2011: 2ND BEST WORST WETTEST VINTAGE

STOP PRESS:  
Mollydooker Wines FaceBook 15 April 2011 posted two images on their wall: one a vineyard which had been harvested, across the road from their block, which means nothing, and another of their own block, with the following caption: "Both of these photos were taken yesterday:one is our vineyard and the picked vineyard is over the road. We are watering to keep the sugar levels down and the canopy flourishing so that the Mollydooker grapes can continue to bask in the beautiful Indian summer sun. The vines are maturing and sending ripe tannin signals to the grapes, which gain extra flavour and richness every day. Exciting news - we have already got argh- cut me off...should read- Exciting news - we have already got two blocks at VELVET GLOVE level!"

Well, they sure look velvety. A close look at this image shows grey, velvety, botrytis-and-mould-riddled berries. So what is Mollydooker doing? They're watering? The vines are sending ripe tannin signals to the grapes? Which gain extra flavour and richness every day? If the silly buggers up the River had only called Sparky Marquis for advice there would now be hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grapes making the Velvet Glove grading, no? Not to mention the Barossa, Clare, the Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale, no? Watering? Those leaves are falling off, for Bacchus' sake!

So is it, or isn't it Aussie's best year ever? Select your preferred degree of propagandist bullshit!
 
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this was published on INDAILY, and the shorter version published here previously has been deleted


This is a bad time to be a wine writer.

There’s far too much competition.

At the climax of a vintage as horrid as 2011 there’s a parallel peak of nonsense spoken by those who know their wines will not be as good as usual.

The astute observer will have already recognized the formation of little twists of spin which look promising to those who somehow utter them. By the time the wine is clarified and packaged, these seminal stutterings will have bloomed into gushing back label texts and blurbs that can be cut and pasted by idiots for centuries.

My opinion of vintage 2011 is largely formed. The vintage is well over half way through. I have toured vineyards and tasted grapes, ferments and wine in enough places to get a fair idea of what happens when you have the wettest vintage in thirty-seven years.

EDEN VALLEY RIESLING KING, COLIN FORBES, WHO HAD BEEN CONTRACTED TO MAKE THE DRY-GROWN BUSH VINE KARRA YERTA RIESLING FOR MARIE LINKE LINKE, RIGHT, WON'T BE PICKING A GRAPE SINCE THE CROP WAS BUTCHERED BY BOTRYTIS AND OTHER MOULDS photo MILTON WORDLEY
 
There are those, of course, who are disarming in their honesty. The tiny-scale Barossa Ranges Riesling aces, Bob McLean (McLean’s Farm) and Marie Linke (Karra Yerta) have stated quite simply that their heavily-Botrytised Riesling is not worth picking. But while their write-offs are symptomatic of the year, their frankness is not indicative, unfortunately, of the general industry spin.

EVEN THE FASTIDIOUSLY HAND-TENDED ORGANIC NEVER-IRRIGATED RIESLING BUSH VINES AT McLEAN'S FARM ARE SUFFICIENTLY DAMAGED BY BOTRYTIS AND OTHER MOULDS TO PROHIBIT PICKING

The summer of 2010-11 was, in fact, the second wettest on record for Australia.

"Nationally we averaged 354.7mm, 70 per cent above normal and second only behind the infamous summer of 1973-74 when 419.8mm was recorded," said Tom Saunders, meteorologist at The Weather Channel.

“Victoria’s had its wettest summer on record,” he continued. “Western Australia recorded its second wettest summer. South Australia recorded its third wettest summer. New South Wales recorded its fifth wettest summer. Queensland recorded its sixth wettest summer. Northern Territory recorded its eighth wettest summer, and Tasmania recorded its seventeenth wettest summer.

THE RAIN AND FLOODS CAME VERY EARLY IN THE VINE CYCLE, AND PERSISTED UNTIL A GREAT VINTAGE WAS UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE ... THIS IS A NORTHERN VICTORIAN VINEYARD

"And after a decade of drought, The Murray Darling Basin also recorded its third wettest summer," he concluded.

