Dammit, I must be missing the point. One thousand plus wineries and Lord knows how many retailers can’t be wrong. Surely if a red wine comes from the vintage year 1998 AD it has to be good, if not great or else stinkingly wonderful! The sun came out, the rain held off, the fruit ripened (and ripened) and virtually every dang winemaker out there got exactly what he or she wanted. And that, I reckon, is where the trouble began. Before the knives come out, let me begin by stating unequivocally that there is indeed a raft of exceptional Australian reds from 1998. Enough for it to be declared an excellent vintage. Southcorp deserves great credit for its collection, especially under the Penfolds, Wynns and Lindemans Coonawarra labels. And without stopping for breath I am flooded with happy memories of exceptional wines like the Petaluma Coonawarra, the Katnook Estate Merlot, Tim Adams’ Aberfeldy, the Devil’s Lair, Rosemount’s Balmoral, Coriole’s Lloyd Shiraz, the Bass Phillip pinots, Majella’s Malleea, Dalwhinnie’s Shiraz and the pick of them all, the Cullen Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot blend. Even the Hunter had the potential for a great red vintage, and wines like Brokenwood’s Graveyard, Tyrrell’s Vat 11 and Briar Ridge’s Stockhausen Hermitage clearly delivered in style. The last vintage that generated the sort of excitement that has everyone upturning boxes in the aisles for every last bottle of 1998 was 1990. Like 1998, it was uniformly hot and dry, beginning and ending warm to hot in most regions. For the first time since 1986 growers on the southern and eastern sides of the continent were able to decide for themselves how long to leave fruit out in the vineyard. Entering unchartered territory, many makers made poor decisions. Excited by the flavours they saw and the promising weather forecasts they heard, many pushed their fruit too far and delayed picking by too long. Ultimately, a great potential vintage in the vineyard was largely wasted. Although they began full of flavour and concentration, most of the powerfully structured, jammy and blocky ‘premium’ reds of 1990 which were supposed to live forever are now past their best. There simply isn’t the legacy of great 1990 red wines that there might and should have been. Something similar but not the same happened in 1998, when too many makers, large and small, unheard of and highly reputed, made reds they will surely live to regret. Whereas in 1990 winemakers were hampered by their unfamiliarity with such warm conditions and by a less sophisticated approach to handling tannins in red wine, those who failed to perform in 1998 have no such excuses. Instead, it was a different set of pressures that caused so many lost opportunities in 1998. The most influential voices within the American media, a significant section of the Australian wine press and even the Australian wine show system and have recently talked up and promoted wines that are ultra-ripe and alcoholic, lacking in freshness and vitality. Typically over-oaked, they are usually excessively endowed with thick, chewy tannins and are virtually devoid of any meaningful cellaring potential. Furthermore, many have also been deliberately made to conjure unnatural levels of complexity in their relative youth and tread and indeed cross over that very fine line between being ‘funky’, ‘feral’ (the two hip-est words of the moment in Australian winespeak) and outright faulty. Too many wines are compromised through this fashionable modern trend which takes non-interference in wine making that extra degree or two too far. Too many modern reds have high pH levels. Too many are made with inadequate racking, acid and sulphur additions, as winemakers vie with each other to make the most ‘natural’ red wines, but with unnatural results. As in 1990, too many winemakers in 1998 left fruit out on the vines for too long for no better reason than they could. Seduced by the possibilities of the additional concentration, thickness and palate structure of more alcoholic young red wines, many failed to accept that once fruit is picked past its optimal flavour ripeness it changes dramatically in character. First to be compromised was the liveliness and purity of perfectly ripe fruit, as the flavour profiles turned from pure sweet berry and plum flavours in red grapes to the cooked, dehydrated and dried fruit flavours more suggestive of prunes, treacle and jam. In their youth some wines from such fruit almost get away with it, since their initial burst of intensity and texture is very appealing to many drinkers, trade, judges and media alike. But once the fruit subdues with time in the bottle, all the underlying problems mentioned previously are revealed. Fruit loses liveliness and focus, alcohol becomes more dominant, and hard tannins become more aggressive as balance and harmony are compromised. The wines I’m talking about are priced anywhere between $15 and $200 per bottle and, like the green herby dimethyl sulphide-influenced reds of the late ’70s and early ’80s before them, represent nothing more than an evolutionary cul-de-sac in Australian winemaking. Brian Croser was first to apply the term ‘dead grape character’ to these wines. It’s his view that many winemakers, a large proportion of which are presently inexperienced, have become convinced that desirable levels of concentration and complexity can be derived from ultra-ripeness in fruit, rather than through what the vine is able to deliver to live grapes and what wine is able to develop as it ages naturally. By making ‘dead grape’ wine in today’s popular protective fashion you end up with something that tastes jammy and soapy, Croser argues. So, to avoid mono-dimensional products, winemakers are forced into adding other layers of complexity by going ‘to the edge of the envelope’. In reality, all you can find there is something to compensate for a lack of real fruit character. Hence the modern plethora of spicy, raisined, chocolatey and honeyed red wines, which by their very nature are so amply suited to an excess of American oak-derived vanilla flavours. Croser doesn’t reckon that’s how to make wine, and I for one heartily agree. Neither can I argue against his suggestion that these wines are about as manipulated as the ports they often resemble, or at the very least, the amarone styles with which they have so much in common. When tasting the greatest wines in the world directly out of barrel I’m always struck by how incredibly clean, pure and balanced they are. They’re not wines of artefact or intervention. They’re often relatively uncomplicated, however explosive or delicate they may be. Great wines – which are by definition long-living wines – develop much of their complexity and character in the bottle, not in the cellar. They’re not forced, they’re not dirty, and they’ve not been over-subjected to winemaking influence, either through inadequacy or excess. It’s a tragedy how many high-profile Australian vineyards mistakenly making fast-maturing, dirty and lifeless reds instead of the longer-living, more focused and better-balanced wines they could be releasing. It’s equally tiring and saddening to hear a winemaker justify a soupy, smoky dry vintage port of a red on the grounds that ‘I can’t figure out why, but the flavours just ripened so late this year’, an excuse that holds water in only the smallest number of cases. Or else: ‘I’ve decided not to pick on outdated criteria like sugar and acidity any more; I’m only doing it on taste.’ That approach clearly only works for a negligible proportion of its adherents, most of whose wines I used to admire. Sure, for many of Australia’s better vineyards, 1998 was perhaps the best season since 1962. Sadly, for too many of the rest, it was only their best since 1997.
