Blanc

The strange Ritual of Bordeaux En Primeur

‘The 2014 Bordeaux en primeur campaign has failed,’ writes Andrew Jefford in his Decanter column. He quotes Farr Vintner’s Tom Hudson who blames over-pricing and adds that ‘customers have completely lost confidence in it.’ Andrew adds that leading Bordeaux proprietors seem to be ‘living in a parallel pricing universe to their core customers …’

En Primeur is a strange ritual unique to Bordeaux (and Burgundy). Wine merchants, wine experts and wine writers gather to taste barrel samples of last year’s vintage. This year it was 2014, and you can read a first-hand account from Will Lyons, one of the participants. The idea is that you can pre-purchase the 2014s at this time, and save something like 20% on the sale price after their release next year. Sounds attractive? Read on before you get too excited.

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It took several decades before the New World winemakers began to make decent Pinot Noirs. Now that they’ve succeeded, Australia’s and New Zealand’s major Pinots cost as much as minor red Burgundies. Some argue that ours are better, but let’s not forget that even the great Burgundies don’t often hit the sweet spot.

That’s because Pinot Noir is the most fickle of red varieties. Vineyard sites and soils, clonal selection of vines, winemaking tricks like fancy yeasts, maceration, cold soaking and barrel fermentation – all these variables need to be optimised before there’s even a chance of success. Over the years, many men have become obsessed with wine’s Holy Grail and gone mad trying.

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Not when 2 wine competitions hand out over 20,000 awards

‘Congratulations to all 9,694 wines given an award by the IWC this year. Did anyone fail to get a sticker of some sort?’ Victoria Moore, The Telegraph (UK).

This post is a few years old now, but nothing has changed since I wrote it. Despite the glaring problems in the current wine show system, the committees running our wine shows refuse to take action. It seems that they don’t give a toss about the dubious ways wine show results are promoted by the wine trade to flog more of their grog. 

The last couple of weeks have seen the results of the 2 biggest world wine competitions announced: the Decanter World Wine Awards and the International Wine Challenge 2015. The medal tally for both competitions is simply mind-boggling – 11,152 out of some 16,000 entries for the DWWA, and 9694 at the IWC who won’t say how many entries it received since it doesn’t want to look smaller than the Decanter affair.

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Yalumba Galway Claret returns from the dead, with a split personality

The courier delivered a couple of samples from Yalumba this week: a Galways Vintage Shiraz 2013, and a Galway Vintage Malbec 2012. The surprise was that neither label showed any resemblance to the Galway Claret label of the past, and this label has a past stretching all the way back to Robert Menzies and beyond.

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A guest post by Brian Miller, first published in The Adelaide Review, October 2011

A faction of rogue wineries, who call themselves ‘Winemakers Without Frontiers’ – but who have plenty of front – recently organised a flash-mob wine tasting at Adelaide Central Market. I stumbled into their ambush and was plied with produce. Louise Hemsley-Smith, from Battle of Bosworth Winery, asked me how I’d heard of the event.

“Did you see us on Facebook? On Twitter?”

“I saw you from across the market,” I replied naively.

“What, with your eyes?” Louise admonished me, “That is so yesterday.”

Oenology is undergoing an e-change. Louise is ahead of the pack and can take you on a virtual tour of her winery via iPad. That’s when she can wrestle the thing away from her offspring.

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what else can we do?

Where the Streets have Hallowed Names

On a recent Sunday outing we decided to visit Minchinbury, which is now a Sydney suburb between Mount Druitt and Rooty Hill. We were astonished how little was left of the Penfolds winery that once produced one of Australia’s top sparkling wines. So much history here, and so little to remind us of it apart from a few streets in the neighbourhood with random wine names like Burgundy Place and Barossa Drive, Combet Place and Buring Crescent.