Just as a perfect vintage, ideally dry, slow and cool, deserves recognition in the odd chance that it may occasionally occur, so do record numbers like these. These are not matters of opinion.

Neither are the simple facts evident to anybody who knows vines well enough to jump over the odd fence and identify Downy Mildew, Powdery Mildew, and Botryitis cinerea. Botrytis not only rots the skins of grapes, but it also attacks the stems of the bunches. When you stand in highly regarded vineyards and watch the vibrations of the mechanical harvesters shaking bunches onto the ground before they even reach those vines, you know something’s wrong. When you watch bins of mouldy slurry, rather than your actual grapes, arrive at winery hoppers, you know this is not what the wineries would like their drinkers to see.

BOTRYTIS CINEREA ON SHIRAZ BERRIES photos by JAMES HOOK, CONSULTING VINE SCIENTIST AND PROPRIETOR OF LAZY BALLERINA WINES, McLAREN VALE.

The need to recognize and identify mere opinions intensifies once frightened winemakers wheel out their most trustworthy employees to tell us that everything’s much better than it is. Such phenomena are not determined by the size of the business, other than in the sense that little guys can bullshit more convincingly than big guys because they’re little.

Troy Elliker, viticulturer for the big McLaren Vale vineyard management company, The Terraces, may feel a little sheepish about calling it too early when on February 19th he said “We've had a very good season and it looks like we are going to have a good year … There will be some really good quality fruit, hence quality wines, coming out of McLaren Vale for the 2011 vintage ... It's a bit later this season because of the weather conditions ... This summer we had cool nights and warm days, which was great for growing grapes down here."

Baron of Barossa, Louisa Rose (below), chief winemaker at Yalumba, warned against calling it early. This Barossa winery takes vast tonnages of fruit from the Riverland, and lesser amounts from the more premium vignobles in the ranges and interstate. At 31,600 tonnes, it is ninth on the list of the biggest Australian wineries measured by winegrape intake.

I could feel poor Louisa squirming when she told The Advertiser "The wines that are going to be made for the 2011 vintage are going to made from very good grapes and those wines are going to be very good drinks."

See the back label forming?

“Ideally cool conditions produced beautiful fruit of good natural acidity and elegance,” a good spindrifter could write, more or less along the lines of what winescribe Max Allen wrote in The Australian. You could easily stretch this to insinuate that 2011 was the closest Australia gets to the general vintage conditions of, say, Bordeaux, strangely reflecting what Clare Riesling hero Jeffrey Grosset told the same paper, about a fortnight after I’d facetiously suggested it on DRINKSTER.

Not to suggest the astute Ms Rose would extend her spin so far. She had already stated "Too many people assume that the whole vintage has been ruined and that's not the case … It's far too early to make bold claims as to what the vintage is really going to look like. Making big claims about the success or failure of a vintage while grapes were still being picked was a foolish exercise … While there had been some sad individual cases of growers with disappointing harvests, that did not tell the story of the whole vintage.”

From a winemaking family famous as champions of positivism at all costs, Neil McGuigan (below) of Australian Vintage (157,000 tonnes) told the influential industry business e-mail newsletter, The Key Report:

“Vintage has been very challenging across Australia with the Hunter and WA both having excellent vintages. The irrigated districts were ‘under the pump’ but those vineyards that were managed correctly and had a bit of luck were able to harvest most of their fruit. Some rejections did occur, and some varieties were adversely affected by Downy Mildew. Barossa looks good but the SE of South Australia has been adversely affected by the weather as well.”

So you have a choice in the Barossa. Either you believe that it “looks good”, or you give ear to the champion grapegrowers’ representative, Baron of Barossa Leo Pech, who said this was the worst vintage he’d seen in 61 years, as reported here at the beginning of vintage.

