VINTAGE 2011 - 2ND WETTEST IN OZ HISTORY

THE AUTHOR ADDRESSING THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN WINE PRESS CLUB IN THE NATIONAL WINE CENTRE AT THE 2010 VINTAGE ROUND-UP LUNCHEON. BILL MOULARADELLIS IS TO THE LEFT, WINEMAKERS FEDERATION AUSTRALIA LOBBYIST ANDREW WILSMORE IS PEEKING OVER THE SPEAKER'S SHOULDER, AND THAT'S CLUB PRESIDENT BRENTON QUIRINI ON THE RIGHT photo LEO DAVIS

2011: Year Of Moulds & Misery
Far Too Much Bad Fruit Picked
Wine Lake Still The Same Size
by PHILIP WHITE


AT last year’s annual South Australia Wine Press Club post-vintage lunch, which I had been invited to address for many consecutive years to appraise the vintages just finished, Bill Moularadellis stood up at the lectern and said not one Australian vine should be uprooted because his company wanted every grape it could get.

Bill, who has recently been appointed to the board of Wine Australia, the industry’s governing body, is the managing director of his family’s Riverland winery, Kingston Estate. Wine Press Club Chairman, Brenton Quirini, of Empire Liquor, who introduced Moularadellis to a full house in the National Wine Centre, had just taken on the distribution of Kingston Estate. The event felt like a re-launch of the brand, with the wines being poured liberally to the throng of businessmen, bankers, and wine industry identities.

I quite liked the Sauvignon blanc.

Some readers may recall Kingston temporarily losing its export licence in May 2000, after I’d written about it using, amongst other things, silver nitrate, a clarifying agent used legally in some countries, but banned in Australia. Respected wine consultant Dr Tony Jordan, who works for the French giant Louis Vuitton Mőet Hennessey, is also on the board of Wine Australia. He suggested to me at the time that there was a good argument to permit the careful use of silver nitrate here; Moularadellis was fully co-operative during the investigations and soon had his licence reinstated.

GOOD-QUALITY SHIRAZ PICKED BEFORE THE 2011 WEATHER WENT AWRY

While it took some time for the Kingston Estate brand to rehabilitate, in the Adelaide market particularly, its was then our ninth-biggest wine exporter, contributing $12-15 million worth of Australia’s $1.2 billion total export.

There was no hint of anything other than enthusiasm for Bill and his wine at the Wine Press Club lunch. But when it came to his suggestion that not one vine should be uprooted, I spoke, shall we say, contrarily. I had suggested we were in a terrible glut of wine internationally, and Australia would suffer, pointing out that about a third of the wine grapes grown here were not required by winemakers. I explained there were three massive presumptions our wine industry’s success had depended upon, and these were hubristic, false, and finished. Over. Kaput.

This unholy trinity of presumptions included an ongoing weak Aussie dollar (it was stupidly undervalued, given our natural resources); a tax regime illogically, unfairly and enormously biased towards the makers of inferior swill (incurring staggering environmental, social and economic damage); and an endless supply of impossibly cheap water (which we knew was no longer there until we had the second-wettest vintage in Australian history – which is not, shall we say, normal).

REASONABLE-QUALITY HAND-PICKED GRENACHE

I had suggested that viticulture as we knew it - in the vast Murray-Darling Basin - was over, and would never return to its glory days of five years back. The world has too much wine; Australia has insufficient water to sacrifice in ratios like 1000:1 to grow and make wine which sells more cheaply than Evian water.

I suggested that contrary to the opinions of the industry councils, which seemed to believe their punch-drunk business should shrink by around 20 per cent, I felt that 40 per cent would be more realisitic, and looked set to occur whether it was organised or not. In the most likely latter case, I said a disorganized deconstruction would be very messy, and entire inland communities would need lots of money, relocation, restructuring and assistance.

Recently, I received a fascinating email from Bill Moularadellis’s brother, Jim, who calls himself Chief Enthusiasm Officer (CEO) of pre-eminent bulk wine brokers Austwine, a 20-year-old “grey market” merchant this year celebrating its 500 millionth litre of bulk wine traded. Jim has written the Moularadellis family version of Vintage 2011.

