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Or is it a $37 Shaw & Smith or a $150 Penfolds RWT?
The judges at London’s 2014 International Wine Challenge said it’s the Shaw and Smith 2012. The cream of Aussie wine reviewers at Gourmet Traveller Wine said it’s the Penfolds RWT 2010. The judges at the Visy Great Aussie Shiraz Challenge 2013 said it’s the Pepperjack Shiraz 2012. What does GOM of Wine James Halliday say? He provides a list of 7 wines that are very hard to buy – more on that further down.
Let’s start with the good news
Saltram’s Pepperjack Shiraz 2012 took out the trophy for best Shiraz at the 2013 Visy Shiraz Challenge with a score of 19. It is often discounted to $17 and is still widely available – our kind of wine. Second place went to the Ingoldby Shiraz 2012, with a score of 18.8. We liked the Pepperjack and scored it at 92 points, we liked the Ingoldby a lot less and gave it 89.
Other reds with gold medal scores at the Visy Challenge were
- Mojo Shiraz 2012 (from Rockbare) – $13 NLA (18.7)
- Seppelt Chalambar Shiraz 2010 – $18 NLA (18.7)
- Swings & Roundeabouts Shiraz 2012 – $20 NLA ( $18.7)
At the other end of the list, we found a couple of heavy hitters from Penfolds.
How come the two Penfolds reds scored bronze medals? These reds are from a top year and a top maker, so the only explanation is that the judges at the Visy Challenge preferred approachable, fruit-driven wines to wines that had the Penfolds bag of winemaking tricks thrown at them.
The 2014 Visy Challenge
The latest challenge came up with unpredictable results as well, except for the overall winner. Apart from the winning Moppity, the results once again prove our premise (or promise) that price is no guide to quality: the next 10 wines that won gold medals (all on 18.5 points)range from $25 to $120. Further down, we look at the names at the bottom of the table and find a bunch of $90 to $180 wines barely scoring bronze medlas (15.5 points). We rest our case at this point, but please check the details:
Overall Winner: Moppity Vineyards Reserve Shiraz 2013 – $60 at Winemakerschoice. Jason Brown at Moppity has had a tremendous year, winning half a dozen major trophies and some 30 gold medals for his Hilltops wines.
Trophy for Best Under $25: Rosemount District Shiraz 2013 – cannot find a source for it. Here are the next half dozen or so, also on 18.5 points.
Surprises at the bottom of the table
These wines are just a selection from a long list which proves our premise that price is no guide to quality. Any score between 15.5 and 17 is a bronze medal.
Grant Burge Wines Meshach 2009 – $180, 15.5 points
Wolf Blass Platinum Shiraz 2010 – $180, 15.7 points
Jacob’s Creek Centenary Hill Barossa Valley Shiraz – $80, 16.2 points
Rosemount Balmoral Syrah 2012 – $75, 15.5 points
Best’s Great Western Shiraz Bin 0 2012 – $80, 15.5 points
Seppelt St Peters Shiraz 2012 – $65, 16.5 points
Wolf Blass Estates of the Barossa Moculta Shiraz 2012 – $80, 15.7 points
Saltram No 1 Shiraz 2010 – $90, 16 points
Fox Creek Reserve Shiraz 2012 – $75, 15.7 points
Kaesler Alte Reben Shiraz 2012 – $150, 15.8 points
St Hallet Blackwell Shiraz 2012 – $35, 15.7 points
O’leary Walker ‘Claire’ Reserve Shiraz 2010 – $90, 15.5 points
Songlines Estates, Songlines Shiraz 2011 – $110, 15.5
More Good News
The Shaw and Smith Shiraz 2012 – this is still in stock for $37 at Kemenys as I’m updating this post – is an easy wine to like as well, polished and stylish, and more elegant than the Pepperjack 2012. It’s a smart, bright, modern Shiraz with lots of charm but it’s not complex, profound or long-lived. It’s not the best red we’ve tasted this year either but we’d give it 94 points. More HERE and HERE
It does prove our premise that you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on a great wine, and the IWC judges get solid support from our own to back their judgment: Tyson Stelzer writes that this is a benchmark Adelaide Hills red, ‘finely textured and immaculately poised, fleshy black cherries, black plums and liquorice … accented with layers of black pepper and game.’
Campbell Mattinson at the Winefront likes it too and gives the Shaw & Smith 94+. At Winewise, Lester Jesberg calls the Shaw and Smith 2012 one of Australia’s best reds. ‘Outstanding. Forget auction prices, forget overhyped classics, this is the real deal – opulently varietal, fresh and concentrated, with polished tannins.’
The really good news is Kemenys still have some Pepperjack 2012 Shiraz in stock for $17, when the rest of the retailers are on the bigger, more clumsy 2013 and want more money.
