Some may be lighter, some long and elegant, some may be rich; but you cannot avoid the reality that the best Champagnes are also the most complex. While many Australian makers of sparkling wine have mastered the practice of marrying pristine fruit with creamy lees and crisp acids, a look across the board at our top sparkling wines shows we still fall well short of the complexity the market is eagerly awaiting. Complexity – a term so poorly abused today you see it written on back labels of young sauvignon blanc and semillon – relates to the bringing together in a single wine of a myriad of complementary and contrasting flavours and textures. Simply put, complexity in sparkling wine arises by creating as wide a pool of diversity as possible before bringing together the better components in a way that suits the wine’s intended style and works together in a harmonious way. Geoff Linton, the winemaker responsible for Yalumba’s flagship fizz, the rather delicious ‘D’, reckons we could be years away from our most complex local sparkling. ‘As a group we’re all still learning’, he says. ‘As far as complexity is concerned, the more you learn, the more you find you don’t know.’ Yalumba’s ‘D’ is a rich, chewy and elegant wine which, according to Linton, is strongly influenced by the techniques used to build it. Since its earliest days the wine has been given a full malolactic fermentation, pushing it towards the soft, creamy style and generating additional presence of flavour. Furthermore, the base wines are left on vintage lees for five months before assemblage and tirage, providing an additional source of yeast flavour and texture. Geoff Linton enjoys making a genuinely vintage wine that reflects the qualities and differences of the seasons. He’d hate it if his wines all turned out the same from year to year. John Ellis, who makes the sparkling Macedon from his Hanging Rock vineyard, takes the same approach, but that’s where most of the similarities end; although the Macedon is also given a full malolactic fermentation. ‘It generates great complexity and character while diminishing the varietal influences’, says Ellis. John Ellis’ Hanging Rock Macedon is a genuinely single vineyard wine so, lacking different vineyards to draw from, he’s required to use every trick in his hand to maximise its complexity. One way or another he was able to fashion a staggering 28 different base wines from which he assembled his third release. Located near Woodend in one of the more marginal of Victoria’s cool areas, the Hanging Rock vineyard has been subject to a diversity of seasons, which alone can generate complexity in a style which relies heavily on reserve components. To date the seasons have ranged from ‘miserable, cold and wet’ (1989), ‘cold and wet’ (1993, 1994), ‘cool and dry’ (1987, 1990, 1992) to ‘hot and dry’ (1988, 1991), according to John Ellis. For two centuries makers of sparkling wines have held older reserve wines back to blend to current vintage wines. It helps to smooth out the differences between the years, should this be desired (especially in non-vintage wines), and contributes more mature flavours and textures to the final blend. Geoff Linton will respond to the recently relaxed restrictions on single vintage requirements in vintage-declared wine by considering the use of up to 15% reserve wine for the 1994 and future blends. Previous ‘D’s only contained between 3-4%. In line with EC requirements, single vintage wines now only need to be 85% of the vintage nominated on the label. This makes life much easier for top-end sparkling makers because they can now use more reserve wines than before to increase their complexity and richness without having to resort to Domaine Chandon-style nomenclature to indicate a wine’s predominant vintage. Linton has matured barrel-fermented components of current vintage wine in old oak for nine months to create what he terms a ‘Claytons’ reserve, with rapidly derived reserve-like characteristics to help him get around the old rules. Innovative stuff, eh? His standard reserve wines are both pinot and chardonnay aged in old oak for three to five years and above on light vintage lees. There can be a temptation to use too much reserve, he says, for it can become too dominant. I doubt if any other Australian sparkling wine depends as heavily on its reserves as Hanging Rock’s Macedon. Ellis keeps back at least 50% of each batch as a reserve, which goes into the following year’s assemblage. This bottling (his third) comprises total of 1000 dozen, while Ellis will keep at least as much back as reserve against his next blend. It comprises 42% from 1992, 50% the of previous blend and 8% of older reserve wines from 1989, 1990 and 1991. In addition to the amount held back for the subsequent year’s blend, Ellis also holds onto other portions of each wine he makes. Some is held inside a reserve tank on which it is matured on yeast lees. ‘I don’t get rid of any lees’, says Ellis. ‘I check if they’re OK and clean, then throw them into the tank, where there are yeast cells that have been decomposing since 1987. As a result the reserve wines are becoming more and more complex, so I can reduce reserve proportions and put more young wine into the blend without compromising quality’, he says. All of John Ellis’ blending components spend their entire lives on yeast lees, so they’ve already acquired yeast complexity prior to going in the bottle. In the traditions of Krug and Bollinger, whose wine he unashamedly admires (and why shouldn’t he?), John Ellis keeps around 25% of all his base wines inside old oak casks, where he looks to develop toasty barrel-aged complexity. Perhaps the greatest unexplored source of complexity in Australian sparkling wine is the concept of diversity of fruit from different vineyard sources. Domaine Chandon and Seppelt (with the Salinger) are perhaps combining more different vineyards than other makers, but Yalumba is also seeking to maximise its opportunities with different vineyards, all the while maintaining and enhancing its particular style. Like other Australian producers of premium sparkling, Yalumba is impatient for its vines to acquire more age. ‘Pinot tends to hit its straps around five to ten years of age, ‘ says Geoff Linton, ‘when its vigour also reduces. And we’re learning about vineyard management all the time. We’re still nowhere near getting our best pinot noir. ‘It’s early days yet, and some of the new clones we’re experimenting with are producing some fantastic flavours. They’re only on their second significant crop, so we can’t tell what impact they’ll have,’ he says. Linton believes that ‘D’ will always be based around the ‘core’ of fruit he harvests from the company’s Eden Valley vineyards, founded on ‘lean, mean’ podsolic soils of such little depth above clay that the vine roots are confined to a tiny volume. Yalumba’s vineyards are close planted on a 2 by 1 metre layout, with 4,700 vines per hectare, exacerbating the competition between the vines. For the ‘D’, Yalumba also sources from cooler, fertile vineyards in Lenswood, Uraidla and Summertown in the Adelaide Hills, and in 1994 introduced base wines from Coonawarra, the Yarra Valley and above Victoria’s King Valley. ‘We’re actively pursuing grapes from other vineyards in those areas and from others’, says Linton, ‘even if the quantities available are tiny.’ ‘D’ is presently blended from around 20-25 different bases. From a single vineyard it’s harder, but certainly not impossible to create a significant spread of diversity for later blending. You can begin with by planting different clones of each variety. John Ellis has two different chardonnay clones, which account for 40% of his blend, plus three different clones of pinot noir, namely MV6, D5V12 and Mariafeldt. D5V12, the preferred dry red clone, produces very pronounced flavours while Mariafeldt, a Swiss clone, is Ellis’ answer to not having pinot meunier growing in his vineyard. ‘It grows bigger berries, with less intense flavour and colour, but is able to fill up and broaden our wine without diminishing the characters of the other components’, he says. In warmer seasons John Ellis has the luxury of being able to spread out his harvest to pick early and late, accumulating different characters each time. In cold years he says it is a relief to have harvested at all. ‘I always try to pick some while the acids are high and the flavours less diminished, but then let some go through to create softer, broader bases to increase the overall complexity’, he says. Once in the cellar, John Ellis then has every winemaker’s luxury of making different pressings cuts. Where he does things differently, he says, is to retain even the hardest of hard pressings for at least three years, by which stage he finds their phenolics to have diminished, while in oak they will have become rich, soft and yellow. ‘These can ultimately be useful in the final cuvee, and at levels as low as only 1% can be quite remarkable,’ he says.
