Having spent a day yesterday tasting ripe, jammy, oaky Australian reds with an average alcoholic strength closer to fourteen than thirteen percent by volume, I retired home to lick my wounds. While most of the wines I tasted were sound, ripe and drinkable, there wasn’t any outstanding highlight. I’m personally finding that the genuine highlights in Australian wine are not increasing at a rate comparable with the recent plantings, even taking into account the huge proportion of new vineyards in the inland river areas. Yesterday, as I’ve found myself doing rather a lot lately, I began to wonder if I’m just becoming too demanding and cranky over the sameness and simplicity of the vast bulk of modern quality wine. So I opened a bottle of what was labelled as Balgownie Hermitage 1986, a 100% shiraz made by Stuart Anderson from estate-grown Bendigo fruit from a warm to hot season. I’ve tasted the wine on two previous occasions, and rated it reasonably well, but not outstandingly. The wine’s alcoholic strength was 12.2%, which by modern standards probably means it would have been blended away with something else. In a nutshell, the wine was outstanding, with richness, ripeness, vitality, strength and balance, and a youthful exuberance that entirely belied its 17 years. It had entered the delicious chocolate/leather/camphor phase, but retained a remarkably intense core of blackberry and cassis flavours, not to mention its complex spectrum of exotic spices. Its richness and palate structure, with its firm spine of perfectly ripened powdery tannins, flew in the face of 99% of contemporary Australian winemaking wisdom and practice. My relief at being able to appreciate a truly great wine is now only matched by my conviction that our modern winemakers simply don’t taste enough old wine. The lessons of history are all there, beautifully preserved, in the bottle. We don’t always have to re-invent the wheel, or do we? Footnote. Stuart Anderson is still making some of the best wine of his life for two small Victoria vineyards, Domaine Epis and Mount Gisborne.
