Australian Wine Shows have a bright future?

Not if past performance is anything to go by

‘We as an industry constantly talk to each other and no one else.’

‘Some of the best and brightest talent of the Australian wine industry gathered in the Hunter Valley last weekend,’ the press release tells us, ‘to celebrate Len’s birthday and to discuss the future of the Australian Wine Show System in the 21st century. … the resounding outcome of the TalkFest was that Australian wine shows have played a critical role in shaping Australia’s wine styles and trends …’

The forum was the Len Evans Tutorial, LET to its friends. The headline of this post is the headlines of the press release, without the questionmark. Philip White, the gadfly of the Aussie wine business, calls it ‘a quaint annual affair’ and explains that ‘Evans’ business cronies and admirers maintain this annual wine judges’ school in his honour. While it was designed to program prospective wine judges to conduct their work in a more scholarly and informed manner, it leaves itself open to accusations of clubby exclusivity, a trait which makes it seem more of a homogenizing exercise.’ http://drinkster.blogspot.com/

Tyson Stelzer has posted a rough transcript of the LET discussions, unedited, here: http://www.winepress.com.au/wine-show-conference-transcript.pdf . I think this is a pretty brave move and applaud the openness. Sadly, the discussions show just how out of touch these folks are. Not surprising perhaps, given that the Australian wine show system has grown into a gigantic, self-serving monster over the decades.

Australian Wine Shows have a shameful track record

White quietly reminds us that the current wine show system was, inter alia, ‘responsible for destroying for years the reputation of Max Schubert, whose early Granges were viciously derided by the powerful judges of the day.’ Philip’s blog post is headed: Oz Wine Shows In Disarray. Judges Gather: Big Interface. Hunter Summit Attempts Fix. And it's worth reading.

He’s dead right but that’s just one of the sins the system has on its ledger. From where I sit, our wine show system has a great deal more to be modest about. Over the four decades that I’ve enjoyed Aussie wines, our show system has

Failed to produce consistent results across various shows in different states
Failed in its role to guide Australian wine styles in a consistent direction
Failed to improve the breed other than in a technical sense
Failed to steer growers toward planting more suitable varieties
Failed to educate the public about the benefits and workings of the show system
Failed to connect with consumers in any relevant way

Meaningless Medals

There was a lot of debate in the Hunter Valley about medals versus point scores, about the 100 point system vs the 20 point one, about the current system vs the Olympic system of 1^st, second and third gold, silver and bronze. There were people arguing that consumers don’t understand medals or point scores, yet no one raised the real issue: consumers can’t work out why truly awful wines win so many trophies and gold medals.

A few recent examples I covered in previous posts include

Annie's Lane Quelltaler Watervale Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon 2010, which won Gold medals and trophies including the top Trophy in The Great Australian Red 2011 comp
Taylors 2010 Promised Land Shiraz ($10), which took out the Trophy for Best Shiraz Under $25 and second place overall in the Visy Great Australian Shiraz Challenge
McWilliams Hanwood Estate Shiraz 2010 (trophies and golds) - a $7 wine
Wolf Blass Red Label Shiraz Grenache 2010 – another $7 wine
McWilliams Mt Pleasant Elizabeth 2005 – trophy and golds

The Wolf Blass won the Montgomery Trophy for Best Wine under $20 at the 2011 Royal Adelaide Wine Show, plus the Radoux Trophy for Best Commercial Red Wine at the same show, plus a Gold Medal at the same show and another Gold at the 2011 Royal Melbourne Show. And to top it off, James Halliday rated it at 94 out of 100 (another gold). The wine was so bad I decided not to risk using it in a Beef Bourgignon but poured it down the sink instead. I did the same with the McWilliams, an unripe, unpleasant concoction if ever there was one.

The Annie’s Lane is a $20 wine, and really not worth it. It's soft and ripe and dressed in aromatic oak, just another tired old wine made to a tired old formula. The others are dirt cheap. Now winemakers aren't fools: if they thought these wines were trophy winners, would they have stuck their cheapest labels on them? Of course not. It’s the judges who are the fools here.

The trouble is that punters see these trophy and gold medal stickers and they think these wines are the bargains of the year. Perhaps they figure that the winemaker tried to tell the marketing guys how good these things were, but the marketing guys weren’t listening. Marketing people are fools too, aren't they? Then they open the bottle and get a hell of a shock – I mean the three cheapo wines here are real shockers.

Meaningless judging contests

Quite a few winemakers don’t believe in the system or find the entry conditions unacceptable, and don’t enter their wines at all. If I look at the wines that stood out like beacons in my reviews this year, medals are not that common.

