Australian Wine. The Jam is On
The way we were
Most people would argue that Australian wine has changed for the better over the last few decades. I’d argue that it’s changed for the worse, and that it’s changed beyond recognition. Did you know that Grange Hermitage, in the heydays of Max Schubert, never exceeded 13 degrees alcohol? Sure it was a big wine, but its substance owed nothing to excessive alcohol content.
Coonawarra is another yardstick. In the sixties, the reds of Brands and Redmans were high acid ‘claret styles’. The wine books of the time made the point that getting rapes fully ripe was a challenge, that vintage often ran into April with frost a frequent threat on the open flatland. Coonawarra reds only exceeded 12.5 degrees alcohol in very warm years.
In 1980, Lindemans made Coonawarra reds with overripe (stewed, jammy) overtones and, toward the end of that decade, Doug Bowen’s once well-balanced reds hit 14.5 and 15% alcohol. Most makers in the area followed suite and made ripe or overripe wines, fruit-driven wines that were no longer recognizable as Coonawarra reds. And it hasn’t changed, as the 2005 Brands Coonawarra red in front of me proves with 15%.
South Australian Tourism Commission
What happened? Global warming? No, it doesn’t work that fast and this change began in the late seventies in line with the industry’s move to drip irrigation 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 harvesters = more sun exposure again
- drip irrigation even in areas of sufficient rainfall = more fruit
Winemaking techniques also changed from yeast selection fermentation, to increase fruit intensity and flavour while reducing tannin and acid levels. These changes were made for marketing reasons.
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 house styles but their Hunters were Hunters and their Barossas were Barossas.
Along came Wolf Blass, a canny young German winemaker. He 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 big enough to leap out the glass in any weather. Big, ripe wines.
Wolf bought grapes from one of the hottest wine areas in all of Australia, Langhorne Creek, used new American oak barrels to add complexity and accelerate the aging process, and won 3 Jimmy Watson Trophies in a row. Jimmy Watson is one of the least significant trophies since it’s awarded to one-year old reds, but Wolf had the marketing nous to turn the JW into the most recognised wine trophy in Australia. Soon his wines were walking out of bottle shops.
The Industrial Revolution
I don’t blame Wolf Blass. Many of the young Turks who followed him would’ve done the same thing. Some of them did and, like Brian McGuigan, became flying winemakers who leapt from vineyard to vineyard by helicopter at vintage time advising smaller wineries on how to treat their wine. It all ended up tasting the same, of course.
Other young Turks went to France, bought vineyards in the Languedoc and churned out Aussie-style ripe, fruit-driven wines. Others again offered their services to Eastern block countries that had opened up after the wall fell in 1989.
No, I blame 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 to its origin.’
And I blame all the winemakers and wine companies (now mostly owned by multinationals, breweries or electrical goods makers) who slavishly followed Blass instead of having the balls to stick to developing their own styles.
By the end of the nineteen-eighties, most wine companies in Australia were making overripe wines because they won more medals than wines that were true to their terroir 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?
The Old World and the new prophets
European countries saw similar changes. Rebel winemakers in Tuscany ignored the restrictions of their DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) and planted Cabernet and Merlot instead of Sangiovese. They used new small oak barrels and modern winemaking techniques, and these Super Tuscans as they became known were hard to tell apart from good Bordeaux. Just as you’d expect.
The changes in France were less dramatic, and were driven by the influence of the prestige regions’ major markets. The USA held sway in the eighties and nineties and Robert Parker, a wine writer who’d assumed a colossal stature, 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 favoured huge reds, wines that were once described in Australia as ‘Steak and eggs in a bottle, followed by a big 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 more than 15% alcohol, and he would declare it a triumph of winemaking. Overnight, the wine would become impossible to obtain as internet bidders drove the price to heights that far exceeded the alcohol level. 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 winemaker as demigod
Overseas and at home, it was soon a case of wineries that were celebrated and wineries that were forgotten. Guns-for-hire winemakers were quick to see the opportunity and offer their services to the forgotten 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.
Soon it was easier to pick the roving winemaker than the winery that grew the grapes at blind tastings, that’s how big the 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 some 100 wineries at vintage time. It’s a kind of madness that is best understood by watching a documentary called Mondovino, which contrasts the old with the new in a very compelling way. In their defence, the flying winemakers would argue that they sorted out many problems that beset small and large wineries alike, for the greater good. Their opponents would argue that they made more and more wine taste the same.
Same Same
Can you pick up a glass of red, smell the pines of Coonawarra in it and detect the once unmistakably fine acid claret style in its taste? Not any more, you can’t. You even can’t tell a Coonawarra red from a Barossa red, not with 15% alcohol hanging over both. You can’t even tell Hunter reds anymore because they’re ripe and clean too. Hints of sweaty saddle, tar, leather? Not on your life.
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, finesse or balance. They have flavour in abundance, flavour that is jammy, huge and in-your-face.
On the whole, a great overripe sameness has covered our vast vinous landscape because most of our young Turk 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 similar wines.
In Vino Veritas
Not any more. The wine no longer tells a story about the place it came from, no longer prides itself on a unique gout de terroir as the French call it. Our wines no longer tell original stories but, like today’s online media, they regurgitate stories that we’re already familiar with.
Does it matter? It does if you like your stories fresh and interesting. It doesn’t if you’re happy to swallow the concoctions the mass merchandisers serve up for us. It matters if you care about a vineyard’s character, or the differences in wines from different places – the dusty, earthy taste of Rhone wines, the smelly slightly rotten noses of Burgundies and the tarry, leathery hints of old Italians, the hair-oil characters of old Alsatian Traminers and the buttered toast of old Australian Rieslings.
The most essential ingredient in wine is balance, the delicate thing that holds fruit, tannins, acidity, and alcohol together in perfect harmony. It’s the hardest thing to find in the new world, where winemakers keep discovering new tricks. I remember when Californian winemakers discovered new oak barrels in the late seventies, and all the wines for the next ten years were over-oaked. The same happened in Australia, first with oak, then with fruit ripeness and alcohol. The Californians learned their lessons, our winemakers haven’t. We’re stuck with the same tired formula.
Australia at the End of the Road
It sounds like a lie, given Australia’s astonishing export successes over the last 15 years, with exports rising from $260 million to $2,700 million dollars. Sadly, Aussie wine is no longer trendy over there, or competitive, and I suspect Jacobs Creek and Casella Wines’ Yellow Tail had a lot to do with that. Thanks to a helping hand from Robert Parker, Yellowtail swept the US market despite having no obvious merit.
Probably the worst thing about our situation is that our success has convinced every single one of us that we make the greatest wines on earth, when nothing could be further from the truth. This belief, now cast in the same concrete as our superiority in world cricket, makes it hard to refine and evolve our wines. Where do you go once you’ve achieved apparent perfection?
Once our wine styles were caricatures of European wines, when names like Chablis, Moselle and Claret adorned our cheap flagons. Now we’ve turned our wines into caricatures once more, this time resembling those muscle-bound young men in tiny swimsuits who strut along Bondi Beach to impress the young sheilas.
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More Reading
This article elaborates on the issues I’ve raised in much more detail
http://www.andrewjefford.com/node/702
More on our vinous woes
http://wineeconomist.com/2009/11/11/australia-at-the-tipping-point/
A link to someone having a go at Robert Parker
http://www.slate.com/id/2067055/
On star winemakers
http://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticle&dataId=22800