Chardonnay supposed to be a forgiving grape. How forgiving, we will soon come to see. For there is no doubt that while winemakers get most of the glamour, 1993 will be the chardonnay vintage when Australia’s viticulturalists earn their well-earned stripes. 1992’s winter was so cold that 1993 was always going to be a nail-biter. Budburst was delayed in most regions and flowering was frequently tardy by around three weeks, pushing ripening well back into the cooler months. What’s more, until Easter at least, the ripening season was generally cloudy and humid, without becoming excessively wet. The cool weather caused the grapes to ripen later than usual in most major wine areas; in damp conditions which reduced yields by promoting vine diseases from downy and powdery mildew to botrytis. Growers in warmer areas, where grapes ripen earlier than in cool regions, harvested much of their crops less ripe than normal, sometimes just in time to avoid fruit breakdown on the vines. 1993 was, however, a vintage of two parts. Some chardonnays never stood a chance, whereas a long and extended Indian summer followed immediately after Easter, helping many of the cooler vineyards to achieve full ripeness. Although some areas fought hard just to make a sound wine, many crops, already reduced in most cases by a factor between 10 to 30%, were picked at optimal flavour and composition to create a dazzling spectrum of exciting new Australian chardonnay. Chardonnay growers in Coonawarra, Padthaway, Clare Mudgee, the Adelaide Hills and the Mornington Peninsula had little to complain about. According to Greg Clayfield, March was the point that turned the 1993 vintage into a benchmark season in South Australia’s south-east. The warmest and driest march-April for many years created great flavour and composition in Padthaway and Coonawarra chardonnay, allowing Clayfield and his Lindemans team the opportunity to indulge themselves in the sorts of oxidative techniques that the contemporary winemaker longs to try out with chardonnay. Results are keenly awaited. Robert Paul of Montrose isn’t at all convinced that Mudgee’s similarly late, cooler year isn’t his region’s norm. In fact, it was precisely the ideal season for the typ4 of wine he’s seeking to make there. ‘If you look at the area’s climate over a longer period of time, our harvest dates aren’t that unusual’, he says. ‘The ‘eighties and early ‘nineties were dominated by warmer years, but the 1993 harvest took place at about the same time as most years in the 1970s.’ Nat White at Main Ridge Estate (Mornington Peninsula, Victoria) is equally happy. Despite some crop reductions through downy mildew (which reduces yields but doesn’t necessarily impact on wine quality) in the first half of the ripening season, 1993 could become the peninsula’s best year for chardonnay to date. The later half of the season brought so many varieties to ripeness at once, there was a danger in some cases of chardonnay becoming over-ripe. White reports no botrytis in his vineyard, but brilliant fruit composition and flavour that required no acid alterations. Harvest time was perfectly normal. Tim Knappstein says that the late Indian summer 1993 produced the best chardonnay he’s yet seen in Clare along with some monstrous flavours and composition scores in the Adelaide Hills. So who were the winemakers that needed to adapt their techniques and use instinctive cunning to cope with the season of ’93? Both Upper Lower Hunter Valleys experienced similar conditions in ’93. Their chardonnays tend to lack their customary fatness and reveal more fragrance and acidity than usual. According to Phillip Ryan, despite the Hunter’s cool and overcast season through November and December, Mount Pleasant’s chardonnay was harvested just two weeks later than normal, thanks to a short spell of late January heat. Ryan’s chardonnay came in between 12 and 12.5% in alcohol, but was more herbaceous, elegant and perfumed than usual. The wines are pleasing, he says, but clearly atypical of the region. To maintain harmony between fruit and oak, he took them out of wood about four weeks earlier than usual. 