Teusner Avatar 2010 – not entered in shows, I suspect
Wynns Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 – no awards I know of
Mountadam High Eden Chardonnay 2010 – no gongs, probably not entered
Hoddles Creek Estate Chardonnay 2011 – no gongs, probably not entered
TarraWarra Estate Chardonnay 2010 – no gongs, same
Jim Barry Watervale Riesling 2012 – yes, a couple of golds
Woodlands Cabernet Merlot 2009 – no medals, probably not entered
42° South Pinot Noir 2008 – no medal, same
Thorn-Clarke Shotfire Ridge Quartage 2009 – no medals
Amberley Secret Lane Cabernet Merlot 2010 – lots of gongs

Makers of our top boutique wines such as Giaconda ad Mount Mary never enter their wines, nor do companies like Penfolds or Henschke enter their top wines, and that goes for dozens more. It's like running a Formula 1 race without Ferrari and McLaren Mercedes. If the system doesn’t judge our best wines, how can it claim to reward the best wines made in this country? How can it claim relevance?

Missing consistency

The Amberley Cab Merlot is an interesting example: in a display of remarkable consistency, it won a gold in almost every state show. That's very much the exception. As a rule, a wine that wins a trophy and top gold in Perth will win nothing in Melbourne, a silver in Sydney, and nothing in Canberra or Brisbane. And vice versa, and many variations on the theme.

There’s clearly something wrong here, isn’t there? I mean, we’re talking about a range of 15 – 19 points from just below bronze to gold here. Or 84 – 95 on the 100 point scale. How can there be that big a variance if we have reliable judging standards of any kind? One answer is that the judges have to work through an average of 150 wines a day. Several times, that is, as they slowly work out the short lists.

‘Adelaide in 2011 was gruelling to judge,’ one of the guys at the Hunter Valley meeting said. ‘In all of my years of judging I cannot remember not being rushed,’ said another. ‘When this happens, the crowd pleasing wines in the middle ground win the awards.’ That’s exactly how we get so many mediocre medal winners: the obvious wines get the gongs, the wines with immediate appeal. The subtle, shy, more reserved things get overlooked.

Thanks to Philip White for this. His description: The most radical wine crew on Earth at the time; perhaps ever? Rock'n'roll: Penfolds has a little wine show of its own in the lab at Grange in the 'fifties. Penfolds winemakers and scientists, left to right: Murray Marchant, Gordon Colquist, Ivan Combet (father of Federal Cabinet Minister Greg Combet), Perce McGuigan (father of Brian and Neil), Jeffrey Penfold-Hyland, Max Schubert, John Davoren, Don Ditter, Harold Davoren (John's father) and Ray Beckwith. http://drinkster.blogspot.com/

Trophies by the truckload

The number of wine shows we put on in this tiny (in wine producing terms) country is heading toward 100 a year. It’s a ludicrous gravy train that grows longer all the time, and everybody loves it. Lots of wine writers and volunteers get to rub shoulders with winemakers and judges and enjoy wine dinners that are breathtaking by most standards.

I’ve no idea how many medals are handed out at these shows but, at the Sydney Show alone, 35 trophies were awarded last year. Yes, 35 trophies at a single wine show. Hotels donate trophies, wine merchants donate trophies, banks donate trophies, airlines … Even a regional show like the Hunter Valley Show hands out 25 trophies!

You thought a trophy was something special, didn’t you? Next time you see a trophy sticker on a bottle of wine, just remember that it’s just one of about a 1,000 trophies handed out every year. Nothing special. And a gold medal? How many thousands of those are thrown around? Literally confetti.

Wine shows guiding wine styles?

In the fifties, Grange was ridiculed because it didn’t conform to the judges ideas of red wine style. In the seventies, a smart young Wolf Blass took the show system for a heady ride when he won the Jimmy Watson trophy several years in a row with his designer reds. He was the Lance Armstrong of the wine business, and he won without resorting to drugs. He simply worked out the obvious charms the wine judges always fell for – ripe, juicy berry fruit and aromatic oak in a plush, soft envelope.

Wolfgang 'Amadeus' Blass, the little master who showed the rest how it's done

That should’ve cause a major rethink in the people running the show system, but the judges sat on their hands as Blass promoted the Jimmy Watson as the holy grail of wine trophies. The JW is awarded for the best one-year old red, a wine that wasn’t yet bottled, and pretty meaningless. Len Evans was there, a young Halliday coming up behind him. Here was a big chance to set the record straight and to establish tougher guidelines for style. Nothing changed.

The copycats won the day

Winemakers across the country copied Wolf Blass or tried to outdo him. Can we blame them? No, they wanted to win medals, and they did. In the eighties, right across the country, the copycats were winning medals with a stretched Blass formula of overripe, extracted reds dressed in toasty, coconutty oak.

One aberration was what we ended up calling ‘Lindeman Essence’, that overdone stewed prunes character which suddenly appeared in the company’s Coonawarra reds. In the nineties, our wine judges did nothing to rein in Coonawarra winemakers who made Cabernets with 15% alcohol and more. Nor did they tell Robert Parker that those monster McLaren Vale reds were port wines in disguise.

On the white side, it was big buttery, oaky Chardonnays that won the trophies. Oak chips were in short supply, then oak essence. The judges, the custodians of our wine styles, failed in that task every way you look at it. Just after the turn of the millennium, they had a change of heart. Suddenly all those big over-extracted oaky wines were ‘old-fashioned’, and cool climate styles described as fresh, crisp and elegant were in – from Coal River in Tassie all the way to Tumbarumba.