Judson Barry, of Brian Barry Wines (less than 100 tonnes) more recently told DRINKSTER “I can speak first hand for the Clare district. The Riesling and Shiraz grapes that I have crushed and seen crushed thus far are 1st class quality. A higher than usual amount of fruit has indeed been left on the vine however, due to poor quality arrived from disease. Harvest is approximately 1/2 complete. One must take into account that it is not just fruit quality that determines the final result of the wine quality. This depends heavily on the particular winemaking method that the fruit is subject to. Winemaking techniques or methods are infinite!”

THE GREAT CLARE RIESLING ACE AND MASTER WINE JUDGE, BRIAN BARRY, THE AUTHOR, AND JUDSON BARRY AT BRIAN'S RECENT 84TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

In the Murray Valley, organic wine grower Michael O’Donohue of Tom’s Drop (less than 20 tonnes) insists he has very good fruit ripening calmly. Another organic Berri company, 919 Wines (less than 100 tonnes), was slightly more specific when Jenny Semmler reflected Judson Barry’s opinion.

“Quality has been marvellous when the fruit comes in clean,” she said. “This vintage will be a test of the winemaker - his or her skill at working closely with the viticulturalist to ensure the fruit is picked at the appropriate time.

“We’re generally finding the fruit is ripe at lower Baumés than usual this year, but with delightful flavour/sugar/acid/tannin balance. Then of course, a good winemaker will be able to be a good custodian of the fruit ... there are traps for unwary players, however.”

TOP-QUALITY EARLY-PICKED SHIRAZ FROM OLIVER'S TARANGA, McLAREN VALE

Closer to home, Inkwell (under 20 tonnes) proprietor Dudley Brown, of McLaren Vale, reports ideal ferments. His neighbour, Paul Petagna (under 10 tonnes) has a winery full of calm, clean ferments. These tiny super-premium local heroes are joined by Roger Pike, of Marius (under 20 tonnes), who says one of his ferments is a bit tricky, but the other two are more or less ideal. Oliver’s Taranga, which picked early, has magnificent wine.

In the Barossa, Tim Smith (right), who will soon be the former winemaker of Chateau Tanunda as he pursues his own revered brand, insists there are some very fine parcels of fruit in that district, while admitting it has not been ideal for many.

So take these claims as you wish, and prepare to see them reflected, or not, on the back labels of the 2011 bottles, if not the bladder packs.

But if it’s forensic accuracy you want, you can’t go past Louisa Rose’s forerunner at the winemaking helm at Yalumba. Brian Walsh, now director of strategy and business management there, wrote a vintage report that is blistering in its honesty and precision.

“The wettest growing season [of the post WWII period]” he stated “being the second wettest year on record. The rain and cold conditions extended right through vintage leading to big losses from disease and produced mostly thin wines from unripe grapes … growers suffered severe losses (as high as 40%) from Downy Mildew due to the wet season – in fact Peter Lehmann did not make any red wine suitable to bottle … ”

Trouble is, Walshie was talking about 1974*.




FOOTNOTES

1. *This quote is from BAROSSA (Barossa Valley – Eden Valley) Vintage Classification 1947 – 1998 (authors: Peter Fuller and Brian Walsh; publisher: Barossa Wine And Tourism Association 1999).

2. A much shorter version of this story first appeared here. I have deleted it, but saved the comments already posted.

Marie Linke from Karra Yerta said...

“About to catch up on your latest posts, Philip. I lapsed into a coma last night for eleven hours which was probably a good thing. Bad thing was, when I woke up, it was still vintage.” April 5, 2011 5:15 PM

Anonymous said...

“There is Barossa Shiraz that has already been graded Grange by the Penfolds team!!

“Both Barossa Merlot and Cabernet are the best we have seen in years.” April 5, 2011 5:31 PM

Jenny said...

“Quality has been marvellous when the fruit comes in clean. This vintage will be a test of the winemkaer - his or her skill at working closely with the viticulturalist to ensure the fruit is picked at the appropriate time. Generally finding the fruit is ripe at lower baumes than usual this year, but with delightful flavour/sugar/acid/tannin balance. Then of course, a good winemaker will be able to be a good custodian of the fruit.

