i want a space here

We check out the wine writers who make our pulses beat faster

Some wine writers get up our noses, others make us smile, others again bore the pressings out of us. The last lot are in the majority but it’s the same with politicians, CEOs of banks and prize-winning novelists. You won’t see many Mark Twains or Oscar Wildes writing about wine but Tom Wolfs are easier to find.

Here’s an example from Philip White, who can turn aroma wheels into Catherine Wheels (and yes, he’s talking about a wine): It smells more like it came from the staff entrance of the Mustang Ranch.  It’s rude and rich and voluptuous in the fruit department, with a great mush of ripe red berries and plums wallowing about.  Maybe even baby beetroot.  Then it blasts off a top note of musk and confectioner’s sugar, and yes, the faintest whiff of the Kanmantoo pit after a blast.

Parker Power – it’s not in the words

We’ll come back to Philip – we can’t just leap over Robert Parker Junior, the man credited with a million dollar nose. Over the last couple of decades, Parker has put millions of dollars into the pockets of Bordeaux proprietors with his glowing reviews and perfect scores. The problem is that he’s handed out too many of these lately. Wine Searcher features a list of the 511 commercially available wines that have been awarded 100 “Parker points”.’

Parker is credited by many for the change we’ve seen in Bordeaux from elegant reds to a much bigger, richer, riper style. As a wine writer, he is polished but conventional. Here’s an example: ‘ … the Pine Ridge 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon is loaded with notes of dark chocolate, spring flowers, black cherries and black currants. This medium to full-bodied, flavorful, pure wine possesses lots of nobility, intensity and richness, but there is not a hard edge to be found in this beauty. For sheer complexity, it is hard to beat. Moreover, it should drink well for 10-15 years.’

Doesn’t get the pulse racing, does it? So let’s get back to the man who has been called the Rimbaud of McLaren Vale, the Charles Bukowski of wine writers and Australian wine’s Kerouac, Hemingway and Montagne rolled into one.

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 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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