PANNELL NEW KING OF McLAREN VALE

STEVE PANNELL OF S. C. PANNELL WINES - A VERY POPULAR VICTOR AT THIS YEAR'S McLAREN VALE WINE SHOW - WINNING THE BUSHING CROWN WITH HIS TOURIGA TEMPRANILLO

A Very Big Day In McLaren Vale
Wine Show System Tries Change
Results All A Wee Bit Transitory
by PHILIP WHITE

It must have been a great Friday: Saturday my phone coughed up three apologies from people who must have felt that they owed me one.

I thought I may have owed a few, too, but the brain had come over a tad mushy. Quite a few of us were sailing with our bow doors open by bedtime.

What happens when you charge several hundred people $150 each to sit in a big old concrete and iron winery hall, handsome and historic in itelf, but with horrid acoustics, scant, overpriced food*, and vast amounts of dangerous drugs – in this case ethanol in the form of beautiful wine - then broadcast extremely loud echoing atonal and disrhythmic bullshit propaganda at them for hours on end?

Answer: they take the drugs.

At least the winner of this year’s McLaren Vale Bushing King was a very popular choice once somebody found the envelope with his name in it.

Which didn’t happen, actually: it looked from my chair that nobody found the envelope. All the hundreds of winemakers had trooped by and lined up, and the emcee had announced the big coronation, and the old king and queen had been up and surrendered the robes and crowns and there they were hanging empty on the hat rack and nobody knew where the envelope was.

McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism manager and chief propagandist, Elizabeth Tasker, who seems to be in charge of some of these things, walked up and down a bit and looked helpless, I mean what else could a poor girl do but look that way, like at a coronation, until eventually a name was whispered in the speaker’s ear, so the announcement got made and we just trusted the Lord that whoever passed the whisper got it right.

Anyway, nobody had a bad word to say about Steve Pannell donning the crown, and to a lush they were singularly impressed by his perfectly savoury, bone dry winner, the S. C. Pannell Touriga Tempranillo 2010. This seemed to be the most popular winner since Wayne Thomas won it with a 2003 Petit Verdot that he made with the truly hot Tim Geddes from the Gemtree Vineyard. That, to this observer, indicated an early attempt of the show judges trying to award a wine outside of the ordinary.

They won it again two years later with a lovely, but much more conventional Shiraz, but Thommo was dying then, and while everybody thought good job well done, popular was hardly the best descriptor to use about that miserable day. Thommo was so weak that dear Bev had to hold him up for the vineyard shot: poor bugger could hardly support his robes in that wind. As Don Riddell wrote at the time: “Damn!”

Also truly popular this year was the Coates Touriga Nacional 2009, voted the best red wine from the Fleurieu. This showed some consistency in the judges’ determination to seek out and award one of the new varieties which have been doing very well on this peninsula for some time, if only in the amazing Langhorne Creek Old Mill Estate vineyard of Peter and Vickie Widdop, who supplied the fruit, and who have had very stylish Touriga rosé, premium dry reds, and vintage port on the market for years at nothing prices. They have also just this week released a stunning sparkling Touriga Brut, a very rare bird indeed, but one I know will soon be a wicked cult fizz; it smells like a dead serious Blancs de Noir Champagne, but is the colour of glace cherries.

McLAREN VALE AND THE FRONT HILLS OF THE WILLUNGA FAULT AND ESCARPMENT VIEWED FROM THE VERANDA AT SETTLEMENT WINES

Which leads me to the little matter of Fleurieu Peninsula white wines. Outside of the McLaren Vale and Adelaide Hills sections of the beautiful Fleurieu, there are many vineyards full of white grapes which should be of exquisite quality. Like, for example the Mt Jagged Semillon which very nearly became the first Penfolds Yattarna “White Grange” sixteen years ago. The Penfolds version still drinks fresh and vibrant and more confident than many a more iconic Hunter Semi festooned with bling.

So what happened in the Fleurieu Peninsula White Commercial Any Vintage class of eighteen wines? No awards. Not one measly bronze. What happened to the fourteen McLaren Vale Semillon/Sauvignons and blends? No awards. What happened to the sixteen McLaren Vale Chardonnays? One silver and five bronze for the biggest-planted white in McLaren Vale. What about Viognier, its great replacement? Four wines; two bronzes.

That little Langhorne Creek patch of Touriga Nacional is the perfect allegory for this beautiful district’s much-touted change of direction: it’s not really happening on a big scale, and when it does, the inertia of the show system mentality makes it very unlikely to be recognized early in the piece. You really do need a very famous winemaker to make an exemplary wine of something new before any average judge will be brave enough to reward it, and even then the chances are enhanced if the wine is conservative.

