While Australia’s warmer regions like the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale are going from strength to strength, our once-fashionable cool climate areas are losing their edge and their identity. This point was rammed home to me recently when I helped to judge the National Cool Climate Wine Show, a small and rather eclectic event held at Bathurst under the chairmanship of Tim Knappstein, himself a first-class show judge and a top palate. The third judge was Ian McKenzie, a former stalwart of the Seppelt brand and Southcorp chief white winemaker now turned consultant. To just a single one of the three hundred-plus entries in the show did we award a gold medal, and believe me, weren’t playing tough. We managed a fistful of silver medals, a couple which were rather fortunate, plus about fifteen bronze medals, several of which were far from unanimous. So who entered their wines? An interesting cross-section of vineyards and wineries from Southcorp and McWilliams down to some of the smallest and most obscure in the land. Many I had never heard of, and some I definitely do not want to hear from again. I actually rated two wines at nine points out of twenty, well below a level fit for human consumption! By and large this show was populated by the next generation of aspirants from Australia’s cool regions, hoping to become the next Bannockburns, Giacondas and Plantagenets. Sadly, this show reflected much of what is happening in cool climates all round Australia. The viticultural and winemaking problems they displayed are typical of what wine buyers are confronted by every time they take a trip to places like the Mornington Peninsula, the Yarra Valley, Mount Barker, the Adelaide Hills, Pemberton/Manjimup, Tasmania and Gippsland. I fear that many emerging wine drinkers may either develop their palates believing cool climate wines are empirically thin and faulty, or else will shun them altogether. So many cool climate wines are lean and under-fruited, lacking sufficient weight and depth of fruit, before finishing with a bite of hard, green acid. Many of the entries in the show – and for that matter many of the cool climate wines sent to my office for evaluation – are made from vineyards established and managed to produce crops far in excess of their ability to ripen them adequately. We used to joke that the French made an art of making wine from under-ripe fruit, but we’re now doing our best to emulate them. Twenty years ago, when many cool climate regions were being planted to vines for the first time in recent history, we used to forgive greenish, herbal tastes of asparagus and capsicum in reds and whites. There’s no justification for these flavours today, unless the season is unusually cold and late. Many wines are also simply faulty and under-made. The popular tendency to take a hands-off approach to winemaking results in the same spectrum of winemaking faults we so often harped about in the French wines of a decade or more ago. In terms of taste, these can come across as stale (oxidative); varnishy (volatile); outhouse, burned rubber or onion skin aromas (reductive); meaty or sour (bacterial); bitter (over-extracted or reductive) and a whole host of other unpleasant qualities. Of course a small presence in a wine of either of these characters might not necessarily qualify as a fault, but I am not referring to small presences in the slightest! The wine of the show – and quite clearly the only wine averaging 18.5 out of 20 or gold medal quality – was something I had never heard of. It was a 2001 Shiraz from a brand-new Mornington Peninsula development called Box Stallion, which takes its name from the fact that its home vineyard has been developed on a former horse stud whose impressive stallion housing facility is being converted to a cellar door. Its maritime climate prevents the Mornington Peninsula being as consistent with shiraz as regions like the Barossa, Great Western or McLaren Vale, but when fully ripe and well made, Mornington Peninsula shiraz makes an astonishing wine. This example exhibits the perfumed spiciness and piercingly intense small black and red berry fruit seen in top Peninsula shirazes. Its handling in both French and American oak lends it a balanced measure of vanilla, chocolate and cedary complexity. It’s medium to full in weight richness, but for sheer depth and intensity, it will take some beating. Another Box Stallion wine that impressed me was its Arneis 2001, its first release from this little-known Italian white variety. Offering a full measure of ripe, succulent flavour and a typically herbal and pear-like perfume, it’s clean and fresh, finishing long and slightly chalky. Box Stallion wines can be found at www.boxstallion.com.au. Ten Up and Coming Cool Climate Vineyards: Apsley Gorge (Tasmania) Box Stallion (Mornington Peninsula, Victoria) Cannibal Creek (Cardinia Ranges, Victoria) Chestnut Hill (Yea, Victoria) Domaine Epis (Macedon Ranges, Victoria) Jinks Creek (Gippsland, Victoria) Kooyong (Mornington Peninsula, Victoria) Madew (Canberra, ACT) Stefano Lubiana (Tasmania) Woodside (Margaret River, WA)
