Aussie Wines come of Age – a look at Campbell Mattinson’s great story
The writing is lively and colourful, like he’s chatting to you after a big lunch across a cleansing ale. He’s direct, in your face much of the time but what he talks about keeps me turning the pages. Most of all because he’s filling in some yawning gaps for me. This is my second time around the world’s vineyards, after a long break. The reason I took the long break was a world of wine that had turned into Theatre of the Absurd.
Not so long ago, even the best French wines were affordable. OK, it was the early eighties – I keep forgetting that was 3 decades ago. Anyhow, I was on a decent but not especially generous income as a sales manager in the IT industry. I was buying good quality Aussie wines from Tyrrells, Mitchells, Bowen Estate and Vasse Felix for around $4 – 5 a bottle.
At the time, you could buy third-growth Bordeaux like 1978 Chateau Montrose, Ducru-Beaucaillou and Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande for around $30. Good Burgundies cost a bit more, and great Sauternes & Barsacs a bit more again – about $60/70 for a full bottle of Rieussec. Expensive yes, but not ridiculous.
Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac
Thousand dollar bottles
I think it was in the early nineties that US brain surgeons and Wall Street types drove the prices of French wines up, in a Robert Parker-induced frenzy. Parker is to wine what Steve Jobs was to Apple. After that, the Hong Kong Chinese got into the act, pushing up auction prices at Christies and Southebys. Bordeaux and Burgundies floated out of reach of ordinary people, the premier grand crus soon fetching a thousand dollars a bottle or more.
I was happy to drink Aussie wines, but some of their makers decided to follow the French into the stratosphere. Mattinson reminds us that Parker paid us a visit in the late nineties and discovered old vines Shiraz from the Barossa, McLaren Vale and Heathcote. Duck Muck, for one. Parker’s followers pushed the prices of Aussie reds to giddy heights. Suddenly, the asking price for Grange was $300, and matched by Hill of Grace.
Barossa Burning
Mattinson begins his story with the Barossa Valley covered in a smoke haze from burning vines. It wasn’t a bushfire, but a government-sponsored vine-pull scheme. It was the mid 1980s and Aussies had yet to discover the virtues of our big, warm, cuddly reds. Shiraz muffins and Cabernet confitures just couldn’t shift the surplus. Barossa shiraz from old vines brought $275 per ton, grenache $190. A decade later, Shiraz would fetch $3000 a ton. By then a lot of old vines had been destroyed.
In the decade and a half that followed, our wine companies built an export market beyond the industry’s wildest dreams. They also discovered a new market for luxury goods, which saw Grange and Hill of Grace followed by >$100 wines from other sources. Penfolds Bin 707, Wynns John Riddoch and Michael, Irvine’s Grand Merlot, Clarendon Hills Astralis, Penfolds Yattarna, Petaluma Tiers, Yalumba Octavius and Virgilius. Mt Edelstone, a wine I used to buy for $4, was zooming past $50 and heading for $100.
Super-premiums
For a short time, some punters bought these things and paid these prices. The wines were typically made to please Parker, which meant they had the entire book of winemaking tricks thrown at them: made from the ripest fruit available, with the last molecule of flavour extracted and loaded up with charred, toasted or coconut-flavoured oak. These wines were caricatures of the old Wolf Blass concoctions, which it must be said are aging much better than some of these super-premiums.
Southcorp had ended up with most of our hallowed wine brands – Penfolds, Lindemans, Leo Buring and so on. It was a miracle that decades of acquisitions, raids and takeovers by corporate barbarians hadn’t quite managed to destroy these old brands. When Southcorp bought Rosemount for a super-premium of $1.5 billion in 2001, Bob Oatley laughed his head off while everybody else scratched theirs.
Nectar for the Gods
I’d already turned my back on the whole silly business. For one, I’d lost my wine merchant, my guiding light. For another, many of the wines I used to buy had become more expensive and less enjoyable, yet our wine writers and wine magazines gushed about new designer labels as if they were manna handed down from heaven. Expensive manna.
A new generation of sommeliers with sharp features and sharper haircuts made you feel like they were allowing you into very exclusive clubs where you were privileged to be offered wine and food that was made for Gods by semi-gods (at a steep entry price).
We stopped going out, not a problem since my best friends and I love cooking. I stopped buying all but cheap wine for drinking during the week, and reached into my cellar on weekends or special occasions. I was happy to be nowhere near the bubble when it burst, but it looked like I was the only one who saw that the emperor of the land was naked.
Boom, boom!
Aussies were beating their chests as their wines swept all before them overseas, when all they were sweeping was cheap frog grog out of Pommy supermarkets. We were rapidly building a reputation for making oceans of bland and boring wine better and cheaper than the frogs and Ities. No one seemed to care since we were shifting tons of wine. The drought was a bigger problem, as it put the brakes on production growth in our irrigation areas. More, more, more was the mantra.
In the early naughties, the first smoke signals of trouble appeared on the horizon: our own market for super-premium wines was saturated. Every winemaker was getting in on the act, but the market was limited so some makers cut their prices. Wynns was one I remember who chopped the prices for John Riddoch and Michael almost in half. Overnight.
Photo courtesy of Wino Sapien
Wynns was an interesting barometer of what went wrong. The old firm with the big reputation and the biggest vineyard holdings in Coonawarra wasn’t making wine of the style or class it used to make. The giant vineyards had been wrecked by years of machine pruning and harvesting, and it took winemaker Sue Hodder and vineyard manager Alan Jenkins years to restore them back to health.