“Traps for unwary players, however.” April 6, 2011 5:33 PM

Cam Haskell said...

“Great stuff Whitey.

“A few points. McGuigan thinks some of it's going to be alright. Which begs the question as to why so much of their wine will be so boring.

“The rainfall in WA figures are a tad misleading. Sure, we got a shedload up north, but down here (in Margaret River) we've only just got some yesterday after super tinder-box-dry conditions since Jan, when we had one day of rain. The fruit I've seen has looked AMAZING, and I think this will be a breakout year for Margaret River shiraz, in particular.

“Your point about trumpeting every vintage is bang on the mark. Vintage variation is real, and it's foolish to suggest that, no matter how judicious, selective and pernickety a producer is that it might match up to a better year. It's irritating and largely mendacious in my opinion to go around treating climate as though it is something that can be overcome in the winery. Absolute bobbins.

“As for fruit being graded as grange, given they make this wine every year, what does that mean? Anything?

“In any case, keep up the good work. Best of luck to the rest of yer still picking and crushing.” April 7, 2011 10:25 AM

Anonymous said...

“This vintage should not be the test of the winemaker, unless he is forced to take fruit with laccase problems. This growing season was surely the test of the viticulturist: his/ her sensitivity, forethought and diligence (and in all likelihood budget) in carrying out cultural operations proactively. This year, perhaps winemakers will actually be stewards of fruit for once, since the requirement for bags of acid and the old culebra negra is vastly dwindled?” April 7, 2011 12:36 PM

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2010 McLAREN VALE: SOMBRE BENEDICTION

DOUG GOVAN'S RUDDERLESS VINEYARD BESIDE HIS FAMOUS VICTORY HOTEL AT SELLICK'S HILL, McLAREN VALE: ONE OF THE FEW WILLUNGA ESCARPMENT OR PIEDMONT VINEYARDS TO BE PICKED IN THE NEAR-PERFECT 2010 VINTAGE - photo MILTON WORDLEY

Winemakers And Ibis Return
Good Fruit Rots In Big Glut
Smart Dudes Move Straight On
by PHILIP WHITE - a shorter version of this appeared in The Independent Weekly

In McLaren Vale, the winter has moved in with some authority. A frost or two; around zero centigrade each night; not much rain yet, but it sorta looks all right as far as winter goes in the world’s best Mediterranean climate. It’s so damn moderate it’s almost too polite.

The smaller birds that were scared off while harvest progressed have returned, and the ibis are back on the flats, drilling thousands of little holes in the sod. Gentle neat aerating holes that no heavy tractor and plough can match, with their great squishing, compacting mass.

I love those stately, prehistoric ibis. They put some ancient Egypt alongside the kangaroos and horses.

I don’t recall a vintage in which the vineyard leaf has hung on for so long after the harvest. This is another sign of a contented, balanced vignoble: happy, confident plants. After vintage there was a great desperate scurry of winemakers off to Britain for various competitions and promotional trade events; as they return they’re surprised, and remark about the leaf still hanging. This confirms their suspicions that the vintage they’ve just had was very good indeed.

This, of course, cannot be claimed by everybody. If you want a reliable touch of depression, follow the drive I took the other day with Roger Pike. We zig-zagged from The Victory on Sellicks Hill right along the piedmont of the Front Hills to Willunga. In other words, we covered half the length of the entire Willunga Embayment’s eastern boundary: some of the most promising vineyard land in the whole of McLaren Vale. There are vineyards all the way; very few of them have been picked. In some, brave owners have commenced pruning the dead bunches along with the canes; others will be left unpicked and unpruned, as there’s not enough money, and little chance of a buyer next year. Half the place is for sale.

Roger, photographed above by Kate Elmes, always sells out of his Marius Wines: they're more ravishing than ravaging. Right now, he's deep into pruning his little vineyard, which grew a stunning crop of black, sinuous assuaging fluid this year. He lives in his vines: it was 09, when the heatwave buggered everything, that he with-held his crop, and made no wine. It wasn’t good enough.

