Thank heavens for 1998. Having had little else to taste in the new red wine department for the last twelve months other than Australia’s rather dismal collection from 1997, I can’t begin to say how happy it makes this particular wine critic that the Gods surely smiled on Australian viticulture during the 1997-1998 growing season. We will certainly see more top-notch wine from 1998 than from any other Australian vintage. But, as we discover so often, all that glitters is not gold. Being a consistently warm to hot vintage, 1998 gave the opportunity to growers to ripen grapes for as long as they wanted to. Driven by a US-based craze for grossly over-ripe and porty red wine, many growers who would not normally make red wines above 14.0% by alcohol had the chance to go for it. Sadly, too many chose to. In recent days I have tasted several hundred of 1998 reds and while there are plenty of classics, there are too many disappointments. The downside is a welter of shapeless, formless reds with alcohol levels around 14-15% which might have shown real class if picked around 13-14% instead. There’s nothing wrong with the way many have been made, but the damage was done well before the fruit arrived in the wineries. My advice when buying your 1998s from Australia is to show some discretion. Only buy the wines at the higher end of the alcoholic spectrum if you have tried them first. Of course there are certain vineyards with certain varieties, especially shiraz, that can handle 14.5%, but there aren’t as many of them around as there are porty wines on the shelves right now. What many winemakers clearly fail to understand is that once in the bottle, over-ripe wines tend excessively towards porty, dried fruit and jammy tastes, they lose definition and direction on palate and the wine is forever left to deal with spirity alcohol tastes. They’re clumsy and unattractive when young and usually have very little cellaring potential, since their high alcoholic strengths ensure they hardly even find balance. Hopefully when Australia next gets the chance to make wine from a vintage like 1998 its makers will have taken the lessons of 1998 to heart.