These wines were crisp and elegant alright, but they often lacked one essential ingredient: ripe fruit. No matter, now the trophies went to Chardonnays reminiscent of Twiggy that struggled to register 12% alcohol, and anorexic Rieslings with 11%, and the judges applauded. Some of the reds showed strange characters that evoked green capsicum, bay leaves and peas, but on the whole fared better on the ripeness scale.

Steering growers toward planting more suitable varieties

In his blog piece, Philip White says ‘Under Evans and his gang, the Australian wine show circuit had a deadly stranglehold on the development of new varieties and flavours in Australian wine, and can be accused of stifling the development of many more varieties ...’ In other words, the judges pushed for French styles and varieties like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, when they should’ve encouraged growers in our Mediterranean climate to stop pulling out Grenache and Mataro vines, and plant more Marsanne and Roussanne.

Philip recalls ‘handing Len Evans himself a glass of delicious Yeringberg Yarra Valley Marsanne Roussanne in the Universal Wine Bar after a Royal Adelaide Wine Show. This was simply too much for Australia’s most evangelical Chardonnay proponent, who took a sniff, went back on his heels, and delivered a derisory tirade about how such lumpen things were below him, and never could catch on.’

We've gone past improving the breed?

That was the consensus at the Hunter Valley conference. ‘Bury the phrase improving the breed,’ one of them said and no one argued. This floored me when I read it. Are they saying the wines we turn out these days have reached a level of perfection that can’t be improved on? Can't go any faster?

I’m thinking about my wine reviews and all those crook wines under the AVOID heading, and the ordinary ones under NOT CONVINCED, and I wonder what vineyard these guys live on. Maybe they’d argue that sub 10 dollar wines like the Wolf Blass and the Taylor’s winning major trophies proves that we’ve reached the highest possible level of perfection. How can it get any better?

It could be my aging eyes, of course. I see lack of standards, consistency and integrity where they see perfection. Still, from the hands-on (or is that lips-on?) perspective over the decades, the current system of awarding medals is a crap shoot. Simple as that. Or it might as well be. I know the judges and winemakers who drive the system are men and women of good intent, so it must be the system that is broken.

We’ve left the wine punter behind

OK, the system was never intended to serve as a guide to wine drinkers but as a guide to winemakers. The wines that won the trophies were held up as leading lights to the rest. It's the wine companies and their marketers who began using show results to flog the grog to us punters, and then convinced the wine shows to change the system to produce more medals and trophies to help with the marketing. Nice one!

Now that ‘we’ve gone past improving the breed’, that obvious conflict of interest is resolved and the system should be able to serve wine drinkers better. At the LET gathering of wine wise men and women in the Hunter Valley, there was indeed a section dedicated to the consumer.

Len Evans Tutorial comittee

The consensus was that consumers don’t understand the system. Oh, really? I’m sure they understand one thing: that it can’t be trusted. ‘After brand and price, the gold medal or any medal is the third most important piece of information,’ says one participant citing some research.

‘7.5% of people say a gold medal makes a impact on their choice, says another.’ And someone adds: ‘5 stars has more meaning - most [punters] don't understand what a medal means.’ Funny that – I suspect you have no one to blame for that but your obsession with putting more carts on the gravy train instead of introducing wine drinkers to its inner workings.

They talked about a stronger representation of media, buyers, sommeliers, retailers and general wine trade with a closer connection with consumers. Notice how the punter is always at the end of the queue. One of the LET participants nailed it when he said: ‘We as an industry constantly talk to each other and no one else.’

So whereto from here?

These are my suggestions:

Toss it all out and start again
A hundred shows and thousands of medals? That’s a joke. Major Rethink
Run few shows, give out fewer and more meaningful medals
Find way to ensure that the judging is consistent across all the shows
Work out a better system for sifting out the ordinary wines and the rubbish
Re-taste short-listed wines several times over two days, once with food
If you can’t get the best vineyards in the country to submit their wines, go and buy their wines so you can judge them or call the whole thing off
Repeat ten times that improving the breed is an ongoing challenge
Have a meeting with key winemakers to agree on benchmarks for styles.
Set standards and appoint guardians to uphold them.

What did the good people in the Hunter Valley come up with? This is what the press release says: ‘Some of the outcomes and recommendations included:

The establishment of an Association of Judges and a central register, similar to the current ASVO system, of current judges
The enhanced focus on consumer engagement and marketing and the importance of strong, relevant communication of wine show outcomes
The continued focus on best practice and the communication of agreed standards for the conduct of wine shows
A continued commitment of the agricultural Societies to meet collectively
Moving the dialogue about the purpose of Shows from “improving the breed’ to the “pursuit of excellence”

Ah, there we have it: the pursuit of excellence. Committee member Samantha Connew added: ‘It is hoped that future changes that result from the reunion weekend will give consumers a better understanding of the integrity of the wine show system, as well as continuing to provide winemakers with the forum they need to benchmark their wines.’

I really think we need a brand new system, and new judges. A fresh approach.