Just because it’s been growing here for more than 150 years, it doesn’t mean that Australian winemakers aren’t trying to make shiraz better. Ever since former Penfolds great maker Max Schubert started theorising on the making of Grange, many of our best winemakers have taken to shiraz with the creative energy an Italian might apply to the concept of a fast car. With shiraz, people matter just as much as site and quality of vines, and there’s no variety more able to reflect minute differences of winemaking approach and terroir. Some of the most innovative modern shirazes actually come from regions boasting a long historical association with the grape. Here are four winemakers keen to challenge the perceptions of what their regions have traditionally achieved with shiraz. Primo Estate Angel Gully Shiraz (McLaren Vale) ‘While I respect and enjoy the style, I felt the world didn’t need another typically ripe and juicy McLaren Vale shiraz’ says Primo Estate’s Joe Grilli, the individual behind the highly respected ‘Joseph’ label. ‘Dina (his wife) and I wanted something finer and more exotic, so fifteen years ago we started looking for a site in Clarendon, the cooler part of McLaren Vale around 250 metres in altitude. In 1997 the Grillis found a site that excited them. Aside from boasting a majestic gum tree that could almost have been the inspiration for the one depicted on the Joseph label, its mean shallow soils over shale-like rock suggested the potential to grow small yields of intensely aromatic and mineral shiraz. They ‘took the plunge’, began planting the site, and today have ten acres under vine and four vintages in the bottle of ‘Angel Gully’ Shiraz. While the currently available 2003 release inevitably reflects the intense heat of its vintage, Grilli agrees with me that the stellar 2002 wine, made from impossibly low yields, acts as a pointer towards the future of this vineyard and its wine. It’s heady, ethereal and powerfully musky. Its genuinely savoury and mineral finish punctuates its classically sour-edged regional expression of blackcurrant and dark cherry shiraz flavour. Grilli deploys only a third new oak, toning down its role in the wine, and artfully retains a silky-fine elegance unusual from the region. Clayfield Shiraz (Grampians) Simon Clayfield has made a career out of making western Victorian shiraz, and is one of those most able to capture its deeply spicy and peppery perfume and flavours of dark plums and berries. Unlike much Australian shiraz, that from Western Victoria is typically medium to full in body, but often extremely long-living. A former winemaker at Best’s and Warrenmang amongst others, Clayfield aims to protect and conserve the shiraz flavours while tempering any aggressive tannins and astringency. Of the vintages released to date of his Clayfield Shiraz, the wines from 2001, 2002 and 2004 reveal these qualities superbly. Clayfield was one of the first makers in his part of the world to experiment by balancing his more elegant wines with finer, less assertive French oak influences. He has also drawn from his big company experience by selectively marrying together the fruit from three or four (depending on vintage conditions) small local vineyards, one of which he owns, but each of which contribute different qualities to his wine. According to Clayfield, one such vineyard provides the backbone, another the pepper and spice, another the ‘unripe plum and licorice flavours’, and another the berry flavours and darker fruits. Deftly blended but relatively unknown, his wine is a modern classic. Balgownie (Bendigo) Balgownie winemaker Tobias Ansted is reinventing a more elegant, spicy and tightly crafted expression of shiraz from the central Victorian region of Bendigo without compromising any of its typical intensity and longevity. Using fruit from the estate’s vineyard planted by Stuart Anderson in 1969, Ansted imbues its profound dark berry and plum-like qualities with complex charcuterie-like influences and assertive, but tightly integrated oak. Contemporary winemaking knowledge enables him to do this while also reining back the robust grittiness typical in Bendigo shiraz, delivering a finer and more powdery cut of astringency than typical from this warm to hot region. While the 2004 Balgownie is more minty and herbal than its immediate predecessors, the 2002 and 2003 vintages have produced wines of exceptional quality and longevity. Each of these three wines is characterized by an exotic fragrance and a sinewy firmness more than just suggestive of fine northern Rh̫ne shiraz. Capercaillie The Ghillie Shiraz (Lower Hunter Valley) Three decades of winemaking has impressed on Alasdair Sutherland that the best way to make the Hunter Valley’s more restrained and savoury expression of shiraz is pretty well to ‘keep it simple and let the fruit speak for itself’. An advocate of old vine shiraz, he’s delighted to be able to source the premier red under his Capercaillie label, The Ghillie Shiraz, from the original Bimbadgen vineyard in Pokolbin, which was planted in the late 1960s. Traditionally, the only oak that Hunter reds ever saw – and most traditional Australian reds could be included in this statement – was older, large and relatively neutral casks. With the commonplace advent of new oak barrels, which impart significantly more flavour and texture than the casks of yesteryear, the challenge facing Hunter winemakers is to impart a desirable amount of oak influence without dominating the shiraz flavours and aromas. Sutherland achieves this by ageing The Ghillie in new American oak casks for around five months before transferring it to new French oak casks from which young chardonnay has just been removed. The wine then picks up some of the appealing up-front American oak qualities, as well as the more balanced and savoury influences from French oak. The stellar 2003 vintage of this wine is a fine result; a wine of full to medium weight scented with violets, dark fruits and black pepper, and steeped in dark, inky fruit backed by tightly knit cedary oak.
