It’s always stimulating to discover youth and talent, in any field. It’s part of the process of regeneration and reinvigoration. The refreshing energy and creativity of a new mind, brimful of ambition and willing to take risks in the pursuit of an innovative dream, can shake things up and inspire others. Just look at what Michael Corbett has done over the last few years under the Vanguardist, Sanglier and La Petite Vanguard labels, especially with his work around grenache and riesling.
Naturally enough, most young winemakers are keen to impress. And if they have their own brand, they often attempt to create something that stands out from the pack. You’d expect that. And I’m making the educated guess that only a minority of todays’ younger makers are chasing more conventional and traditional styles, and most of those are in the employ of one of the larger companies.
Without doubt, this emerging generation of winemakers is more heavily focused than the previous towards the concept of sustainability and its associated spinoffs in terms of wines categorised either as organic, biodynamic, orange, ‘natural’ or ‘minimal intervention’. Given that most of our current opinion leaders are from a similar generation, and share this view towards wine and are likely to be connected with these makers on social media, it’s hardly surprising who gets the traction and the coverage.
Strangely, I’m also becoming more convinced that the emerging crop of wine drinkers appear to be less interested in the actual quality of what drinking than they are about their perceptions of the producer’s environmental credentials – in terms of not only the growing of the grapes but also by what might have been added during a wine’s making. While wine bars now identify wines as ‘organic’, ‘biodynamic’, or ‘minimal intervention’, I’ll bet their inner-city patrons don’t have a clue what any of these terms actually imply. And too many of these wines simply fail some rather basic quality tests, by a long way.
Saying that, do I honestly believe that most Australian wine drinkers would actually buy a wine they don’t prefer to drink because they feel they have to? Not at all. Perhaps instead consumers are buying wines they feel more comfortable being seen to drink, which means they’re more likely to want to follow wine trends and fashions than ever before. Some of these new generation wines actually have more in common with the current pandemic of bizarre-tasting beer than they do with wine itself.
How about those who steer clear of the new alternatives? What are the messages they receive? Are they receiving a fair and broad representation of what is offered today in Australian wine? Aside from a few exceptions, the answer is a resounding no. That’s a topic I’ve covered in detail elsewhere, but where does it leave the makers of plain good old honest, wonderful, great value wine that doesn’t make the A-list of the professional cheerleaders? Looking for customers.
Today Australia is blessed with a generation or two of excellent career wine growers and makers, very few of whom ever make the headlines anymore. No emerging young wine critic or influencer will ever make their reputation writing about them, yet several were legends in a previous time. They live in a less glamorous world than many of their more fashionable and more highly exposed younger contemporaries. They’re also less likely to spend hours each day posting images or reels of themselves, their new haircut or dog. They’re struggling to get traction in a world of crowded information, bytes, opinion and data.
Back in the 1980s, Ros Ritchie – then of Delatite – was a winemaking superstar. Her rieslings and her Dead Man’s Hill Gewurztraminer were greeted with the fanfare today seen for new releases from Rieslingfreak or Stargazer. A few decades on and she’s still based around Mansfield and she’s making better wine than ever before under her Ros Ritchie brand; cultivated, elegant and finely balanced expressions of several different varieties. And, on a quality basis, they’re outrageously inexpensive.
For more than two decades Patrick Hardiker has unobtrusively made a collection of table wines at Cannibal Creek, including one of Australia’s elite sauvignon blancs. He continues to shoot the lights out with this grape, creating a wine that’s more European than Australian. Yet less than a single percent of Australian drinkers of this variety would ever have heard of Cannibal Creek.
Leigh Clarnette has enjoyed a stellar winemaking career in Victoria and New South Wales, with a pedigree that includes stints at TarraWarra, Seppelt Great Western, Taltarni. He knows his stuff. Under his Clarnette label he releases a stable of table wines from the Grampians and other regions in western Victoria that massively over-deliver. Their hallmark is their elegance, medium weight, varietal expression and savoury nature. Yet most are under $40.
