15. The Search for Consistency or the Pursuit of Excellence? Single vineyard, regional and multi-regional as winemaking choices in Australia1

Brian Walsh

Yalumba

Excellence and Consistency are Not Mutually Exclusive

I am changing the subtheme, ‘The search for consistency or the pursuit of excellence’, to ‘the search for consistency and the pursuit of excellence’.

Is it better to have an average wine from an exceptional single site or an outstanding wine from a combination of sites? And who decides?

In this room I suggest that many of us are interested principally in the intrinsic qualities, provenance and integrity of the wine, whatever the source(s); however, many or most wine purchasers might not have enough confidence in understanding or defining their own interpretation of high quality and look to ‘experts’ from many quarters for advice and validation.

I do not intend to talk for or against single sites, or multi-sites, or multi-regions, as if there was only one true way.

This is not a religion.

I intend to explore the positives and negatives of these winemaking philosophies with an overriding assumption that everyone involved in the creation of fine wine in Australia is trying to make wines of excellence.

What is Fine Wine?

In trying to define ‘fine wine’, it is difficult to not mention price per bottle.

That said, for all sorts of supply–demand reasons there are some high-end prices generally beyond the reach of a normal, genuine wine lover who might be on the ‘average wage’, and the disparity between the top-priced wine from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Stellenbosch, Piedmont, Margaret River, Oregon or the Canberra District is such that establishing a fair global comparison is difficult.

Perhaps rather than price, it is the top-valued 5 or 10 per cent of any major wine-producing region or nation?

Andrew Jefford suggested in January 2010 that, in Europe at least, fine wine represented less than 5 per cent of total production.

I suggest we don’t get too prescriptive and definitely not too exclusive, as I am aware of many winemakers who are trying to make, and achieving success in making, fine wine at modest selling prices.

It is fair to say that we are excluding from this discussion those wines that generally sell below A$10 equivalent, as important to our collective futures as those wines are.

Wine Intelligence UK (May 2010)—not without some controversy—suggested that £10+, US$25+ and Swiss CHF25+ formed a logical line in the sand for fine wine.

A group of unnamed ‘connoisseurs’ was outraged, suggesting that they ‘would not describe anything below £30 as fine wine’!

A subsequent Wine Intelligence UK consumer survey reported in June 2010 on consumers’ expectations of fine wine.

Consumers valued: heritage, provenance, handcrafting, critical acclaim, family history and rarity.

Of particular interest was that the dimension of time was also important.

Consumers wanted to feel that

• time had been dedicated to the growing and making of the wine
• retailers and/or sommeliers will devote some time to assist in their decision making
• they made time available to drink the wine and cherish the experience.

I like that approach, where the winemaker takes time to craft a great wine and the wine drinkers make time to savour the wine. Very civilised!

Great Wine Does Not Start in the Vineyard

Contrary to the above widespread and popular belief, I assert that great wine starts in the brain.

The creation of fine wine is, at its source, an intellectual exercise. Someone has a dream, a vision, a hunch—then the desire, commitment, capability and energy to craft something special, typically with a desire for unique attributes that differentiate it from others.

There are admiration and inspiration emanating from other wines, but at the root there is a desire to create ‘differentness’.

An Irony of the Taste of Terroir

During my working life in wine in Australia, I have often heard—and I have often said myself, generally in a positive sense—that a certain Australian wine has a Rhone-like character, in the case of a cool-region Shiraz, or is reminiscent of Champagne, in the case of a fine Australian sparkling, or has a hint of Bordeaux, in the case of a Coonawarra or Margaret River Cabernet.

Those comments imply that the more a wine is thought to show Old-World quality, style and flavour characteristics, the more we tend to praise it.

Apparently, as it loses some of its Australian-ness or local terroir, we admire it more. And often in the same breath we praise the apparent terroir influence on these fine wines—wines that have lost their Australian terroir and taken on the terroir characteristics of another place.

Andrew Jefford repeats the theme in ‘Mateship with place’, in Issue 28 of the World of Fine Wine. While referencing 30 fine Australian wines, he speaks of

• ‘classy Shiraz in the Northern Rhone idiom, full of Yarra freshness’
• ‘a palate of almost Burgundian purity’
• ‘…makes this the Mersault among Australian chardonnays’.

Terroir Gained or Terroir Lost?

Perhaps this is part of an Australian cultural cringe, as we have long had a habit of looking abroad for validation of our skills and expertise—and not just in wine, but in almost all forms of the arts.

