Again the Australian wine industry is running at breakneck speed. Although it certainly wasn’t out of the blue, many of us were astonished by news of the Fosters/Mildara Blass takeover of Beringer. The upshot is that ‘globalisation’ has become the industry buzzword. Will Southcorp buy or else find itself bought? Will BRL Hardy be able to afford the US expansion it’s been talking up lately? And how will Pernod Ricard react to what’s happening around them? This issue of OnWine coincides with the introduction of the latest edition of The OnWine Australian Wine Annual to the market. It also welcomes a new OnWine Wine of the Year, Cullen’s brilliant 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, a worthy successor to last year’s winner, Rosemount Estate’s 1996 Mountain Blue Cabernet Shiraz. The new 2001 edition of the annual also highlights the other five finalists for this award, of which Tim Adams’ Aberfeldy Shiraz 1998 is the Wine of the Edition for this issue. Tim Adams doesn’t often taste each and every vintage of The Aberfeldy, but staged complete vertical for OnWine. I hope my notes reflect how far this under-rated wine has come in such a short time. The other leading and under-rated shiraz which receives its share of attention in this issue is Coriole’s Lloyd Reserve. What this excellent wine shares with The Aberfeldy is a link with its terroir which obviously remains unbroken, largely for the reason that its fruit is harvested fully ripe and not over-ripe. Tim Adams and Mark Lloyd are equally committed to the integrity of their flagship wines and share a determination not to be influenced by the winemaking and viticultural trends which are turning so many of our top reds into dry vintage port. In recent weeks I have been surprised by the amount of feedback I have received directly and indirectly over an article I contributed to Wine Magazine in which I compared the rating system developed by Langton’s Fine Wine Auctions with that of my own in The OnWine Wine Annual. Given the nature of some of the reaction, I might take this opportunity to clarify a point I made in that story which I thought was self-evident and which I certainly still believe to be perfectly true. My point was that ‘I think I am the only person who attempts today to classify the Australian wine industry on the basis of quality!’. The key word here is ‘classify’. While several other critics produce books which rate many vintages of individual wines, no other writer attempts to create a comprehensive annual classification of Australia’s wine brands based on their own tasting scores. All of which leads me to welcome two new wines to my ‘1’ level of classification, making a total of 17 for the entire country. These are Petaluma’s Coonawarra and Best’s Thomson Family Shiraz from Great Western. To the makers of these wines, and to Vanya Cullen, maker of the OnWine Wine of the Year – a wine which is already one of the ‘Perfect 1s’ – my sincere congratulations. You can order the new edition of the annual near the back of this issue or through www.onwine.com.au.
