas, and Coonwarra reds were elegant wines with fine acid backbones.
Along came Wolf Blass, a canny young German winemaker with a sharp eye for opportunity. He saw that medals sold wines, and saw how our show system worked. The prestigious Melbourne show, for example, was held in winter in the freezing cold Exhibition Buildings. The only wines that won medals there were those forward enough to leap out the glass in any weather: plush, ripe wines with a lot of front, just like Wolfie.
Wolf was also canny enough to recognise that Langhorne Creek produced the rich fruit that suited his style, and was smart enough to work out that the right new oak barrels would add polish to his wines and soften them up for early consumption. Wolf also saw the potential of young John Glaetzer who would become the most decorated winemaker in Australia.
Together, they won 3 Jimmy Watson Trophies in a row in the seventies. Jimmy Watson was one of the least significant trophies since it was awarded to one-year old reds that weren’t even bottled, but Wolf had the marketing nous to turn the little mug into the most recognised wine trophy in Australia. Soon his wines were walking out of bottle shops.
The Flying Winemaker
I don’t blame Wolf Blass. Many of the young Turks who followed him became gun-for-hire winemakers who offered their services to struggling wineries, flying by helicopter from vineyard to vineyard, and flying by plane from continent to continent, adding their magic touch and fairy dust for a small ransom wherever they went.
Overseas and at home, it soon became a case of wineries that were celebrated and wineries that were forgotten. Sometimes it was easier to pick the roving winemaker’s touch at blind tastings than the area or vineyard the grapes came from, that’s how big their fingerprints were. The wine business had come to resemble Hollywood and its star system, from Michel Rolland in France to Brian Croser in Australia.
The best of them were and still are consulting to dozens of wineries at vintage time. It’s a kind of madness that the documentary Mondovino brings out by contrasting the old with the new in a very compelling way. It shows Bordeaux’s Michel Rolland charging around France in a chauffeur-driven limo, smoking cigars and talking on his mobile a lot.
We also see Rolland in a winery, talking to the owners. His secret seems to be micro-oxidation, a technique that is used between the alcoholic and malo-lactic fermentations. It’s a refined version of what Wolfie did to soften his reds in the old days.
In an article for Wine Spectator, James Suckling says Rolland’s ‘omnipresence in the world of fine wine is impressive, to say the least. But it’s also a source of concern and criticism. It seems the Frenchman can almost change water into 100-point wine, but some say his wines are too alike, or warn that he represents the globalization of premium wine, whereby many wines taste alike regardless of their disparate origins.’
Rolland puts it down to peer envy. He’s super successful. He consults to an endless list of wineries in 13 countries spread from California to India. Like Wolf Blass, he is a great blender, and yet his work begins in the vineyard with lower yields, more careful fruit selection and later picking. Concentration is the name of the game.
Old World, New Prophets
In the eighties, European countries saw similar changes in winemaking as we did. Ambitious winemakers in Tuscany ignored the restrictions of their DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) and planted Cabernet and Merlot instead of Sangiovese and Barbera. They used new small oak barrels and modern winemaking techniques, and soon these ‘Super Tuscans’ were hard to tell apart from good Bordeaux – just as you’d expect.
The changes in France were less dramatic, but the great estates of Bordeaux had a lot of expensive wine to sell every year, and the USA was their biggest market. Robert Parker, a wine writer who’d become a superstar in his country, could make or break a major chateau with a single review. His trips to Bordeaux were soon anticipated with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for invading armies.
Parker liked his wines big, and some of the wines of Bordeaux went the way of our Coonawarra reds. The Burgundians with their miniscule quantities of highly fancied wines had no need to fawn over Parker and treated him with good old French disdain until Parker handed over coverage of the region to an assistant.