PURE BOTRYTIS STRIKE ON A SHIRAZ BERRY. A LOT OF FRUIT LOOKED REASONABLE ON THE VINE, BUT WHEN IT WAS TOUCHED, THE BOTRYTIS SLIME BENEATH THE SKIN SAW THE BERRIES FALL APART photo JAMES HOOK

Put broadly, Jim agrees with my contention that while the vintage crush total was a much bigger figure than anybody predicted, given the oversupply and rotten vintage, the 1.6 million tonnes crushed includes large amounts of juice which was reduced to concentrate to bolster other batches of fruit which could not ripen. And much of the rest of the crush will make wine so rotten it cannot be cleaned up sufficiently for sale anyway. So the 1.6 million tonnes is not an indicator of how much potable wine was made, but an indicator of how much bad fruit was picked.

Let me reiterate: vast fields of rotten, mouldy, brown pus was indeed picked. I watched it picked, and watched winemakers in many regions struggle to know how to deal with bins of machine-harvested mildewed and botrytised grapes that turned to slurry before they reached the crusher.

All this uncertainty is forcing up the price of bulk wine in store from previous vintages – bulk wine whose poor quality had prevented its sale, even at much lower prices, until this ocean of much worse wine arrived at the hoppers this year.

Jim Moularadellis writes that this confusion has brought about a situation where the expected price has artificially levelled, so that vendors are asking the same price for bad wine as others expect for less buggered wine. Since vintage, there has been much chatter about price, but few actual sales. This, he thinks, will correct itself as the year progresses, as more wineries realise that whatever they do to clean up the mouldy swill they picked, whatever they spend on whatever chemicals, colorants, bleaches, thickening essences or reagents, the wine simply will not make the drinkable grade.

Jim concludes that good quality supply of all the staple varieties is very tight and lean, and remarks particularly on the sudden spike in demand for Moscato. (This is the variety BRL-Hardy had wanted to plant on Adelaide University’s 206ha viticultural research property at Glenthorne Farm in order to fund the establishment there of further wine and grape research facilities, but was refused by the university – Deputy chancellor, Brian Croser, reportedly preferred Chardonnay.)

Then, to finish his sad song of wine gone wrong, Jim says:

“2012 vintage promises more of the same due to the likely modest level of vineyard removals, at least average winter rainfall on top of already moist soils and a persistently high Australian dollar.”

MOULDY MACHINE-HARVESTED GRENACHE

In other words, he’s not expecting the wine tax imbalance to be corrected. Nor, for that matter, was he expecting the current powerful move toward higher base alcohol retail prices by people like Woolworths, led by Coles, a swelling band of politicians, and the health lobby. Any such inevitable correction will very quickly see an increase in the removal or abandonment of unprofitable and marginal vineyards, believe me. There’s one of the three presumptions – which I call stupid – being blindly clung to.

Here’s another: Jim agrees that the dollar will stay “high” but seems to think it’s artificially so; he seems disappointed. I think it’s normal, given our natural resources, which will take some time to extract. I heard this morning one analyst suggesting the dollar will stay roughly where it is for twenty years.

So where are we? In spite of all the deserted and uprooted vineyards, and the vast amount of the 2011 crop being used for concentrate, it is now evident that the Australian wine lake is about the same size it was a couple of years ago. The biggest difference is the quality: it’s worse. Around 40-45 million cases worth of wine was made from fruit which should have been cut to the ground and left; those vineyards should go.

BOTRYTIS-INFECTED RIESLING IN THE BAROSSA 2011 photo DAVID LEHMANN ... CLICK HERE FOR LOUISA ROSE'S REPORT FROM YALUMBA

But many growers who couldn’t sell their rotten crops this year don’t have the money to uproot vineyards or even prune them. So they sit there with the husks of the 2011 fruit intact, acting like perfect incubators for disease which will bloom and infest healthy neighbouring vineyards unless 2012 is back to the Big Dry that preceded the second wettest vintage in history.

However, given the weather we’ve had since vintage, anything can happen. It’s perfect in McLaren Vale as I write: those who can afford to prune have done it; the whole region’s sprouted and the weather’s perfect. Yesterday a mate complained that for the first time in his life he’d got sunburnt whilst pruning; earlier in the year I saw grape pickers wearing wet weather gear usually reserved for pruning in the winter.

As for the South Australian Wine Press Club: I wasn’t invited to summarise 2011. I think they invited Tony Love.

MACHINE-HARVESTED SHIRAZ ROTTEN WITH MILDEW AND BOTRYTIS

To read Jim Moularadellis's full report, click here.