1993 dealt much of Tasmania a difficult viticultural hand. The Pipers Brook area experienced cool, wet conditions until April, before warm sunlight helped ripen the later white varieties. Crops were generally down by 30-40% with downy and powdery mildew and botrytis mould, some of which crept into the table wines and will inevitably make them earlier-maturing than normal. Vineyard management was all-important. Andrew Pirie went to extraordinary lengths to keep botrytis out of his Pipers Brook Chardonnay, dropping about 20% of his fruit on the ground. ‘We normally splash the wine around a bit, but last year we were more cautious in our handling. We didn’t want it to pick up oxidative enzymes from around the winery, we still put it through a malo-lactic fermentation’, he says. The outcome, according to Pirie, is a wine that shows the characteristic expression of Pipers Brook chardonnay. Although there is no premature colour development to suggest that some botrytis may have found its way into the wine, Pirie expects it to soften more quickly than usual. Fans of Pipers Brook’s top drop, The Summit, will go wanting from this year, since Pirie was unable to let the grapes hang on the vines for long enough to reach his intended minimum alcoholic strength of 13.5%. No chapitalisation or concentrate used here! Typical of much of the country, Victoria’s vintage was remarkably uniform despite the diversity of its wine regions. It began as a challenge to the grower, as an almost Biblical scourge of numerous viticultural diseases staged a bold attempt to wipe the vintage off the map. The Yarra Valley’s vintage was later than usual, and several growers, Seville Estate included, had to contend with botrytis right until harvest. Dr Peter McMahon chose to hand-pick his way around the infected fruit and then to minimise skin contact in the winery in a bid to minimise botrytis influence. He has found the same characters as usual in his finished wine, although its titratable acidity of just over eight grams per litre is higher than usual for Seville Estate. In 1993 the Macedon region produced chardonnay of similar composition to the previous vintage. Even the harvest dates were similar, although in 1993 the warm post-Easter sunshine is to thank for that. Like most Victorian wine regions, the western districts experienced a growing season of two disparate halves. Fruit was picked fully-ripe with good acids, creating fleshy, but not fat wines with good flavour. Most of the wine areas in Victoria’s west are quite isolated and thereby avoid the disease problems of other parts. 1993 was a season to sort out the chardonnay makers in the Margaret River. Powdery mildew (downy mildew is not found in WA) demanded careful attention to canopy management and sulphur application in the vineyard. Mike Peterkin operates the Pierro vineyard and winery. In February he maximised fruit exposure by plucking excessive leaves away, and two weeks later removed by hand all diseased bunches, reducing his yield by at least one third. A month later he began to harvest the vineyard, picking around the edges to discourage members of the vagrant avarian population. Despite these difficulties, Peterkin was still able to achieve sugars in the desired range of 13 to 13.5 Beaume. Peterkin sulphured the grapes immediately on arrival at the winery before a rapid separation of juice and skins. After clarification the juice was found to be clean and aromatic, fortunately without any hint of mildew. Peterkin was then confident enough to add back some of the clarification bottoms and ferment this wine as normal, indulging in the high level of solids contact which makes Pierro Chardonnay one of the richest and most powerful in Australia. Winter provided the final twist to this story by turning so cold in April that Peterkin’s malolactic fermentations stopped, only to be rekindled once December provided enough warmth to see them safely through. Mount Barker’s season followed unseasonal snow late in 1992, before three cool, dry months in December, January and February. Ripening was slow, but even until Wednesday March 17, when as John Wade remembers, all meterological hell broke loose. The English Masters of Wine arrived in the area on the same day, but Wade is loath to cast a link between the two events. That day it hailed, beginning three days of solid rain which depostited an average of six inches around the district. Grapes that had been almost ready to pick were immediately placed on the casualty list. Deciding to leave on the vine any fruit that was less damaged by hail, John Wade recommended picking the rest as soon as it was dry enough to do so. This early-picked fruit, while not of the same standard as before the rain, still retained attractive flavours, although some dilution had clearly occured. No further rain fell, so Wade’s remaining fruit was able to rebuild its sugar levels. Sadly, however, its flavour lacked the freshness of the first harvest. Assembling the wines then became a question of balancing the flavour of the early fruit with enough of the latter to create body and strength, attempting not to outweigh flavour with alcohol. Since the resulting wines lacked the richness and weight of the region’s norm, Wade was then careful not to further hinder their balance with excessive oak.