The site is now a housing development with a restaurant and a small museum (pictured), which wasn’t open on this lovely autumn Sunday and didn’t look as if it had been open recently. The people in the nearby restaurant knew nothing about it. There is a ‘Heritage Walk’ around the perimeter of the site, with signs that remind us of the buildings that once stood here. An old chimney around the back looks as out of place as a Roman column on a Harry Seidler building.

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There’s no creek, only rivers

Langhorne Creek lies about 80 kms south-east of Adelaide on a fertile alluvial flood plain fed by the Angas and Bremer rivers. The weird thing is that there’s no creek here called Langhorne Creek – the area was originally known as Langhorne’s Crossing, the spot where local cattle drovers Alfred and Henry Langhorne drove their cattle across the Bremer during the 1840s. Ten years later Frank Potts was the first to plant vines here, and his Bleasdale Vineyard has been in production ever since.

Langhorne Creek lies close to the northern shore of Lake Alexandrina, about 40 kms south-east of McLaren Vale. The Bremer and Angas rivers flood the area in winter and help the rich alluvial soils produce big yields of healthy grapes. The winter flooding – from rain in the Mount Lofty Ranges – carries the vines through the dry summer months. Wineries control the flow of the rivers through a system of floodgates and banks, which they use to divert water to their vineyards as needed.

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It’s not just the volume end, but the fine wine market too

You’ve seen the sad stories on the news of Riverland grape growers forced to sell their grapes for less than the cost of production. What you haven’t seen is companies making fine wine conceding that they’re having a tough time too.

Australia produces well over a billion litres of wine a year, and is the world’s fourth largest wine exporter yet only 12th in per capita consumption (just 4 litres a year per capita).

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One day a few weeks ago, I met with the people from Naked Wines at their offices on the water at Newport, just down from the Newport Arms. Here I found a call centre of reasonable size spread over two floors, and was greeted by a lady with a big smile who introduced herself as the Customer Happiness Manager and apologized for the messy office – they’d just had a birthday party with cake and balloons.

As a young salesman, I visited thousands of offices over many years and developed the ability to read an organisation from a few clues gleaned by observing the employees. Here at Naked Wines, it was obvious right away that they loved working here.

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The wines we drink have changed a lot in the last few decades, whether they’re Australian or imported. Reds have changed most of all: they’re bigger, richer and softer, they’re more fruity and less tannic these days. Most commercial reds are ready to drink when they’re released 2 or 3 years old, therefore the question in the title of this post.

What about the big guns?

Grange and its iconic siblings are still made for the long haul, and will repay some years in the cellar. So will the top of the line Henschkes, Torbrecks and Brokenwoods, the serious reds from Leeuwin Estate, Cape Mentelle and Wendouree. Some of our best Rieslings and Semillons will improve for a decade or more as well.

What about  the great names of Bordeaux and Burgundy, Italy and Germany? The Wine Spectator’s Matt Kramer raised the cellaring question not long ago and concluded that ‘most of today’s fine wines will reach a point of diminishing returns on aging after as few as five years of additional cellaring after release.’ He added that even great Bordeaux and Burgundies, and the best Brunello di Montalcino or Barolo wines would repay 10 years of cellaring at most.

Green Harvests

The main reason Kramer gives is ‘green harvests’, the practice of taking green bunches of grapes off the vines a few weeks before harvest. This practice, which wasn’t widespread until the 1990s, results in uniformly riper grapes. Kramer says the practice ‘has transformed the quality of fine red wines nearly everywhere, ensuring more uniformly ripe grapes with rounder, softer, finer tannins.’

Kramer adds that cleaner winemaking, malolactic fermentation and the practice of maturing reds in small oak barrels have also played a role in making today’s wines are far more drinkable than their counterparts of 20 years ago.

Later Harvests

Kramer only mentions the recent trend of ultra-ripe late picking in passing, which is a little strange given that it has the most obvious effect on bringing wines forward. The riper and richer red wines are, the more appealing they are in their youth. As they age, they tend to fade rapidly like so many Mediterranean beauties but it’s easy to forget that when confronted with the blush of youth.