Parker really liked huge reds, the kind Peter Lehmann once described as ‘Steak and eggs in a bottle, followed by a good cigar.’ To us, that was a joke but Parker took it seriously. He’d come down under, taste some obscure red in McLaren Vale that was made from pressings, had hugely extracted jammy fruit and was viscous from 16% alcohol, and he’d declare it a triumph. Examples are Duck Muck, Chris Ringland, Mollydooker.
Overnight, these wines would become impossible to buy as internet bidders drove their prices to heights that far exceeded their alcohol levels. People who knew nothing about wine soon followed Parker like faithful Muslims follow the Qur’an – they’d only buy wines that he rated at better than 90 out of 100 points.
The judges and the jury
Toward the end of the old milllenium, most wine companies in Australia were making overripe wines loaded with coconut oak because they won more medals than wines that were true to their origin or heritage, and were easier to sell to a public that didn’t appreciate the finer points of fine wine anyway. Give ‘em what they deserve, right?
Do I blame Parker for this awful trend that produced years of reds that now look like caricatures? Do I blame our flying winemakers who imposed their techniques on so many wineries? No, I blame our wine show system which is badly broken, and our wine judges who should’ve said: ‘Don’t give us concoctions, make real wine instead. This is not the perfume business where we craft new fragrances every season to seduce the punters. Make wine that’s true to our principles and true to its origin.’
That’s exactly what committed wineries have always done, from Wendouree to Woodlands, but most of our wineries are owned by multinational corporations. Their marketing people treat wine the same as soft drinks or toilet paper, and many of the brands they market have passed through more hands than old books in a Salvo’s shop.
Lindemans is an example we covered recently. Here was a once great company with a wonderful history and some of the finest terroir in Australia – Sunshine and Ben Ean vineyards in the Hunter, Florita in Watervale … Now it makes low calorie wines for the weight conscious, and a range of wines for airheads based on fairy tales not history.
The bigger they are, the more they are the same
On the whole, a great overripe sameness has covered our vast vinous landscape because most of our winemakers use the same grape varieties, grown and picked in much the same way, along with the same winemaking techniques and the same trick yeasts – and, surprise, surprise, they make very similar wines.
A few years ago, Andrew Jefford from Decanter gathered some views on an article about Australian wine. He quoted a UK fine wine trader who said: ‘The big problem with [Australian] reds is that they’re definitely stuck with the image of being too concentrated, too alcoholic, show-stopping, point-winning wines that are not actually enjoyable to drink. They’re one-dimensional in style with no complexity or subtlety. Power seems to be their main purpose. These wines are not made to be drunk and savoured with food.’
A Canadian journalist had a similar take: ‘I like to drink my wine, not eat it,’ he told Andrew. Another said: ‘We long for lighter, drier, more food-friendly styles.’ Jefford cites others described Aussie reds as ‘jammy, hot, lacking elegance and finesse.’ He writes that ‘whites were generally thought to be “more interesting and better value than the reds’’.’
Missing was ‘a sense of place, character and a refreshing quality,’ Jefford summed up the consensus, along with a sense of place and character (terroir). Our wines are cleaner than they were, to be sure, but today’s Hunter reds rarely show those distinctive notes of sweaty saddle, old tennis shoes and leather. It’s the same in Europe: most red Burgundies have lost their rustic pong, Rhone reds their dusty, earthy taste, and Barolos their tarry characters.
Michel Rolland has a different take on this issue, saying ‘once upon a time, you could often recognise a wine by its defects rather than its quality.’ Robert Parker also favours wines of more uniform quality, a point Mondovino underscores by filming a Burger King billboard as Parker drives past it. Needless to say, Parker aimed a lot of rants at the producer after he saw the doco.
The worm turns
Michael Steinberger writes in Slate that Parker Power is waning. ‘He was publicly slammed by the Mondavis,’ he says, ‘the first family of American wine. He had alleged, in print, that the Mondavi winery was slipping because it was not fashioning the kind of blockbuster Cabernets that are currently Napa Valley’s stock in trade. The Mondavis pointedly replied that their aim is to craft elegant, food-friendly wines, not critic bait.’