It appears the McLaren Vale judges were trapped, see-sawing between their acknowledgement that most of what’s being made after the old school is dullsville, and their yearning for better examples of what they think should come in to replace that ancient regime. But I think too that in many varieties, the current judging system simply doesn’t seem capable of selecting the best wines. The judges can’t say it, for example, but I can: the results of the Grenache class team look strange. You had on one hand the very staunch, almost humourless straight Grenache of Steve Pannell’s getting a trophy, leaving the International Judge, Lisa Perotti-Brown, to seek out something a little more viscerally joyous and juicy for her trophy, and she went for Redknot?

Given the expenditure currently pointed at expanding the McLaren Vale plantings of Grenache, and other north-west Mediterranean varieties, the powers that be will have to somehow conspire to assemble a judging team that might be more fluent in this variety, or the best may often be seen to be failures.

But then, maybe the same could be said for the more traditionally conventional classes. Either the winemakers or the judges should be shot once the Shiraz numbers are digested. No award in a class of eleven sparkling reds. In the Commercially Available Shiraz class, 2010 and younger, two golds and a few silvers went to 43 wines, with 15 winning bronze, meaning merely that the wines are safe to drink, and then there were 23 with no award whatsoever.

In the Commercially Available Shiraz 2009 and Older, there were 119 entries, which won three golds; eight silvers and 42 bronze medals. But 66 wines won nothing at all. On my points scale, these would all be scoring below 65/100 points. If these results are to be believed, these wines should NOT be on the market. I reckon the results are to be believed. The lazy greed of the average Australian winemaker has seen them produce ordinary plonk for decades; McLaren Vale is no exception.

Which leads me to the question: what IS McLaren Vale good at? Talk?
WE ALL KNOW McLAREN VALE IS SOMETIMES TOO GOOD AT TALKING, BUT WE ALSO KNOW IT'S CAPABLE OF MAKING BETTER WINE THAN THESE SHOW RESULTS WOULD SUGGEST photo STACEY POTHOVEN

There was another show worth mentioning on the same week: The Royal Melbourne, with its allegedly legendary Jimmy Watson Trophy. This king jug of show bling is as infamous as it is famous. But it really does seem that it is only really truly famous when it is won by a Glaetzer. John “The Ferrett” Glaetzer and his teams took four home for his Wolf Blass Black Label Langhorne Creek reds. In fact it was his mid-seventies three in a row that really made the Jimmy big in the first place: Wolfie’s propagandists did a job as good as Glaetzer’s, and they used a virtually unknown trophy to raise their virtually unknown brand to an amazing lofty position which it has never really lost. When the fourth one came in decades later, it brought a ray of hope that the enormous Blass team were still on track, despite all those takeovers and rumours and nonsense, and the unseemly bitchery many of that mob show the Penfolds crew, which is really friggin dumb, given the fact that both mobs work for the same company, and there’s still only one Grange.

Anyway, Nick Glaetzer, John The Ferret’s nephew, has up and returned some glimmer to The Big Jim by winning it with a Tasmanian Shiraz, his Mon Pere 2010, due for release in February. As if to drive a permanent stake between him and the Barossa, Nick has respectfully named the wine after his Barossadeutscher father, the great Baron and winemaker, Colin, but in French?

Colin, by the way, is John The Ferret’s identical twin. John helps the Widdops make their Old Mill reds.

Just as we see a rare, perhaps furtive attempt by the show system to reward Steve Pannell for heading off the old threadbare patch in McLaren Vale, it looks to me like a similar thing’s happened in Melbourne. With all this New Heat and all, and the wine industry’s continuing failure to grasp it, maybe McLaren Vale should follow this rad Glaetzer example, and leave the Shiraz to Tassie.

Or pray that these two unusual errantries of the ancient and fusty order of Royal wine judgement are a mere precursor of many bright changes ahead.

If you must touch wood, make it French.


*FOOTNOTE:
Having heard that the caterer received many e-mails and calls of thanks for the luncheon, I asked various people who sat at other tables. Most felt the food was okay to so-so considering the huge number of diners. I thought the service was very good, and told the waiters so, but couldn't help comparing my sparse meal - with its watery prawns and dry steak - to the astonishing fourteen-dish repast Oliver's Taranga recently tabled for a similar fee at their 175th.

To see full list of results and trophy winners click here.

IT WAS PIZZAS AND BEERS INTO THE NIGHT, AFTERWARDS AT THE BARN.