Most wine judges and reviewers fall for the lush young beauties, and winemakers haven’t been slow to notice. ‘There is a race towards concentration, to please many critics [read Robert Parker],’ Professor Denis Dubourdieu told Decanter magazine. He said later picking – sometimes even after the Sauternes harvest in October – had become common practice.

Jean Claude Berrouet, formerly at Petrus and now winemaking director for various estates in Pomerol, told Decanter that he had seen alcohol levels rise between 2 and 2.5 degrees in his 40-years of winemaking. The 2009 and 2010 Bordeaux reds support his claims, with alcohol readings of 14.5 to 15% – details HERE.

The Gamble of Long Term Cellaring

I’m lucky to be part of a group of wine lovers who have deep cellars, and we get together every few months for dinner. We all bring a bottle or two of our finest, and at least half of them are either over the hill, or disappointing, or dud bottles. Yes, you end up with quite a few duds over the years.

In the cold, hard light of day, this is what happened: you bought a $100 bottle of wine and stored it in your purpose-built cellar for 25 years. It’s now worth $2000 but it’s a dud. You can’t even get your $100 investment back, let alone present value. If you’d bought bought 5 shares in Microsoft at its IPO in 1986 for $105 instead, they would’ve turned into 1440 shares over the course of nine stock splits and would be worth about $37,000 today.

Age is overrated

The longer you keep a wine, the higher the chances that you’ll be disappointed. That’s because age throws a harsh light on character flaws, as it does with people. At every one of these dinners, I come away thinking that the good wines we shared would’ve been better 10 years ago (excepting the fortified wines).

One night in 2012, we shared four 1982 Grand Cru Bordeaux including first the growths Latour and Haut-Brion. Even these fabled wines from a fabled vintage would’ve been better ten years earlier. There are sublime exceptions: a 1976 Grange was at its absolute peak in the same year, and so was a 1975 Chateau d’Yquem.

The thing to remember is this: if you open a bottle and think the wine is good but needs a few more years to reach its full potential, you’ll most likely enjoy it anyway. If you open a bottle and think it would’ve been better 5 years ago, the disappointment will linger. If you have more bottles of the wine in your cellar, the disappointment will linger longer.

Back to the Real World

I’ve just updated our list of Best Cellaring Wines under $20, and it’s a real struggle to find wines – red or white – that will improve for more than 3 -5 years. As you can see from the examples below, among the safest cellaring bets are Aussie Rieslings and Semillons made the traditional way.

How can we tell if a wine will improve for 5 – 10 years? Two ways: We look for a good structure, that is: depth of flavour, line and length of fine acid (in white wines) and a decent tannin grip on the finish of red wines. The fruit may be subdued and the component parts may be immature and edgy, but the wine must show good balance overall. It’s not easy to explain in words, but experienced tasters think they can tell (yours truly included).

As with the weather, the further ahead you forecast the more uncertain things get. That means the longer you keep a wine, the greater the gamble. This is why reviewers of thoroughbreds look at the bloodlines. If a wine has a history of aging well over 20 years, it’s a safe bet that the new wine of a good vintage will follow suit. That’s if all else is equal, the winery hasn’t changed hands, and the winemaking team is still the same.

Corks and Stelvin caps

The screwcaps have banished cork taint but have had no impact on winemaking for obvious reasons. Most of us expect them to slow down the aging process but that’s not yet been proven beyond doubt. If it’s true, it may help keep some wines alive a bit longer which could be a good thing given the shorter lifespans of most modern wines.

The screwcaps have also had an impact on ‘laying wines down’, since they can now happily stand up in your cellar. Of course, most of us down’t have a cellar in the traditional sense so we’ve put together our Rough Guide to Cellaring Wine in a Hot Climate to show you some practical options.

Kim