Are makers of Australian red wine missing the point? On one hand most of the world’s winemaking nations are collectively making red wines of elegance and restraint, but here in Australia our winemakers appear hell-bent on moving the opposite way as quickly as possible. With the passage of each recent vintage, our red wines are taking on more ripeness, more alcohol and more oak. The only real differences between these wines and the jammy, over-ripe reds of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties is that today we use small oak – or minuscule oak if you count oak shavings – and a pH meter to ensure that our modern reds are deficient in neither wood extract nor acidity. It’s hardly five years since I remember telling attendees at my wine classes that most red wines weighed in between 11.5% and 12.5% alcohol by volume, with the occasional exception touching the then heady limit of 13%. Today one could be excused for suggesting that by creating a red with a mere 13% alcohol by volume was to run the risk of it being taken for a rose. Or a blackcurrant fruit cup. Thirteen is nothing! Look at the bottle shop shelves and see how many are rated as high as fourteen, or even fifteen! And remember that the labelling laws still in use given winemakers freedom to under-state the true alcohol levels in wine by 1.5%. You could be drinking more port than you think! Back in the bad old days, cork-sniffers would dip a pH meter into their wines before their tongues. With alcohol today it is quite different. Once you start leaving over 13% of alcohol in a finished wine, white or red, you take the serious risk that the alcohol itself will sooner or later become the dominant factor in its flavour and structure. Young wines may initially explode with fruit and commence their careers in a scaffolding of brassy new oak. But what happens when they mature a bit? Fruit and oak marry, reduce in impact and intensity and settle down; alcohol doesn’t. Fifteen percent will always be fifteen percent. Sooner or later the wine will taste hot and spirity and once these factors become obvious the more hot and spirity the wine will become. Of course there are the exceptions – from shiraz and pinot noir, especially, which can cope with high alcohols in their stride. These wines are not cropped anywhere near the Australian standard of five or more tonnes per acre, but nearer to two tonnes or less. These are the wines – such as Henschke Hill of Grace and Mount Edelstone, Rockford Basket Press Shiraz, Penfolds Grange, Giaconda Pinot Noir, Mount Mary Pinot Noir – which come from both warm and cool climates and from mature vineyards whose intensity of fruit can carry the dual impacts of high alcohol and heavy oak. So why the emergence of these wines? There’s no single reason but the advent of new criteria for deciding when to harvest grapes, the introduction of unfamiliar trellis types, the peer group pressure generated by the wine show system and the remarkable run of excellent seasons over the last five years must each have played some part. In the early 1980s Australian winemakers turned their attention to other aspects apart from the accumulation of sugar in grapes as a measure of when to harvest them. It had become popular knowledge that different components of grape juice actually ripened at different times. You could, for instance, have grapes with perfectly adequate sugar levels for the making of table wine, but whose flavours themselves were under or over-ripe. Take, for example, the number of pinot noirs you now see with alcohols around 14% but also with green, grassy and herbaceous flavours. Or the other pinot noirs we used to see, harvested earlier to make a wine of 11.5% or so, whose flavours were perfect but whose alcohol was actually deficient. Yes, deficient! You actually need around 13% in most cases to make a top pinot noir. Today growers are using a range of harvest criteria to decide the time of harvest, extending from grape colouring, tasting the fruit to terpene (flavour) analysis. The high-alcohol phenomenon is anything but limited to the warmer areas like the Barossa, the Hunter or the Swan. Another startling reality is the fact that while just five years ago most of the cooler regions would struggle in even the warmest of seasons to create sugar levels with the potential for 12.5% by volume, these same vineyards are now regularly turning out over 13.5% in average years. While it’s undeniable that the modern vertical trellising systems introduced by hot-gospelling viticulturists like Dick Smart are responsible for a significant improvement in Australia’s cool-climate wine, there is reason to believe that because modern viticultural technology is being applied more for the fact that it exists, rather than for any ultimate gain in wine quality. Thank heavens that red wines from the Adelaide Hills, Yarra Valley and Mornington Peninsula no longer taste of asparagus soup, the taste we actually flocked towards in the early 1980s when cool climates first became ‘in’. But why, from regions which should be seeking elegance, tightness and finesse to fully exploit the quality of their fruit, should they go to the opposite extreme, with over-ripe and simple fruit and an alcohol kick to boot? Peer group pressure plays a huge role in Australian wine, especially through our wine show system. Many of our best wineries don’t enter wine shows, but gold medals are awarded for keeps. Our winemakers do pay attention – whether they follow their direction or not – on which wines are scoring the gongs. At least 60% of the judges at the major shows on our wine circuit are winemakers for our three largest producers: the Southcorp group, Orlando Wyndham and BRL Hardy. Without suggesting for a second that the judges are able to detect their own wines and then sponsor them accordingly, it is entirely reasonable to expect them to associate with wines of a similar style to those they are taught to make or are teaching others to make. Look at the red wines winning awards today, whether they’re from any of the companies mentioned above; Henschke, Rosemount, Wolf Blass or McWilliams. While in most (but certainly not all) cases the trophy-winners have a sound enough balance of fruit, oak, alcohol and tannin, too many of the wines collecting lesser awards tend to be less complete versions of the same. One could reasonably suggest that it’s in the interests of the big companies to promote their own styles and that the message that filters down to the also-rans in the shows is to make a better fist of the same big company styles. Is there a danger that Australian wine, like a Barossa sausage machine, could quickly evolve into a maker of uniformly unbalanced and ultimately ordinary red wine, especially by world standards? Quite possibly, given by the feedback from overseas, where the words ‘jammy’, ‘porty’, ‘over-ripe’ and ‘too much of everything’ are becoming as synonymous with contemporary Australian red wines as they did with the Californian reds of twenty years ago. Australian reds have swung from one extreme to the other in little under ten years. Now we just have to find a balance. Soon.