Pity more winemakers don’t have the honesty and balls, and respect of their customers, to do the same.

This year, he’s made three beautiful Marius wines, because the vintage was good.

It’s a tragic comment on the state of things that elsewhere, last year’s inferior wines are clogging up the veins of the business, occupying barrels and tanks, while the grapes of a truly grand year are hanging rotting and useless in the vineyard. This racket is full of people with absolutely no gastronomic intelligence. They are mere sugar miners and ethanol pushers.

Keith Richards says three per cent of rock music is good. I think the wine business, too, is 97 per cent abject crap.

There’s another insidious thing that knocks the corners of one’s mouth down, and it, too, has to do with contrasting philosophies about farming. Where I live, on Yangarra, the big vineyard is in transition to organic management. Yet for the last week, the chill winter air was a-throb with the aggro pulse of a helicopter spraying broad leaf herbicide on vineyards somewhere further back up the escarpment. I’m not suggesting this spray infected Yangarra, but you can smell this stuff as it spills down the creeklines and gullies, to infest neighbouring properties whether they want poison spray or not.

Rather than hire a helicopter and a truck full of petrochem, the crew here has just completed fencing the vineyards so they can use cattle and sheep to eat the weeds through the winter, leaving their exceptionally tidy spread of fertilizing pellets on the neatly-trimmed sward.

As many larger agribusinesses – it’s not restricted to wine – gradually convert to a safer, cleaner, farming regime, this matter of spray drift will become the cause of much irritation and litigation. I’ve seen it happen on a terrible scale in different places, at different times: I was at Rosemount in the Upper Hunter one dry summer, when a farmer of something other than grapes let go a huge application of something that smelled atrocious and killed large swathes of vineyard when the breeze wafted it along.

FIRESIDE VIEW FROM THE HIGHBANK BED AND BREAKFAST

I also recall the first organic vineyard in Coonawarra, Highbank, proudly standing, clean and happy amidst a glower of aggro petrochem-addicted neighbours who blamed every stray spore of mildew or botrytis on the organic vigneron who refused to spray the same poison. Eventually the neighbours solved this by employing aerial spraying techniques, so the plane happened to fly a bit too far across the boundary before it turned its squirters off, thus purging the nasty clean intruder. That took a lot of sorting out, too.

At one point the vineyard workers at Southcorp threatened to cease handling petrochem sprays because of their danger to health. “But you must spray”, they were told, “or there’ll be no crop.” They politely pointed out that the Highbank Vineyard always produced a beautiful crop without any poison, so there was an example supporting their case. That took some sorting out, too.

But the helicopter’s throb is not always a bad sound to everybody. At Petrus, the great Merlot vineyard in Pomerol, Bordeaux, the owner has been known to wrap the vineyard ground in plastic to protect and conserve the soil’s natural moisture, taping the stuff up around the trunk of each vine. Merlot likes wet feet, along with dry leaves and bunches. So he sits above the vineyard in his hovering chopper at night, ensuring the leaves and bunches stay dry, and frost and disease-free until harvest.

Here is a good case in point. The sound of his beautiful, incredible machine is very satisfying to him. The vineyard workers, who live in cottages around its parameter, probably have a different point of view.

MARIUS - TOP REDS FROM THE FAULTLINE

ROGER PIKE AT HIS MARIUS VINEYARD ON THE WILLUNGA FAULTLINE, WILLUNGA, IN MCLAREN VALE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA - photo: KATE ELMES - click for link
Glowering Glints Below The Bling
Spotting The Right Gravel Stuff
Wines With Bibles And Snakes
by PHILIP WHITE - this story first appeared in The Independent Weekly


“I wanted a place where I felt right about the piece of land” said Roger Pike, drawing aromatic smoke from an old briar pipe with half its side burned away. “I spotted that gravel stuff, and that felt as good as the view. It had old almonds on it. Plus there was a little go-kart track out the back which was a lot of fun.”

