Let me make a small confession. I’ve only recently really, truly come to understand why the Barossa Valley is so important to Australian wine. Sure, it’s been the backbone of wines like Grange for longer than I have been alive and has been playground for such great wine industry characters as Peter Lehmann, Colin Gramp, Wolf Blass and Rocky O’Callaghan. While its greatest wines, like Henschke’s Hill of Grace, the superlative Eden Valley Rieslings of Leo Buring and the legendary Saltram reds made by Peter Lehmann furnish it with a legacy of which most wine regions would be deeply envious, it’s still been hard to figure out what all the fuss has been about. Now well inside the second half of my fourth decade I still regret that I wasted the first one and a half by not paying the attention to wine that perhaps I might have done. So it wasn’t until the end of the 1970s that I first began to recognise the importance of the word ‘Barossa’, although I couldn’t then really figure out why. The only Barossa wines I used to experience with any degree of regularity were the occasional red label wines from Kaiser Stuhl, the popular Eden Valley rieslings of Orlando and Leo Buring, the Eden Valley reds of Henschke (which were a darned sight cheaper back then, I hasten to add), and the occasional Barossa floor red from people like Hoffmans (now Miranda), St Hallett’s (now without its apostrophe), Saltram and Yalumba. The Barossa suffered more than most regions at the hands of the almost paranoid fixation towards cool climates exhibited by makers, sellers and drinker of Australian wine in the decade following the mid 1970s. Fruit prices plummeted, and grapes were bought in from cooler regions to blend away the Barossa’s uncompromising warm-climate richness and character, which few wanted to experience in undiluted form. In actual fact, through the late 1970s and into the 1980s you could hardly find a red wine made from Barossa floor fruit and labelled as such. It was as if a cloud of embarrassment and apology hung over the once-famous valley, which then became a dark storm of gloom through the disgraceful and damaging South Australian Vine Pull Scheme of the mid 1980s, during which many of its most valuable old vine resources were pulled up for good. Prices for Barossa fruit were so bad that in 1986 cabernet sauvignon was actually turned into sweet sherry! The Barossa was reduced to just 500 growers, as 9% of its vineyard was destroyed, including much of its oldest shiraz. Hardly surprising, since shiraz was still treated like a second-class citizen after cabernet and neither Penfolds, Lindemans or Orlando, the age-old ‘PLO’ triumverate which then controlled Australian wine, actually released a red wine from 100% Barossa fruit and marketed it as such. As a winemaking student of Roseworthy College in 1984 it’s little wonder I couldn’t begin to reconcile the Barossa’s downtrodden and dishevelled exterior which I saw so frequently with its once-lofty reputation. Today things could hardly be more different. The Barossa is blooming. It’s standing tall and proud and nearly every inch looks a million dollars. For prosperity, along with popularity and self-confidence, has returned. Like its wines, the Barossa’s name is bigger and bolder than ever before. It took the Europeans and Americans to reawaken the Australian interest in our own unique and world-class warmer climate wines. How, our makers were grilled by wide-eyed overseas buyers, could we have neglected them as we did? For in no other country on God’s earth could you find vines of such age and quality, whose wines were as consistent, as concentrated and as distinctive as these. With only the rarest of exceptions from the south of France, South Africa and California, is there anything which even resembles the rich, concentrated sweet expression of spicy fruit and velvet tannins of the dryland shirazes of the Barossa. With the McLaren Vale, the Barossa has been the region most to benefit from the renewed interest in Australia’s bounty of old, dryland red vines, especially shiraz. The smaller makers were first to return the Barossa’s name to prominence, through the ongoing re-emergence of grower-based wineries like Barossa Valley Estates, Bethany, Grant Burge, Charles Cimicky, Charles Melton, Elderton, Rockford, St Hallett, Turkey Flat and The Willows. By making the first St Hallett Old Block Shiraz in 1980 Robert O’Callaghan (now at Rockford) was clearly ahead of his time in refocusing his energies towards old vine Barossa shiraz. But nobody has done more to salvage the Barossa’s reputation than Peter Lehmann, who after the 1979 vintage left Saltram to establish his own wine company to look after the interests of the many growers then desperate to find a market for their fruit. This company eventually became the listed Peter Lehmann Wines Ltd and its future looks better than ever. Even the big companies are now getting in on the act. Penfolds has established its Rhone blend of shiraz, grenache and mourvedre as a 100% Barossa label and a new premium Barossa shiraz is widely anticipated. Barossa-based giant Orlando, which years ago would release fascinating blends of dry-grown Barossa red varieties, has returned to the fold with its excellent Centenary Shiraz 1994. By allocating its premium Octavius label to old Barossa shiraz vineyards, Yalumba has done its bit, while Seppelt’s premier Dorrien Cabernet Sauvignon has simply gone from strength to strength. Wolf Blass, while traditionally based in the Barossa, built its reputation for red wines on the back of Langhorne Creek, although Barossa fruit indeed contributed in varying degrees from vintage to vintage in different blends. Today, for the first time, it has released a 100% Barossa red, its 1996 Cabernet Sauvignon. How things have changed! Today there is no shortage in the bottle of the most profound reason why the Barossa’s reputation has returned, hopefully for the long term. And through these bottles, people like me can discover what people like Peter Lehmann have experienced and spoken about for decades, the true identity and uniqueness of Barossa wine. Barossa flavour is right there where it ought to be, and not blended away in South Australian dry reds whose origins might once have caused embarrassment to their makers. Try the rich, ripe reds of Peter Lehmann and Grant Burge, the firm but fine-grained Basket Press Shiraz of Rockford, the silky-smooth soft reds of Bethany, the sumptuous, jammy reds of Elderton, the polished Signature blend of Yalumba, the bony and exotically flavoured Nine Popes blend of Charlie Melton or the powerfully extracted and sumptuously alcoholic dry reds of Turkey Flat, Veritas and Barossa Settlers and discover exactly what the fuss is all about. And then you’ll simply wonder why we nearly let it all roll over and die.
