The year printed on a wine’s label is its vintage year, the year the grapes were harvested. In most cases, the year also refers to the year of fermentation, although some late-harvested and very sweet northern hemisphere dessert wines can be slow enough to linger into the next calendar year. As far as I know, there is only one wine from Australia that also records the year of bottling on the front label, namely Penfolds Grange. Variation from season to season is one of the most important factors that determine the quality of a particular bottle of wine. Even the same grapes from the same vineyard invariably produce very different wines from year to year. Although vintage variation in Australia is merely a fraction of that encountered in most European wine regions of any quality, it is still a significant variable that demands consideration when making informed buying decisions. Even in the event that all other variables are consistent from year to year, which they certainly are not, weather can influence wine in an infinite number of ways: from determining whether conditions at flowering are favourable or not, all the way through to whether final ripening and harvest occur in the warmth of sunshine or through the midst of damaging rains. If viticulturists were to turn pagan, it would be to a god of weather that they would build their first shrine. Weather-influenced variation is nearly always more pronounced and more frequent in the cooler, more marginal viticultural regions. While Australia is principally a warm to hot wine producing nation, a significant proportion of the country’s premium wine now comes from cooler regions in the southwestern and southeastern corners of the continent. The spectrum of diverse weather encountered in these regions far exceeds that of the traditional Australian wine growing areas like the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, central Victoria and the Clare Valley. Paradoxically, the best years in cool climates are typically the warmer seasons that accelerate the ripening period, creating a finer acid balance, superior sugar levels, flavours and better-defined colours. Remembering the best vintage years can be a complicated process. Australia, for instance, is an enormous country and it’s simply not possible to say with any degree of conviction that such and such a vintage year was a good season for the entire nation at large. Even South Australia, one of the larger States, usually experiences significantly different vintage conditions and quality between the wine regions closer to Adelaide, such as the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, and the regions in the State’s southeast such as Coonawarra and Padthaway. But even vintage charts and classifications that attempt to generalise over individual regions are also profoundly misleading. They would be less misleading if the regions were entirely uniform in their topography and climate, but human factors like quality of vineyard management and the specific nature of the varieties planted still serve to devalue their meaning. Occasionally you get vintages that produce standout combinations of region and variety. 2002, for example, was a year in which if a riesling maker in South Australia’s Clare Valley didn’t make a classic wine, he or she has probably chosen the wrong career. Similarly for pinot noir in the Mornington Peninsula in 2003, or cabernet sauvignon from Coonawarra in 1998. Ultimately, each individual wine is affected by external factors to a profound enough extent to reduce vintage charts to making all but the most sweeping of generalisations, so it’s best to use them in that context. With due modesty, my book, The Australian Wine Annual, is designed to take the guesswork out of that very sort of question to a very specific level for Australian wine.
