Before it was bottled I couldn’t drink enough of the Lindemans St George Cabernet Sauvignon 1980. This wine not only won the Jimmy Watson Trophy, but ignited a twenty-year debate on what cabernet sauvignon should and should not taste like. To whit: do herby greenish mulberry flavours form a valid part of cabernet’s flavour spectrum? I worked the disastrously damp 1983 vintage at Lindemans Coonawarra, the highlight of which was meant to be assisting with the St George. Alas, when the pitiful amount of dirty rotten fruit harvested eventually showed up at the winery, nature had already dictated there was to be no St George made that year. Off it went to Karadoc, near Mildura, to be turned into Ben Ean or something similar. So, unable to help make St George, I decided to relate to it another way, by syphoning off as much as I felt I could get away with via the racking valve on a very large stainless steel tank half-way along the right aisle at the Rouge Homme winery. I know I was not alone in choosing this particular means to express my affection for the young wine, but despite my best efforts and those of others like me, there was enough remaining for commercial release. It was always a leafy, greenish sort of a wine but while young these flavours were held in check by explosive, heady dark berry fruit flavours, themselves wound around the tightest and finest of tannins. The overall effect was not unlike taking a swallow-dive onto a pile of velvet cushions. Alas, as time progressed, the wine deteriorated. Having tasted it the other day I’m actually glad I don’t have any left. It looks simple, green, Ribena-like and sappy. Lindemans reckon they’ve since eliminated the precursors to these flavours, which they believe were yeast-related. I’ve also tasted the excellent new 1998 Coonawarra red wine releases from Lindemans, each of which will eventually be recognised as the best yet released under its respective label. It’s been an uphill battle for Lindemans Coonawarra. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s its vineyards were very much a proving ground for innovative mechanised techniques. By the early 1990s the vines found some balance, capably ripening normal yields of small bunches of small berries towards the outside of a vertical canopy. Yet while the vineyards’ output have looked great on paper, the wines themselves have under-achieved. At various stages they’ve been hampered by herby under-ripe flavours, inadequate oak and sappy tannins, each of which in their own way have reduced the wines’ ability to show direction and focus. In warm years the wines have tasted thick and jammy, in cooler years thin and weedy. Nobody will ever be able to say had the vineyards been more conventionally managed, if the outcome might have been any different. 1980 was the last year in which a Lindemans vineyard was cane-pruned in conventional manner in Coonawarra, and all Lindemans Coonawarra reds contained some component of minimally pruned fruit until as recently as 1996. Surprisingly, two of the better wines, from 1986 and 1991, each have considerable minimally pruned components. Proponents of minimal pruning reiterate that skirting fruit and foliage from the vines is essential with this type of canopy management, to reduce yields and correct canopy alignment. Petaluma provides a fascinating comparison with Lindemans over an extended period, since its vineyards are hand-pruned and hand-harvested, and the volumes of its Coonawarra red would roughly equate with that of St George. My most recent tastings of each vintage suggest that since 1986, when the St George is clearly a superior wine to Petaluma’s, the wines have been too closely pointed to separate in 1988, 1991, 1995 and 1996. Petaluma’s wine is comfortably ahead in 1987, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 and 1998. There was no Petaluma in 1989, a year of a particularly ordinary St George. The point of the exercise isn’t to talk St George down, but is more in the vein of simply wondering what might have been. The 1998 St George is everything a modern Coonawarra cabernet should be: fine, elegant, restrained, yet bursting with the sort of intense and complex small berry flavours that few regions anywhere in the world could dream of matching. Its tannins are smooth and tight-knit and its palate as concentrated as it is reserved. Lindemans’ Coonawarra winemaker is the affable Greg Clayfield, a thoughful champion of the way Lindemans has grown and made wine over his two decades or so at the Coonawarra helm. It’s his view that the improvements in St George have come from a number of sources, especially in the vineyard. ‘Our approach to grape maturity has improved. We’re picking a little riper in the 1990s than we were in the1980s, when our focus was on the ‘elegant’ style of red.’ The vineyards are also monitored more closely for water stress and irrigation is more judiciously applied. In the cellar, we’ve also had considerably improved access to more and better oak.’