Matt Kramer (Wine Spectator, 31 May 2008) argues that Old World/New World delineation is both increasingly more difficult and also less meaningful, not only qualitatively, but also increasingly stylistically.

My extrapolation of that position is that with tens of thousands of winegrowers around the world working on, by and large, the same dozen or so Vitis vinifera varieties, there will be countless wines that taste much the same and so the intimate, finite, measurable, explainable and supportable single vineyard will be an additional if not the additional attribute that creates long-term value for its owner/guardian.

In the same article, Kramer uses ‘site deference’ as a substitute for terroir, citing site deference as a mentality rather than a locality.

Steve Weber and Leanne De Bortoli go one further with their brand Riorret (terroir backwards, or is that down under?), the philosophy of which is ‘wine with place and imagination’.

It is interesting that in 1991, more than 50 years after the formal foundation of the AOC system, Fanet said ‘we are still very far away from being able to explain for each of the approximately 400 French Appellations, which of the characteristics of their terroir creates the originality and specificity of their wines’!

When is Consistency Good and When is it Bad?

In short, common current belief measured in terms of ‘CCIWAs’ (column centimetres in wine articles) is that consistency is bad when it happens in a winery and not in a vineyard.

Good winegrowers around the world

• choose planting material for consistent results or complementarity if mixed clones
• prune for consistency of crop
• manage canopy for consistency of exposure
• farm for consistency of vigour and vine health
• include selective stress
• shoot or bunch thin for consistency and placement of crop
• selectively pick for consistency of maturity
• after picking, sort for consistency of ‘quality’ or ‘purity’, as defined.

Generally, those actions are all deemed appropriate, whereas the next stage of intervention for consistency and higher quality—particularly in recent times—is sometimes and in some quarters seen as a negative or unnatural intrusion.

What is Natural and Unnatural?

It seems today that almost any ‘winemaking’, as in plying the winemaker’s trade, is often seen as somewhat unnatural or interfering with nature.

The use of cultured yeast, acidification, filtration and now even microbiological stability is deemed unnatural. While overuse of any of those techniques can be intrusive, we should not abandon all the positive historical advances we have made in an ideological quest for natural.

Champagne and sherry, for example, would both be particularly difficult to make without good intervention and management of the processes.

In Australia we had potentially devastating problems with Brettanomyces as recently as 10 years ago, as, with good intentions, we moved to a lower sulfur dioxide regime without thinking of past lessons learned.

In much of Australia in the 2011 vintage, lack of intervention would have meant total loss.

It is disappointing to read the following statements.

Jacques Lardiere, head winemaker at Louis Jadot, in Decanter (September 2010), said:

[W]ineries that clean up their wines are removing the life from them.

I’m not after technical perfection. I don’t have much time for the Australian approach, where the ideal wine is the most neutral.

It’s easy to clean up a wine, but by removing faults, unless they are truly detrimental, you also remove its life. (Emphasis added)

Most of us would not disagree with Lardiere that in fine wine a hint of ‘wildness’ is not a bad thing, but there is a dangerous fine line to be walked and it is incorrect to assert that Australia’s ideal wine is our most neutral.

There is a fair chance that Lardiere might not have been exposed to a huge selection of Australia’s Landmark wines.

There is a certain inconsistency in growing the finest grapes possible and then allowing (encouraging?) faults to develop with little care or concern.

Tim White (Australian Financial Review, 13–15 August 2010) provided another view that essentially says that if we take naturalness to its logical conclusion, we would not be making wine in Australia from imported vine stock at all: ‘the way we cultivate the vine is about as unnatural as it gets’, noting that in its natural habitat it is a climber of trees and other conveniently accessible objects.

He then goes further: ‘if we follow the notion of “naturalness” as it applies on this continent we should not be making wine out of the grapes of Vitis vinifera at all, given that it is an introduced species.’

I raise the issues of consistency and naturalness as I sense in recent times the concept of terroir has been too narrowly attributed to place—to the exclusion of philosophy and people.

The following is Warren Moran’s translation of the INAO’s notes on terroir in 2000:

A social construction within a natural space gifted with homogeneous characteristics, delimited on the cadastra, and characterised by a set of values—aesthetic landscape values, cultural values of historical significance, patrimonial values of social significance and values related to its reputation.

