Few wines can polarise opinions like Grant Burge’s flagship Meshach red. Back in mid 1997 Winestate magazine’s editor Peter Simic referred to Meshach as ‘having all the hallmarks of the next Grange’, giving it a range of truly spectacular scores and a massive eight pages of his magazine to the story. Meshach is making gains on the auction market, although Stewart Langton says it’s yet to be regarded as bona fide blue chip. ‘It takes time to establish that sort of credibility’, he says. ‘To some degree Meshach has done it quickly, but it takes more than two or three vintages to establish that reputation. Grant Burge has done it as quickly as anyone, but it’s clear that the wines are still evolving into a style.’ It’s my view that with the exception of the truly stunning 1991 vintage, the praise heaped on the early releases of Meshach was premature. I’ve consistently rated the early wines just below gold medal (18.5) status, and firmly believe that Burge was feeling his way around until the 1994 vintage, the first of four truly brilliant wines. From 1994 onwards Meshach should go on to fully justify its place in the first rank of premium Australian shirazes. ‘I wanted to create something really special, a regional expression to make people sit up and look’, says Grant Burge. ‘I want Meshach to be recognised as one of Australia’s top red wines. I’m doing it my way and in my style and I’m not copying any of the other makers with that reputation. When I began, Barossa reds were very under-rated (see previous issue of OnWine). I realised that the flagship wines was to be old vine shiraz, and one to live and last for some time. The concept was to produce a rich, intense, robust and concentrated shiraz, but not necessarily a varietal wine. ‘Many wines these days at just two years old are very varietal and elegant and drinkable, but Meshach is about impact and power; it needs aging to reach its peak. As such it’s quite against most trends over the last 10 years. Even the 1995 wine, which has had two years in oak and another two in bottle, is still huge and powerful. Sure it’s becoming approachable, but it now needs another 5-6 years to show what Meshach is all about.’ Burge acknowledges that making Meshach has been an evolutionary process. The core of the wine has been 21 acres of shiraz plantings in the Filsell vineyard which date back to 1920. He’s now facing the dilemma of deciding whether or not to keep Meshach as a single vineyard wine, which would deny him access to the vineyard next door whose 110 year-old vines made his best shiraz in 1999. Burge had been making shiraz from Filsell since 1978 and by 1988 was convinced of its special potential. He began in 1988 by just ‘making a wine and seeing how it went’. At the time he thought the 1988 vintage was a huge wine, but even after its two years in oak he recognised that althoughit might have been attractive shiraz, it lacked the weight and structure he really wanted. ‘The wine has to show some fruit, but I’m oaking the wine to achieve a really complex vinous bouquet rather than overt shiraz flavour’, he says. Burge picks 60 tonnes of potential Meshach fruit into 5 tonne fermenters and after a traditional seven day fermentation transfers the wine into oak to finish the ferment. Most of the pressings are returned to the wine, but the pressings which are kept separate constitute the core of the final Meshach blend, accounting for 23-25% of the finished wine. After the foundation blend is made in September, a few different options are kept separate until July in the second year in oak, when the final blend begins to take shape. After fine-tuning, the wine is returned to oak until the end of its second year, most vintages being bottled after vintage of that year. Since the early days Burge has refined his approach to oak for Meshach and increased the proportion of new oak from 70% to 100% from 1994 onwards. By imparting oak influence more quickly he believes he retains more primary fruit and achieves a more stable colour. Since the vintages did not produce wine to Burge’s standard, no Meshach was made in either 1989 or 1997. The 1997 fruit went into Filsell Shiraz, making it a richer and weightier wine than its predecessors.