The Penfolds RWT Shiraz 2010
GTW’s June/July 2014 issue said ‘Big Red Issue’ on the cover, and promised 25 Shiraz Superstars. At BWU$20, we’ve talked a lot about the superstar St Henri 2010 that stole the show at the 2014 Penfolds Icon and Luxury Release on May 1. Some reviewers scored this wine at 100 points, and we scored it at 96+ so this should’ve been the pick of the Pennies in the GTW tasting,
Sadly, neither the Shaw and Smith nor the St Henri is among the 25 Shiraz Superstars listed by GTW since it confined its selection to wines from the McLaren Vale and the Barossa. Makes you wonder why the Pepperjack wasn’t incuded. Makes you want to scream too, doesn’t it, when a magazine claims to review 25 Shiraz Superstars and leaves out Grange’s older brother.
The RWT scores 96 points here, the top score in a tasting that produced scores that were lower than the GTW average according to Nick Bullied MW. That’s quite a contrast to the Visy Great Australian Shiraz Challenge 2013, where the very same Penfolds RWT 2010 was banished to the bottom of the Bronze Medal table with a score of 15.7.
To translate this to the 100-point scale is not a matter of multiplying by 5. More on the move to the 100-point scale here. This is the system that has been in use by the Sydney Show:
- Gold Medal – 95 points and over
- Silver Medal – 90 to 94 points
- Bronze Medal – 85 to 89 points
In other words, Penfolds RWT would’ve scored between 85 and 89 points at the Visy Challenge. Its cheaper sibling Bin 150 Marananga Shiraz 2010 also scored 15.7. Before you say: the guys at the Visy comp must’ve got it wrong, have a look at the rest of the GTW line-up and you’ll see a lot of fancied runners on the bottom of that list as well.
So what says Halliday?
The Wine Companion 2015 lists these wines as our top Shiraz reds, all with a JH score of 98.
- Hare’s Chase Lepus 2010 – $130 (93 from the Winefront)
- Hentley Farm Museum Release The Creation 2009 – NLA
- Penfolds Bin 170 Kalimna Block C – $1800 (not a misprint)
- Wendouree Shiraz 2012 – $60 – NA unless you’re on the mailing list (there’s a long queue)
- Henschke Mount Edelstone 2012 – $120 – NLA
- McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz 2011 – $110 pre-order (not yet released)
- Bleasdale Powder Monkey Shiraz 2012 – $65 – NLA
- Dalwhinnie The Eagle 2012 – $130 – NLA
As you can see, this is an exercise in utter futility – these wines are somewhere between fairy dust and rocking horse manure.
Late last year, Winestate completed its 2014 World’s Greatest Shiraz Challenge. This time, the results were similar to the Wine Companion list: among the top 3 wines, two are impossible to find, and one is $150.
So what says Best Wines Under $20?
What’s the best Shiraz we’ve tasted in the last couple years? Mitchell McNicol Shiraz 2006. At a recent lunch with friends, it stood out like a beacon, and we ended up fighting over our shares. It’s a youthful deep red colour for a 9-year-old, with a nose full of flowers, dark berries, pencil shavings and more. The palate served up the same goodies on a rich, velvety bed of polished tannins, and added a few mature characters. It’s rich but not jammy, it’s big but not huge, Andrew Mitchell has struck the perfect balance with this wine, and the integration of all the elements is seamless. It will no doubt improve for the next decade, even if it’s hard to see how it could.
A year ago, I bought 6 bottles of St Henri 2010 for about $70 each, that is $420. It was a stand-out St Henri, and several reviewers gave it 100 points. I reckon the McNicol is a better wine, and it’s nearly half the price, and you don’t have to wait another 20 years to enjoy it. I wrote in my review that Penfolds would charge $250 for a wine like this, and I stand by that. The bonus is that it’s almost a decade old. Over the years, Andrew Mitchell has held his top reds back, and that includes the standard Cabernet (2007 is the current issue), and you can still buy the McNicol Shiraz 2006 for $40 from the winery. This wine is the best-kept secret in Aussie reds. No one else has reviewed it to my knowledge, most likely because Mitchell Wines is not the most fashionable winery these days. Do yourselves a favour and get some.
What’s point of this story?
All of the above proves that wine judging is a flawed science, and it’s this lack of consistency in wine reviews and wine judging that drove me to start the BWU$20 website. And the fact that most reviewers write about wines that are to be released at some distant point in the future, or wines you can only buy from some obscure shop on the outer edge of Mongolia. Oh, and the fancy prose and the clunky adverbs …
That said, are we any better at getting it right than the other guys? We get a lot of emails saying we do, but the answer is NO. Sure, we try harder because
- we preselect most of the wines we review
- we restrict the number of wines we review
- we taste the wines over several days with and without food
- we only review wines you can buy (St Henri 2010 was a challenge but we kept our word)
- we mention the scores of other reviewers where they differ from ours, and
- we encourage you to try wines before you buy, and show you easy ways of doing that.
But we’re only human.
Kim