Moran (Christchurch, NZ, 2006) talks of the six facets of terroir—agro, vini, territorial, identity, legal and promotional—highlighting the absolute need for human intervention.

Our History of Blending

In Australia

Interregional

As noted by Brian Croser at the Landmark Tutorial 2009, much of the ‘golden era’ of interregional blending—the 1940s to 1960s—was based on curiosity, experimentation and genuinely trying to make a better wine, keeping in mind also that the production of dry table wine was a very small part of our commercial wine industry.

Importantly it is also implied that its origins were in ‘mateship’ or industry camaraderie, which grew into the swapping, trading and subsequent blending of a cask or two of each other’s wines.

There is also the possibility that in that very process of blending, these winemakers were questioning whether some of the attributes that their mates’ wines were bringing to the equation might be reproducible closer to home.

In many cases this might have been a conscious or subconscious search for single sites.

Certainly in the case of Roger Warren of Hardy’s, he was not convinced of the quality of McLaren Vale Shiraz for red table wine, leading to a search further afield for other blending options—the pursuit of excellence.

In my early days in wine in Australia (the late 1960s), the Barossa–Coonawarra blends of Penfolds’ Max Schubert, the Hunter–McLaren Vale or Tahbilk–McLaren Vale blends of Hardy’s Roger Warren, the Hunter–Coonawarras of Mildara and others were the stuff of legend. We were, and still are, very proud of those wines, although as we seem to be inexorably driven towards single sites as the pinnacle of our craft, we are today less likely to try to emulate these great wines. Bravo to Penfolds for the strengths of its brands, giving it the capacity and confidence to continue with a long list of superb interregional wines.

In that era (1940s to 1970s), the pursuit of excellence could be argued as the pursuit and purchase of the wine, not the pursuit and purchase of the land to grow the wine and definitely not the search for a single site.

Andrew Jefford (Personal communication) said that one could argue that this interregional blending of fine wine could be considered as one form of Australian terroir—a multi-terroir.

Of Varieties

Varietal labelling became the fashion from the late 1960s and into the 1970s in Australia, modelled somewhat on the Californian experience. Hitherto our wines had generally been labelled as Claret, Burgundy, Champagne, Hock, Graves and the list goes on.

For some not easily or logically explainable reason, for the next 30 years or so, single varietal wines were generally deemed—in the marketplace—to be superior to ‘blended wines’.

Blends assumed a blending down rather than a blending up in quality.

Is it possible that in another generation we might be having the same discussion about single vineyards (in lieu of single varietals) and blended vineyards (in lieu of blends of varieties) and again be questioning the logic?

In the days of Clarets and Burgundies, blending of varieties was quite common. Shiraz, Grenache, Carignane, Oeillade and Cabernet Sauvignon were generally made without reference to the varieties.

Were we more or less sophisticated then? The variety wasn’t that important, just the maker and the wine.

When red wine boomed there was some blending down, with Grenache converted from fortified to table wine production. It helped give Grenache a bad name, not that it was the grape’s fault; it was the fault of the winemakers.

But the blending up continued and as our winemakers looked for a Cabernet blender they chose Shiraz. It was in abundance and the synergies, the yin and yang, with Cabernet Sauvignon proved extremely successful.

In about 1865 Dr Jules Guyot, philosopher, scientist and oenological adviser, recommended adding Syrah to Cabernet to the producers in Provence, but to the best of my knowledge the recommendation wasn’t taken up with gusto.

The Bordelaise practised ‘hermitaging’ before it was legislated out of order.

Would Bordeaux have been better in say the 1970s and 1980s if ‘hermitaging’ was still permitted and practised? Chateau Palmer, in a quite expensive vin de table, has begun revisiting ‘hermitaging’.

How lucky were we in Australia to be able to assume a world leadership position with this great blend?

Within Regions

This was and is the most common activity, where large, medium and some small wineries carefully choose grapes from within their region or subregion, knowing that ultimately many will go together into the final wine and hoping for complementarity of flavours and textures.

Maurice O’Shea, one of Australia’s greatest winemakers, was noted for his ability to select complementary parcels of wine from neighbours to craft outstanding Hunter reds. My understanding is that often this was wine not grapes.

That skill was practised also in the 1970s and later by a young Wolfgang Blass, with great commercial success, although in a sign of the times, Blass was disparaged by some as ‘just’ a blender—not a term that was used to describe Maurice O’Shea.