“Forty-five years ago I lived at Reynella”, he said, with a voice as gravelly as that Marius vineyard dirt. It’s full of adventure and mystery from buccaneering about Europe with the top down; chasing fast lasses along the Riviera ... “I sort of went off into the rest of the world,” he continued, waving his pipe at the sunset and the Gulf. “Big corporations. Ran businesses. Came back after all those years and everybody was still here. Now I’ve got a beautiful wife, a lovely daughter, and a vineyard in this weird dirt.”

We sat there during vintage, gazing from the verandah on the fault line just north of Willunga, tasting an array of delicious wines from that freaky fanglomerate. At some stage in the past, there’s been a towering cliff or embankment which shed a talus, or scree slope of rocks of all sorts. It looks like it was dumped there in one big ker-sploosh, but before it was dumped it was already mashed up and ground down and slopped about by ice and ancient waters, and mysterious, mighty upheavals.

“I’m not even picking this year,” he said at that time, staring at his vines from a big easy chair. The heatwave had toasted much of the crop, and while a neighbour wanted the rest, Roger wouldn’t let his harvesting machine in. “I’ve still got plenty of beautiful 07 and 08 waiting to emerge, and, well, I just don’t feel like making a wine that’s not up to par,” he said. “And I don’t want a bloody machine in here, compacting the ground. Knocking my babies around.”

The first wine I tasted from this very special four acre enterprise was made in 1998 by the Bordelaise magnate, Jacques Lurton, for the French market. The vines were just four years old, but a touch of Gallic finesse rendered an intense yet delicate wine of lovely balance and style, quite unlike the chubby homogenised stuff most of the Vales churns out. I reckon it was the first export wine I’d seen with the words “Fleurieu Peninsula” on it ... it was very, very good.

Since then, Roger generally makes three Marius wines a year. The best, and slowest to emerge from its surly slumber, is the Symphony. It’s $35. There are still a few boxes of 05 surviving, miraculously. I awarded it a measly 93++ here a couple of years back: I’d go 94+++ now it’s begun to show its hand. We shared an 04 the other day at The Victory, and while it’s 100% shiraz from a special slice of the vineyard which has had no irrigation for six years, it seems as seamless and luxuriously silky as the 98 of Lurton: there’s something sweetly hedgerow berry Bordelaise about its cushy plushness.

When the vintage is not perfect, the ultra-premium Symphony fruit goes instead into the lower appellation, called Simpatico. This occurred in 2006, and if its quality is any guide, Roger could well have called it Symphony anyway. This is probably the only wine I’ve had which reminded me of decaying e-type Jaguars, crows in the racing green pines, Bibles and snakes. I like a wine with snakes. $25; 93+++.

Not the least of the black Marius trinity is the Symposium, a fifty-fifty blend of mourvèdre and shiraz. Contrary to the slow-food modest-living Epicurians of the annual gastronomy symposia founded by Michael Symons in the ’eighties, Roger rightly maintains that a symposium is really a noisy, boisterous, after-dinner booze-up.

“When I began planning this blend the winemakers round here said I was nuts,” he said. “You couldn’t sell mourvèdre, they reckoned. Stick to shiraz. So you know what I did? I went straight back to my shed, and tipped all the barrels in a tank, so it was blended. Then I put it back in the barrels. Nobody’s taken it apart.”

As far as symposia goes, these two swarthy varieties are certainly having a party, but it’s more an orgy of treacherous midnight whispers than anything boisterously boozy. The brilliant 06 is nearly gone at 93+++ points and a steal at $30.

Few vineyards have such a specific and freakish geology to infest their wine with such character: amongst all the plush silken sheen and polished syrupy fruits, the Marius wines always glower: you can feel dark glints of ironstone and dolomite amongst the quartz and schist bling at the bottom of this garden. Mystery, see? Deep, sweet mystery.



[for August 2011 vid clip of Pike and White click here]