An Old Favourite Turns Half a Century

Few Australians with a love of wine will never have enjoyed or cellared Wynns Coonawarra Estate’s Cabernet Sauvignon, the wine known the country over simply as the ‘Black Label’. Yet, while most of us view this affordable benchmark with a measure of familiarity or affection, few actually appreciate the notion that with all other things such as vintage quality being equal, the best has yet to come.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wynns staged a tasting to commemorate 50 vintages of its signature wine. It was not only a once in a lifetime chance for wine critics to gain a rare insight into its complete evolution, but also to undertake a journey through time in the way that Coonawarra has evolved as a region. More importantly, perhaps, it gave Wynns’ current chief winemaker, Sue Hodder, a unique chance to calibrate her efforts against those of her predecessors and to learn from their wines and their memories of how they were grown and made. Few winemakers in this country could ever hope to experience anything similar.

‘The tasting reinforced to me that despite the changes in style, many of which can be ascribed to the fashions of whatever period, that there is a genuine regional character at Coonawarra’, she says. ‘It also highlighted that instead of having to continue with major evolutionary steps, it’s really just a matter for us to finesse and fine-tune what we’re doing to get the most from our mature vineyards.’

The extent to which the decades could be neatly grouped and summarised was rather extraordinary. Using the most basic of facilities and having no control of the vineyards, the earliest releases of the 1950s were astonishingly elegant and long living. They were natural, uncluttered wines, the earliest of which were made entirely without electricity! The fine, cedary 1954 vintage, the smoky, leathery 1955 and the more sumptuous and chocolate-like 1958 were the standouts from this decade.

The 1960s were headed by the legendary 1962 and 1966 vintages. Velvet-smooth and cigarboxy, the 1962 is showing no sign of decay. More substantial and assertive, the 1966 is ripe, minty and assertive, still steeped in primary fruit. Other than these great wines, others from this decade revealed some difficulty in controlling varnishy, volatile acidity, although the wines from 1965, 1967 and 1968 were more than acceptable.

Aside from a still-youthful and willowy 1970 vintage, a round and sumptuous 1971 and a cedary but slightly dilute 1976, quality and style took a dip in the 1970s, a largely forgettable decade for Australian cabernet. Accompanied by an increasing area of young vine vineyard whose lack of depth of fruit was going to dilute the wines anyway, we saw the emergence of a national trend towards lighter, ultra-leafy and minty cabernets which as a group fail to provide any genuine development of classic bottle-matured qualities.

Although John Wade, Wynns winemaker between 1982 and 1985 helped steer Wynns away from this trend, it still afflicted most Australian cabernet to some degree or other almost until the emergence of the 1990s. This period coincided with the Barossa’s now-historic low point, when during the late 1970s and early 1980s Barossa reds were deliberately and unsuccessfully made to emulate cool-climate wines.

While the wines of the 1980s were fuller in body than those of the 1970s, revealing a broader array of flavours and aromas, many remain leafy and backward. From this notion you can remove Wade’s masterpiece of 1982, a classical and still-youthful cabernet based on piercingly ripe fruit framed by excellent fine-grained tannins.

Whether it’s climate change or not, there’s no denying that the warmer run of vintages experienced in the 1990s came at a good time for Wynns. With a larger area of more mature vines at its disposal and a willingness to ripen grapes more fully, certainly away from the leafiness of previous decades, the Black Label became a more concentrated and assertively structured wine. Assisted by a willingness to develop more open canopies in the vineyard, promoting greater fruit exposure, classic vintages like 1990, 1991, 1996 and 1998 although this wine has never really fulfilled expectations rolled off the mill. Even 1994, a cool but even season that in previous decades would have resulted in thin, weedy cabernet, produced a first-class and genuinely vibrant wine thanks largely to this refinement of attitude.

Hodder believes she can cherry-pick the best qualities of these older wines from the knowledge she has gleaned through the tasting and the contact it brought her with the makers of the older wines. She’s now aiming to make Black Labels with ripe tannins and a depth of fruit. Whether they’re full or medium-bodied, she says, will be determined by the vintage. ‘If we select parcels based on their tannic structure’, she says, ‘everything else will ultimately line up, providing we’re clear in our minds what we’re looking for. That might mean that we sacrifice some youthful brightness for wines that are dark and closed, and which might need time in the bottle to emerge. They won’t be early blooming and aromatic young wines; the structure we’re after comes at the expense of those aromatics. You can’t have it both ways.’

It’s taken some years of major vineyard renovation and tinkering in the cellars for Sue Hodder’s ambitions for the Black Label to take true effect in the bottle. After the unusually cool 2002 vintage, parcels of fruit from 2003 and 2004 confirm that she is now able to deliver the wines she is aiming for. But consider her thoughts when you ultimately taste them, since by cutting back on primary fruit and by maintaining the winery’s historically small proportion of around 20 new oak, they do to a degree fly in the face of contemporary wine fashion. You’ll then have to trust us both that their true qualities will begin to emerge around five years later. For at least another two decades! Please login to post comment