Warren Moran at Terroir 2006 (UC Davis) said that ‘to assemble wines from different terroirs is little different from assembling different varieties in the same terroir’—a version of Andrew Jefford’s multi-terroir?

Is not a multi-site wine from within a single or multiple geographic indication merely a blend of several single sites?

Vintage Champagne is one of the finest examples of multi-cuvees from within a large region—generally aimed at raising the quality bar.

What is a Single Vineyard and Why is it Important?

It is my view that the single vineyard is an arbitrary construct.

One could argue that one of the reasons for a single-site approach to winemaking is to show consistency over time from a single source, not withstanding that nature intervenes to provide the variations induced by seasonality.

However, we cannot and should not avoid acknowledging the intellectual property values in a defined site and how that has the potential to create serious and well-justified wealth in the correct hands.

If most of what the collective winemakers of the world do in terms of practices and techniques is to be copied, it is ultimately only the site that cannot be truly copied by another—even if the result is very similar.

There is currently no definition of a single site in our Australian wine law, but common law would imply a clearly defined vineyard of known boundaries, most likely a contiguous piece of land and possibly under single ownership.

A single vineyard or farm may not be claimed under US wine law unless 95 per cent of the fruit comes from that vineyard.

Recently the South African wine producers defined single vineyards. A key point was that a single vineyard may not be greater than 6 ha in size. Is this driven by an assumption that if greater than 5 ha, homogeneity of the land might be corrupted (less consistency?), or is it driven by an assumption that smaller (and more exclusive) is a better marketing fit for a consumer expectation of single site?

Noteworthy also is that a single-vineyard wine may only be planted to a single variety. What are they thinking?

The Irony of the Single Vineyard

A single vineyard implies homogeneity of soil and climate. It implies a single terroir of reproducible consistency.

The search for consistency by other means is seen by some as a dumbing down, not an enriching experience.

In reality, most single sites will have some degree of variability within the boundaries of the vineyard: soil structure and depth, available moisture content, subtle changes in elevation or exposure to the elements.

A single vine is the ultimate, yet totally impractical expression of a unique terroir.

Some great single vineyards are planted on slopes where we know there is a difference between top, middle and bottom, due to soil depth, fertility, temperature, sunlight interception and so on. This reinforces the variability within a single vineyard, arguing against the aim of homogeneity.

As an aside, Brian Croser notes in ‘My pinosity’ (The World of Fine Wine, 2009) another apparent paradox, where in the pursuit of fine wine, we tend to choose the coolest possible region and then select the warmest possible site on which to plant. I don’t think he posed the next question of should we find a warm region and choose the coldest possible site?

Our History of Single Sites

Australia has a long history of single-site wines, although I sense we tend (with notable exceptions) not to celebrate them with the same degree of reverence that we might a European single vineyard of real stature—and maybe that’s reasonable. We should respect history and heritage as intrinsic parts of wine culture and be patient in waiting for greatness to be bestowed.

The shorter-term challenge for those of us with single-vineyard programs is to articulate what this means to our domestic and international audiences.

Beyond the classic Australian single-site wines, many of which you will have tasted, there is an emerging class of new single sites, providing a very exciting development for us all.

While I expect this is happening across many Australian wine regions, I will talk about the Barossa project, due to knowledge of, and familiarity with, the project.

The Barossa Ground project is a collaborative exercise being undertaken by the winegrowers of the Barossa to see (initially over a five-year period) whether and how the different soil types, aspects and microclimates of the Barossa, as they apply to Shiraz, can be transferred into the wines and how that knowledge can be accumulated, interpreted and articulated to the wider wine community.

As a by-product of the process, many more significant and distinguished vineyard sites are being isolated and will most likely come onto market as single-site offerings.

So much of the value in single-site winemaking is in the focused search for perfection and the associated accumulation of site-specific knowledge and information. It certainly represents one aspect of ‘the pursuit of excellence’.

Conclusion

Excellence and consistency are not mutually exclusive.

Single vineyard, regional and multi-regional are winemaking choices for Australian winegrowers.

Many great fine wines have been and will continue to be made from those choices.

Vive la difference!

As the boundaries of individuality and uniqueness, of Old World and New World become blurred, the single site is one incontestable protection of intellectual property.

Winegrowers without a single site must carefully develop their own differentiation capability and a method for communicating their story.

Consistency is not inherently bad; consistently great is a worthy ambition.

Winemaking intervention, with knowledge, care and sensitivity, should not be scorned.