The Sting in the Yellow Tail
Last year, we were staying in a friend’s house over Christmas, and I saw the new face of Aussie wine in his fridge and drinks cupboard: Yellow Tail, any way you liked it. Red or white, Cabernet or Chardonnay. Like most punters out there, my friend is confused by the vast numbers of wines that fill up the shelves of our grog shops. It was an easy decision to buy a brand that provided easy drinking wines that were easy on the pocket.
He didn’t know that the export bubble had burst, and that he was drinking the same wine Americans used to buy at half the price. The giant worm had turned on itself, at a time when we had an excess of 100 million cases of wine in this country. Boom, boom! Mattinson says the Casellas were filling close to 60,000 bottles every hour at the height of the export boom in their refinery in Griffith. He also gives us a look into how and why this happened, that’s the good part.
Photo courtesy of The Telegraph
New wines, new ways, old prices
It took about a decade to drink my way through my cellar, then I was down to my last few bottles of Mitchells Riesling and Mountadam Chardonnay, down to a few dozen Wendouree and Penfolds bin reds. The cellar had become a depressing place to visit, and there was no joy in the cheap grog I’d got used to drinking – cheap Kiwi Sauvignon Blancs and Yalumba Y series and St Hallett Gamekeepers. Problem was, I’d become disconnected from the world of wine and had no idea who was who in the Zoo any longer.
At a party one night, a fellow I was talking to asked me if I liked good Riesling. I answered: Is the Pope a Catholic? The wine was Jim Barry Watervale Riesling 2009, and it was just what the doctor ordered. I tracked down a case of it for $13 a bottle, and wondered why I’d been drinking those crappy $10 wines when I could buy wine this good for a few bucks more. Then it dawned on me: the bubble had burst, sanity had returned.
Finding a new wine merchant wasn’t easy. Where I live in Mosman, Vintage Cellars reigned supreme, and they would have to be the most expensive places in Australia to buy wine. Then a friend began sending me Winestar’s weekly emails and I saw that the smart guys had moved online. I ordered a few of Bert’s wines and never looked back.
Return to sanity
OK, a few of them weren’t what he’d promised but Kym Teusner’s reds made up for that. I also liked the story about how he stopped a couple of brothers from turning their ancient Barossa Shiraz vines over to developers. Mattinson reminds us that some of these Barossa vines are older than any in France, because South Australia escaped the phylloxera louse.
That’s how the Riebke Shiraz was born, a wine I bought for $17. A wine that was in the same class as the Wendouree reds I loved, but one that showed its charms long before you gave it 20 years in the cellar. Teusner’s Avatar is in another class again – for just $10 more you get what is most likely the best GSM made in Australia today. If Penfolds had a wine like this, I wrote a while back, the marketing guys would create a special label for it and charge at least $100. I stand by that.
What we have here is a new generation of young Turks who just want to make the best wine they can for a fair price. The Kalleskes, the guys at Turkey Flat and Maverick and many more all over the country, from Tarrawarra in the Yarra to Woodlands in the West. Just like our winemakers of old, these young Turks start with great fruit and apply back-to-basics techniques with minimal interference. They make great wines that reflect the place from which they come, and the grape variety. Authenticity, Mattinson calls it.
Some of the big guys have come good as well, Wynns for example. The black label 2009 Coonawarra Cabernet is the best since the early days, a great Coonawarra red of elegance and class. It’s so good it defies the usual logic that only small scale winemaking can produce outstanding wines, and it was so cheap at one point that it defied economic rationale as well ($19).
More sanity
The GFC slowed down the demand for fancy frog grog from the USA, but a new generation of affluent Chinese soon picked up the slack and bought any wine as long as it had Premier Grand Cru Classé on the label. Spending more than a grand on a special gift bottle was the norm, but that’s changed apparently. ‘Some of the Chinese super rich are getting tired of Lafite,’ Georges Tong, a prominent Hong Kong wine collector, told The Telegraph. ‘Presenting a bottle of Lafite as a gift is not as fashionable as before. Gift recipients are now demanding Domaine de la Romanee Conti.’
In other words, they’ve upped the anti to $2-5000 a bottle. Further downmarket, prices aren’t holding so well. Ducru Beaucaillou is down 50% on last year to $100 a bottle, Vieux Chateau Certain is down to $130 from last year’s $240. Chateau Ausone, a top St Emilion red, is also about half the price it was, but the great 2006 is still over $1000. I really don’t mind drinking Ducru Beaucaillou – for $100 it’s at least an option for a special occasion.
WHY THE FRENCH HATE US was published in 2007 by Hardie Grant, so Mattinson didn’t chronicle the rise of the Chinese, or the first $1000 wine launched by Penfolds in 2008 in Shanghai. He would have a field day with the Parawa Estate Ingalalla Grand Reserve 2007 that was made for the Chinese market sold out fast despite its $1200 price tag and horrid label.
http://briard.typepad.com/get_the_picture/2012/04/parawa-estate-ingalalla-grand-reserve-2007.html . The Chinese are clearly desperate for new wine adventures.
In the summary of his book, Mattinson says, ‘if I have any advice for the Australian wine industry, it is: make the wines you love to drink and sell them at the prices you’d love, as a consumer, to pay.’ I can’t add much to that except that this is what my blog is about: finding those winemakers who follow Mattinson’s advice and singing their praises from the rooftops.
The book is out of print, but I stumbled over my copy in a Dan Murphy’s store, and Winestar has it for sale online here http://www.winestar.com.au/prod1820.htm
Thanks for a great read, Campbell.
Kim
