The Wine Cask

I used to drink quite a lot of cask wine. Along with taking enough coffee to prevent a small capital city from sleeping for three weeks, it’s what you tend to do at university. Those memories I still retain of my tertiary education continue to affirm that whilst the coffee was rarely drinkable at best, the wine, for the bulk of the time, most definitely was.

Pity the student of today – except those at Roseworthy and Wagga, who don’t know how fortunate they are – whose quality of liquid diet has sunk to today’s level of sulphurous flabby cask chablis and colic cask clarets with their grip of an epileptic Sumo wrestler…Obviously this is no way for the minds of the future to be introduced to the Real World beyond, with its Moutons and Moets.

There’s no doubt in my mind – the quality of four and five-litre casks has slumped. My proud boast of yesteryear that Australians drank the best vin ordinaire in the world seems to have gone with it. If you’re in any doubt, look around the shelves of the next French supermarket you visit and snap up a few bottles. Of course there will be a few duds, but cold reality states that where the rest of the world is drinking better cheaper wine, we’re drinking worse.

I have tried quite a number of white cask wines over the Christmas period – which is, after all, a time for humility – and I am upset at the amount of SO2 I have encountered in the majority of these wines. Even worse – I asked my friends whether they could detect the choking, burning sensation that tasted of burnt matches that I described to them, and most couldn’t. They said that the wines just tasted of cask wine. Deplorable.

I guess that much of this must relate to price. How any producer can be expected to maintain a product’s quality and consistency, yet sell it at the same price for around eight to ten years, is beyond me. Some companies are trying to get more return from the cask market by increasing their prices, breaking away from the pack and creating a new `quality cask’ bracket.

More and more sport vintage years on their labels; more are labelled according to variety – and some good varieties are finding their way into the softpak. Perhaps the biggest single move has been the development of the smaller two-litre cask, generally containing “bottle quality” wine in a more convenient package, whose smaller size suggests exclusivity and quality.

I particularly like the new Thomas Mitchell range of two-litre casks, made by Mitchelton, and would put them ahead of those made by Renmano and Yalumba at the moment. Two McLaren Vale firms, Dennis’ and D’Arenberg have put good wine into smaller casks. Whilst the packages may lack the ritzy appeal of the larger-production and more commercial lines, the wine has interest, character and some quality.

But the most extraordinary thing is that you had better get used to taking trouble choosing your casks – you might not have able to afford much more than them in the future.

Figures suggest that about sixty-five percent of all Australian wine is sold as cask wine – a number that appears to be actually declined over the last few years rather than increased. Doubtless by using a statistic such as this, the Federal Government broke another promise and introduced another hike to the wine sales tax, the full impact of which still definitely has yet to be seen.

Many people are not aware that the producer of cask wine is more than favourably encouraged by this fine example of legislation based upon ignorance and insulated misconception. The tax is based upon wholesale price rather than volume of product, meaning that quality bottled wine is directly penalized for quality.

Surely these conditions will even affect the quality of cask wine as well? With a tax which actively promotes cheap wine maybe we shall never see an improvement in the standard of our larger casks.

It strikes me as unbelieveable that the Federal Government has not listened to the wine industry’s pleas that its only way to a secure future can be based upon the consistent achievement of quality. Therefore by taxing this very aspect the Government seeks to doom our wine industry to mediocrity – unfortunately exemplified by the wine cask. And you thought that socialism had nothing to do with drinking?

The introduction of cask coolers throws another red herring into the pond. One of the largest companies in Australia recently revealed to me that there is a very real possibilty that coolers will whittle away at its cask market by up to 25 by the end of this summer. Mmmm…sobering thoughts…never a pleasant prospect.

If a quarter of the cask market is removed, then we have to sell a lot of coolers to utilize the same quantity of wine, don’t we? And is we don’t, less wine has been consumed, and the wine industry’s supposed Saviour, the cooler, will have done nothing more than to shift its consumers towards fruit juices and other styles of mixed drink, i.e. fruit punches and cocktails.

By putting coolers in casks are we encouraging people to drink wine or not? Coolers were supposed to open up a new market of wine drinkers, but instead the figures show that they have intruded on the conventional pattern which first atttracts the new wine consumer to cask wine, then to cheaper bottled wine, then to qualtity wine and so on. Coolers, especially now that they are commonly found in casks, serve to introduce an alternative to the budding wine consumer that may well lead him or her away from wine itself.

Coolers are not marketed as wine products, they do not have? `WINE COOLER’ splashed across their labels. They are perceived by the public for what they are – fruit cup/cocktail drinks whose alcoholic content muight just as well have come from Inca Pesco. The whole affair reeks of short-term greed while forward planning is thrown to the winds.

The cask cooler only serves to exacerbate all the problems that coolers are beginning to give the wine industry, which appears intent on trying its darndest to feed one hand by amputating the other.

So what do I hope happens to casks? I hope that there is a return to quality across the board and a movement in price to a realistic level, which gives the grower and producer something to live for. As you may have gathered by now, I hope that every last drop of cooler is sold off as shuttle fuel, so my inclinations toward
cask coolers is similarly unimpressive.

Casks do have a role to play, and one which should have become more profitable by now. When there’s money in it, perhaps quality will return. But I guess that will only happen when bad news like coolers are just a memory. Please login to post comment