That’s not a great Australian wine!’ the voice barks down the telephone. ‘That’s an interesting Australian wine. A great Australian wine is an old Woodley’s Treasure Chest, an old Grange, or Penfolds Special Bin Number.’ The wine he was referring to was one of my favourite modern Australian pinot noirs, the Giaconda 1992, and the owner of the voice at the other end of the line was Len Evans. The subject matter was the wine I was expected to bring to lunch. In his habitually sensitive way, Evans was correctly asserting what an over-abused concept the idea of ‘greatness’ in wine has become. It’s a tag we tend to throw around like confetti. The sporting press anoints any Australian sportsperson who wins an offshore event as a ‘great’. On their retirement politicians become ‘great statesmen’. Deceased writers, unable to sell a copy in their own lifetimes, enter their heyday on the classics shelves of the bookstores. They become great authors. How? And by whom? Perhaps it’s a language thing that prompts the wine media to use the term ‘great’ so often. After all, the cheap, commercial wines that ten years ago we would describe in rather depreciating terms are now listed as ‘premium’. Wines with some personality and points of interest, costing around $15-$30 are called super-premium. We have the Americans to thank for that most absurd wine term of all: ‘ultra-premium’, which means something really quite flash. What’s next? ‘Hyper-premium’? It’s hype, to be sure. Greatness in wine is such an over-used term. The other day I heard someone talking about a ‘great’ unoaked chardonnay, a concept so profoundly contradictory I nearly choked. So, if we take the view that the term should be respected, what does a wine need to have done to warrant the tag of ‘great’? Most great wines are not flash-in-the-pans. They tend to come from stables well known for their ability to consistently make wine of the highest level. Is Mildara’s famous Peppermint Pattie, the Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon from 1963, a great wine, or a very good and interesting one? I tend to think the latter. Much as I admire certain Mildara cabernets, the brand is not amongst our top echelon. What about a recent classic like the Howard Park 1994 Cabernet Merlot? No fluke, this wine, as anyone who has followed the emergence of this stellar label would attest. The wine is nothing short of magnificent, yet to call the ninth release of a wine as ‘great’ sounds hollow and assumptive. Great it may well become, but for the moment, not yet. So greatness demands track record and maturity. A wine so described must have demonstrated an ability to stand the test of time. It requires far more vision and skill for a winemaker to fashion a wine able to come to full flower with maturity than to make the sort of crowd-pleasing combinations of sweet, jammy fruit and assertive oak which win so many medals at wine shows. It takes an understanding only able to be born from experience or else a rare natural instinct to predict how each and every component of a wine will develop in the presence of all the other parties to the blend. So many up-front and essentially one-dimensional successful show wines fall flat on their faces after an embarrassingly brief spell in the cellar. You could even suggest that greatness and youth in wine might be mutually exclusive. As for wines made for early consumption, irrespective of their quality, could they ever be described as ‘great’? I don’t think so. Even though champagne is largely meant to be enjoyed while comparatively young, it’s possible for current vintages from the premium marques to be recognised for their greatness. Krug’s current release is from 1985, a wine now touted as one of its finest vintages of all time. Its youth, lightness to the touch and its freshness to taste almost entirely belie its age of twelve years. A truly great, magnificent wine. Greatness also depends to a very large degree on the audience. Ask an American five years ago if there were any great Australian wines and in return you would probably have received an incredulous stare. Today they all know about Grange and several of its proteges. Yet Grange hasn’t changed, just its publicity. So, while my Giaconda Pinot Noir 1992 proved to be an excellent wine with remarkable intensity, concentration, structure and balance, it was not accepted by my table as a great wine, and rightly so. One day, perhaps. After some boozy future luncheon a visiting MW might just anoint it as the first truly great vintage of a lineage he identifies in a global wine publication as Australia’s finest pinot noir. And another argument will have just begun. Fortunately, Penfolds saved my bacon. My bottle of Bin 7, a special one-off edition from 1967, was truly sublime and I actually heard the Chairman himself describe it as ‘great’.