Chris Coulter left behind him a big company background with Chateau Yaldara that gave him the knowledge and tools he has redeployed since 2015 with his own Adelaide Hills-based company, Coulter Wines. How his wines are not being poured by every second restaurant in Australia is beyond me. There’s nothing showy about Chris and his brand – just repeatable, delicious and very affordable quality.
Tim Adams has been his own man since the late 1980s when he left Leasingham eventually to set up Tim Adams Wines in 1987. An experienced maker with as pure an understanding of what makes Clare table wine tick as you’ll find, his wines have set my standard for quality and value since the early 1990s. Nothing has changed since, except the wines are better and more diverse than ever before. This maker, having just completed his 50th vintage, is still seeking ways by which to offer his customers more. I love that attitude. And then there’s his astonishing Mr Mick range…
With 36 years of making wine behind him, Andrew ‘Ox’ Hardy is most closely associated in the past with Petaluma and Knappstein. He’s also made wine in California, Oregon and Bordeaux. Yet I’ve never seen him more excited that he is playing with the grenache, shiraz and fiano (plus of course the mandatory Adelaide Hills chardonnay) he has assembled under the Ox Hardy brand. With each of these wines he’s captured the regional and varietal essence that others are still seeking.
Dave Powell, creator of Torbreck in the late 1990s and one of the few winemakers who in my opinion are responsible for two major innovations in Australian red wine, is now over-delivering under his new Neldner Road label. With great respect to some other elite Barossa brands, in my opinion this brand is the region’s leader. And the Neldner Road entry-level wines are far better than the flagships of many. As for the best from Neldner Road? World class.
Rob Mann is the fifth generation of his wine producing family, which includes winemaker uncle Dorham, grape grower father Tony, legendary winemaking grandfather Jack and winemaking great-grandfather George. His own career has seem him in elite winemaking roles in small, large and medium-sized companies in Australia and overseas including Tintara, Cape Mentelle and Newton (Napa Valley). Rob’s wife Genevieve is also an accomplished winemaker, having worked in France, California and her native South Africa. The wines grown at Rob’s family vineyard in the Swan Valley under their Corymbia label bring exotic and contemporary European elements into this region’s wine expression that I could never have imagined. Rob is also the winemaker behind the Swinney (Frankland River) label, which sets new standards with several Rhone Valley red varieties when grown in Western Australia.
Andrew Thomas established Thomas Wines in the Hunter Valley way back in 1997, after 13 years working at Tyrrells and stints in Sonoma, Tuscany, Piedmont and Provence. He has revolutionised this region’s approach to its traditional varieties of shiraz and semillon, adhering to what he believes puts the region’s best foot forward. His wines are those of a maker who knows place – the places where his fruit comes from and his place as a maker determined to let those sites best express themselves. He hasn’t changed a zot since I met him in 1984 and I firmly rate Thommo as one of the real treasures in Australian winemaking.
John Duval, the former Penfolds chief winemaker, needs little introduction. Here’s a maker who after a long career working towards one of the most elevated roles in Australian winemaking, decided to start from square one and do it all again. The success of John Duval wines is based around their technical quality, their regional honesty, their value in the marketplace and John’s own personal touch as a maker who can take or leave as he chooses from his Penfolds background. I’ve been a fan of these wines for ages.
Wines from these makers are all – or about to be – ranged in our Shop at Oliver’s Wines. Like every other wine we list, they have to be amongst the finest at their price point, wherever they’re from. Made by experienced, confident professionals who have faced and dealt with multiple challenges in their winemaking past, who understand world wine and where their efforts fit into a global framework, who know when to stop tinkering and to leave a wine alone, and who have reached a level of knowhow that enables their wines to be more laid-back than showy; these are typically wines of finesse and style, with the kind of balance and structure that suits drinking while young as well as the enticing possibilities of development in the cellar.
So, while it can be a journey of excitement and discovery to taste the fruits of our younger generation of winemakers – and without wishing to disparage or discourage any of them – I strongly suggest not to do this at the expense of what our more experienced generations are still regularly and steadily placing onto the market. Otherwise it’s likely you’re missing out. They may not be fashionable, they operate entirely outside the trends and it’s unlikely you’ll see their names in lights, but the best of our more mature winemakers come up with the goods, time and again.
