It’s Wine Show Time. Time for hundreds of wines to be decorated with medals of bronze, silver and gold and for dozens of others to receive those elusive trophies. But are they the best wines around? Call me cynical, but I reckon there’s an increasing tendency to pick out ‘show wines’, rather than the best wines at major Australian shows. Since most of the judges are winemakers, and mostly winemakers from the larger companies, there’s a real danger they are opting for wines they admire as the best made, rather than the best to drink. The result? A welter of gold medal and trophy winners with excessive oak, over-ripe or porty fruit and alarming alcohol levels, which taste like Wagner in full flight when young but shortly thereafter look haggard and decayed, a directionless mishmash nobody would want to drink. Too many multi-gold medal and trophy winners which should cellar well just simply don’t stack up. The Australian show system does remain the best of its kind in the world and nobody has developed a superior alternative. That wouldn’t stop overnight improvements, such as the removal of classes for unbottled wine, a standardisation of class structure between shows and an improvement in the conditions for tasters. Judges in the Melbourne show face sub-arctic conditions so cold that the only wines they can smell between shivers are those constituted by enough American timber to construct a Maryland mansion. Wine shows began to provide a forum for new growers and makers to see how their wines were graded by experts and to receive constructive feedback to help them make better wine. Shows have much to do with the present quality of Australian wine right across the board. Is time for a change in the philosophical approach to the wine show circuit? Could it take a broader and more stylistic approach? Now that much of our best wine is sold in international markets, it is frequently evaluated against a completely different set of parameters to those back home, often with startlingly different interpretations. Can wine shows cater for elegant, restrained wine that doesn’t leap out of the glass when young? Can they be less predictable? Can they take long-term potential more into account? Can they give a trophy to a chardonnay which has not seen American oak? Nobody’s expecting miracles here, but I’d love to tip some of the trophy-winners I used to collect into the mouths of those who chose them. Jeremy Oliver.