Steinberger says some Bordeaux winemakers ‘known for turning out turbocharged wines have now renounced that approach and are embracing a more traditional style that emphasizes finesse over power.’ We can only hope and pray that this long-overdue trend will come to our shores sooner rather than later.
Once they forsake their blockbuster winemaking techniques, will more of our winemakers get their heads around the importance of terroir? Will we be able to pick up a glass of red, smell the pines of Coonawarra in it and detect the once unmistakably fine acid claret style?
Right now you can’t even tell a Coonawarra red from a Barossa red, not with 14.5% alcohol bloating both beyond recoignition. This point seems lost on the Bigger is Better brigade: Once the alcohol levels climb past 13.5 to 14%, the finer characters of wine are obscured, just as a rich sauce can overpower the dish it graces. Expression of terroir is one of the finer points in wines, and easily lost.
Subtle Australia
Last year, Matt Kramer from the Wine Spectator ran a seminar under that heading. He presented three very different wines to make his point:
- Tyrrells Vat 1 Hunter valley Semillon 2005
- Grosset Polish Hill Riesling 2012, and
- Cullen Diana Madeline Margaret River 2010
What’s interesting here is that these wines are 11.3%, 12.5% and 13%. They’re not only subtle, elegant wines, their origins are easy to pick in a blind tasting. Another thing they have in common is a long life ahead of them. Despite the lowish 13% alcohol, the Cullen Cabernet will improve for 20 years or more, say those who’ve tasted it. Sadly, it’s a hundred dollar wine. One consolation is that it’s as good as a $1000 Bordeaux.
Matt chose well, and he could have added a few more wines – Shiraz from the Canberra district, Chardonnay from Tumbarumba, Pinot Noir from the Mornington Peninsula and Riesling from the Great Southern area in Western Australia. Again, these wines tend to be on the elegant rather than the blockbuster side of the spectrum.
These wines are in the vast minority. Most of our wines are too ripe and too alcoholic, they’re blockbusters that aren’t enjoyable to drink with food. They’re not designed to, their designed to win medals by making judges’ eyeballs pop out of their sockets. They have enormous power but no glory, and no subtlety, elegance or finesse. They have flavour in abundance, flavour that is often jammy, huge and in-your-face.
The times are a’changing
So what if wines no longer tell stories about the places they come from, no longer pride themselves on their origins? Does it matter? It does if you like your stories , original and interesting. It doesn’t if you’re happy to swallow the concoctions the mass merchandisers serve up. It matters if you care about a vineyard’s unique character, or the differences in wines from different places.
The future looks brighter, though: Andrew Jefford qualifies the comments we cited earlier by adding: ‘Those of you who know the latest developments in the Yarra and the Adelaide Hills and Tasmania and Frankland and Beechworth, [know] that this picture is wildly inaccurate of developments on the ground. Indeed so – but these are the wines which are out there on shop shelves in Stockholm, Calgary, Manchester and Pittsburgh.’
Jefford then says: ‘We share a common vision – of Australia as not simply a supplier of consistent, inexpensive, accessible wine, but as a nation producing unapologetically complex, refined and harmonious wines which reflect their ancient land in aromas and flavours of unique and compelling sensual beauty. That’s the only route to a sustainable wine future for Australia, and my remarks have no other intention than hastening the journey.’
I couldn’t have put it better. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a way to go. Once our wine styles were caricatures of European wines, when names like Chablis, Moselle and Claret adorned our labels. In the sixties and seventies we made honest Aussie wines that clearly reflected their origins. In the eighties and nineties, we discovered that rich, ripe reds sell faster, and in the nineties we exported large quantities of sunshine in a bottle.
In effect, we turned our wines into caricatures once more, this time resembling those muscle-bound young young men in tiny swimsuits who strut along Bondi Beach to impress the young sheilas. We have more growing up to do.
Kim