Having just tasted a large number of white wines today from the 2003 vintage, I must admit to be more than slightly surprised at the number of ‘finished’ wines on the marketplace that display what would appeared to be stuck ferment characters and even smoke-tainted qualities. While attempting to make notes for a particular Verdelho, I had written down ‘rather like an Islay malt’ before actually realising what I had written. Under a different guise, its combination of greenish seaweed-like characters and peat-like smokiness might have been appealing, but not in this case. Sometimes the smoke-tainted qualities can be more subtle and hard to identify, but I am rather shocked that some makers still find such wines to be commercially saleable. Similarly, there is a higher level of estery stressed fruit evident in Australian chardonnay from 2003 than I am accustomed to seeing, alongside some rather extraordinary levels of residual sugar. Clearly, the accumulated years of drought have seriously affected the levels of yeast nutrient present in many wines. Let’s hope this recent climate change is a reversible process.
