I am about to break a long-held rule of mine, which is not to comment directly on the words of other wine critics. I will try to do so without commenting directly on individual wines, since I respect that different critics will naturally rate and review different wines in different ways. So I’ll constrain these comments to a totally bewildering rating of Australia’s top 52 wineries as recently published by the SMH and associated papers plus the Real Review.
To start with, it’s completely meaningless to rate a winery. Wine writers should stick with just rating the wines they taste without entering into what I believe is a commercially driven process devised by James Halliday and taken to the next level by Hardie Grant.
Think on this for a moment: how on earth do you rate a winery? On the beauty of its view, on its architectural merit, on its feng shui, on its dogs, or perhaps even on its playground?
But for the moment let’s just stick with its wines. How then rate a winery like Leeuwin Estate, which for much of its history has led the non-Burgundian world with its Art Series Chardonnay, but has frankly not performed at anywhere near that level with any other wine? Do you rate it highly because of its consistent excellence with chardonnay, or do you tear strips off it for being merely good to very good with its other wines? There are countless wineries in this category.
Or how about a winery like Ferngrove? Wonderful consistency and quality for price across its range of wines, which never quite shoot the lights out, but are never expensive. How does this fit in?
Or how about a winery that manages consistent excellence across its tiny output of one, two or three wines? How does it rate against a huge brand with one or two classic labels and a whole lot of well-made but otherwise boring wines? Better or worse? Go figure.
And the big brands, several of which make this list, are not even individual wineries at all, since they’re created across a number of locations. Is there a single Penfolds winery? Or Hardy’s? So how do they make the list?
But if you own the list, you make the rules.
Or how about a winery that in Australia has taken a major international grape variety to a stellar level not seen elsewhere in this country and has been recognised for such around the world, released some of our finest reds from a major emerging variety (in this case nebbiolo), returned to form with one of the better, more structural pinot noirs in the land and is singly responsible for the emergence of its region as a sought-after producer of shiraz, in which it is unquestionably the best?
According to the recently published list, it rates number 50. That means that there must be 49 better wineries in Australia than Giaconda, including Sittella in WA’s Swan Valley, rated some 15 places in front. An interesting notion, perhaps, but how could it possibly be correct? Even vaguely correct?
So there must have been a technical glitch in the process?
While the non-rating of Giaconda is certainly a mystery of Hitchcockian proportions, some of the other outcomes might cause even an average detective to start reaching for the magnifying glass, pipe and deerstalker.
Here are a few of the outcomes that caused my body sudden, but involuntary movement:
- Penfolds (which happens to make Grange, Bin 707, Magill Estate, Bin 150, Bin 389, Yattarna, Bin 51 Riesling, the special Bin reds including the recent Bin 111A) is rated at 31. One behind Levantine Hill.
- In just a single year, Penfolds dropped 30 places, from 1 to 31. Yet their wines have shown improvement of late…
- Mount Mary, which makes the Yarra Valley’s finest wine by daylight, is rated at 21, eleven places behind Yering Station.
- Four of the top nine wineries in Australia come from the Hunter Valley, and none of them is Andrew Thomas.
- Five of the top nine come from New South Wales.
- Morris is indeed home to some wonderful old fortifieds but finds itself the no. 1 winery in Victoria.
- At 16, Taylors is rated as the Clare Valley’s top winery. Grosset doesn’t even make the top 52.
- And finally, Giaconda is rated the third-best winery in Beechworth, behind Eldorado Road and Fighting Gully Road. Astonishing.
The idea of putting wineries in this kind of order just doesn’t stack up. But it gets worse. Apparently, this list runs into the hundreds…
