Keith Mugford reckons he’s taken a punt. Maker and owner of Moss Wood, one of Margaret River’s premium domaines, he’s just released his stunning 1996 Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s a wine of rare elegance, complexity and fineness, although its superbly understated strength sets it at odds with the current trend that more is better. But this is Keith Mugford’s first release of cabernet since he ditched the ‘Reserve’ tag he occasionally gave to small parcels of wine, deciding instead to make all this wine as if it were to be bottled under a ‘Reserve’ label. In so doing he’s joined his Margaret River neighbour in Cullen by going against the prevalent trend in Australia, and will straightforwardly rely on his ability to make and market a single estate wine. I applaud the move, for it gives simplicity and authenticity to the business of understanding and buying premium wine. For if you’re like me you never quite know what to make of the word ‘Reserve’, especially when it appears on a bottle similar to, but more expensive than those you regularly drink. It’s a word that hardly ever comes cheap and a term that, like democracy and decency, means different things to different people. I guess it all depends on who puts it on the label. Is it the winemaker who, with a few barrels of something so spectacular and complete at hand, decides to keep the lot separate from the bulk of a blend for a once-in-a-while special release? Is it the marketer who, under pressure from the accountants to raise profile, prices and profits in about that order, simply decides to put much the same wine with an extra dollop of oak into a fancy bottle with a five colour-label, a computer-generated ‘historical’ name and a price about 50% wholesale above the standard wine? Or is it the accountant himself who, in the face of tough competition at or below the ‘standard’ price, allocates the bulk of the standard wine for further maturation, slashes the price of what’s left, only to re-introduce it as much the same product with yet another fancy label and price? Only this time around it will sport a ‘Reserve’ tag and be sufficiently over-oaked to fool most of the public, the trade and the press. No winemaker I have ever spoken to about his or her Reserve wine ever believes its removal from a larger mass ever affects the quality of what it leaves behind. On a large scale, I am happy to accept Brian Croser’s view that the removal of Petaluma’s Tiers Chardonnay has not compromised the remaining wine. I rate Petaluma’s 1996 Chardonnay, the first to have dealt with this potential disadvantage, as one of the company’s best ever. At the other extreme, winemakers such as Giaconda’s Rick Kinzbrunner, one of Victoria’s leading chardonnay producers, are adamant that you cannot remove a parcel of your best fruit from a relatively small make without diminishing the remaining wine. He is certainly not alone in that view. Until its final vintage in 1994 one of the most sought-after of Australia’s ‘reserve’ wines was the Cullen Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot. Unlike some vineyards, which only release a ‘reserve’ wine from exceptional seasons, the Cullen wine was released every year, yet consistently managed to perform at a very high level. Vanya Cullen, one of the best and most instinctive winemakers in Australia, is now instead making just a single cabernet wine, removing the term ‘reserve’ from the label in the process. Cullen’s argument is that her entire vineyard is now sufficiently mature not to need to distinguish between parcels of younger and older vines and that since 1995 all the cabernet sauvignon and merlot from the estate vineyard has been handled with the same techniques as the old ‘reserve’ anyway. Similarly, concerned that his flagship Moss Wood Cabernet Sauvignon wine was becoming to be viewed as a second label behind the occasional appearances of the sought-after Reserve wine, Keith Mugford dumped the ‘reserve’ idea. Well, not exactly. As he explains: ‘The first Reserve wine was really an experiment, until we realised that ultimately we should make all the wine that way, with two years in oak. The trouble was, we couldn’t afford to, so we kept the wine for special years, the last being 1994. ‘From 1996 onwards we have made all our own cabernet into the reserve style of wine, and that vintage will not be released until July this year. It’s taken nearly 20 years for us to be able to afford to do this, for we didn’t just want to push up the price without the winemaking rationale behind it. Otherwise it might have looked like a price grab’. The wine will retail at what I believe is a very realistic world price of around $70 per bottle. If only everyone else was as honest as Moss Wood and Cullen. There are many compelling arguments to suggest that all wine companies, large and small, can benefit from a tiered labelling structure. This concept not only gives their winemakers the flexibility to deal with exceptionally good and ordinary seasons by promoting good wines and ‘declassifying’ poorer batches, but when used honestly it gives the buyer a very fair idea of what is up to scratch and what isn’t. One of the Mornington Peninsula’s best wineries, Stonier’s, was not afraid not to release its Reserve Pinot Noir from the rather dampish 1996 vintage. A certain very high profile Yarra producer might win friends by showing the same discipline with its Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon from cooler seasons. At the end of the day it’s most important to realise that there is no law or industry standard covering the term ‘reserve’. Although some makers use it with pure honesty and reverence, it’s regrettable that the best advice I can give you is to treat it with scepticism.
