Long Live The Blend!

Oakridge Estate’s Jim Zitzlaff isn’t the first winemaker to bemoan the public’s pre-occupation with straight varietal wine. His Yarra Valley winery quickly made a huge impact with the sheer quality of its straight Cabernet Sauvignon, but experienced unforeseen difficulty selling its first blended wine, the Cabernet Shiraz Merlot 1986, labelled accordingly. Both wines were scarce, of premium quality and both collected trophies. “It’s almost as if there are two or three varieties in the same wine, then it can’t be any good!”, says Zitzlaff.

Too many Australian wine drinkers are still duped by the absurdity originally proposed by the wine industry itself, that for a wine to be any good it must come from a single grape, a single vineyard and a single year.

Blending makes the best wine in all but the rarest of incidences. It’s not just an excuse for a winemaker left with a winery full of slops after a poor vintage. Blending is an art – considered in France to be at least as important as the actual making of the various components of the blend themselves.

Nearly all the best French wines are blends. With all but one exception – Krug’s Clos de Mesnil – the greatest Champagne is blended, frequently across dozens of vineyards and at least two grape varieties. The extraordinary reds of the Medoc in Bordeaux are blends of perhaps three or four grapes and apart from the rarest, scarcest of Burgundies, they’re all blends too.

Relics from the feudal days of the Middle Ages, the vineyards of Burgundy and Champagne are tiny plots of cultivated land set amid the sea of vines across their rolling landscapes. In the Clos de Vougeot, the largest of the Grand Cru first growth vineyards in Burgundy, there are no less than eighty owners for its mere fifty hectares.

Growers may own several such plots within a single ‘vineyard’, as well as other plots in different vineyards. Apart from the obvious difficulties this presents when carting machinery around to cultivate the vines, it means that such plots are invariably blended together to bump up the total wine yield into a marketable amount.

Since around sixty percent of Burgundy is sold through a system of negociants and brokers, who buy small parcels of wine from growers before maturing and blending it themselves, then their ‘bulked up’ blends can derive from at least twenty or more growers, taking the blending of a single variety to a huge extent.

Champagne follows a similar pattern, but to a greater degree. How many small growers’ plots do you think it would take to produce the millions of bottles that constitutes a Moet et Chandon Non-Vintage Champagne? Hundreds. This wine possibly represents the greatest blending exercise on earth.

At least ninety-five percent of Australian wine is blended. Our blends take many forms. At the premium level our winemakers are doing exactly as their counterparts in the Medoc area of Bordeaux, blending together cabernet sauvignon and merlot, possibly also with cabernet franc and a little malbec. Different grape varieties produce different flavours and textures, so it’s up to the winemaker or blender to see that the varieties are proportioned to contribute most to complexity of flavour and structure. A harmonious and non-conflicting harmony between the various component grapes is sought after.

In Bordeaux the presence of several varieties in the vineyard is seen as an insurance. Merlot ripens early, cabernet sauvignon late. In bad, cold years they would be unable to make a wine at all without their merlot.

Australian wines made with precisely this philosophy include Lindemans Pyrus, Tisdall’s Mount Helen Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, Mildara’s Alexander’s Blend, Mountadam’s new beauty, ‘The Red”, Diamond Valley Cabernet, Cullens Cabernet Merlot and Stanley Leasingham Bin 56 Cabernet Malbec.

Two or more grape varieties from the same vineyard may together make a better wine than either of the varietal components. Lindemans Limestone Ridge is such an example, in which one of Coonawarra’s best single vineyards is planted to both shiraz and cabernet sauvignon. The results speak for themselves. Limestone Ridge is one of Australia’s most sought-after and decorated wines.

Straight varietal wines may also be blends of many different components. Selected parcels of fruit from adjacent or distant vineyards can achieve an array of marginally or profoundly different flavours and textures, enabling the winemaker to capture as many of the characteristics of a grape variety in a single wine as possible.

Take Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon, a masterful example of a varietal cabernet sauvignon wine. It is chosen from several different vineyards, often from entirely separate regions. A more commercially-priced example is the very fine Seppelt Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon, a wine made in comparatively large quantities, and taken from different states, let alone different vineyards.

Let’s return to the specialist grower, who may just have three acres of chardonnay, and nothing else. How can he achieve the complexity and quality that comes of blending, for he doesn’t have the pool of diversity available to him that a Dr Lindeman or Mr Seppelt has virtually on tap?

The principles remain the same, but the small grower or winemaker has first to create this diversity. Let’s stay with the example of chardonnay.

It’s harvest time and it takes the grower and his family and close friends two weekends of solid work to harvest them grapes. If you’ve ever done this by hand you will immediately understand why I specify close friends. The weather is quite warm and the grapes ripen quite quickly, so the grower times the two pickings to get one slightly under-ripe, the other slightly over. The average will be close to the mark. But straight away we have two separate parcels, which can be blended together directly, or made entirely separately – our first source of variation or diversity.

Next, for each parcel, the grower may leave some of the juice ‘on skins’ after crushing in order to extract more body and richness. Some juice may go straight through, creating a lighter, fresher batch. Segments of juice may or may not be clarified before fermentation. Different yeasts can be added to create different characters in different batches. The fermentation can be carried out entirely in wooden barrels or in stainless steel, or a combination of the two.

After the primary yeast fermentation, some or all of the wine could be encouraged to complete a secondary, or bacterial fermentation, which softens acidity and broadens and complexes flavour. Parcels of the wine could be matured in oak after fermentation, with or without dead yeast cells still in the barrel.

The barrels could be French, American, German or Portuguese. Each produces a different character and effect on the wine. You can choose from dozens of entirely different French oaks, from the forests of Nevers, Alliers, Troncais, Vosges or Limousin, assembled by different coopers. You can even specify how toasty, or charred you want the inside of the barrel to be – light, medium or heavy toast!

The options are endless, and I have only mentioned a few. The small grower, with only ten tonnes of chardonnay from his three acres can easily produce twenty or so entirely different wines, before attempting the assemblage, the blending exercise to reunite them in the best way possible. Once again, you might be surprised to learn how much of our wine is made with such a philosophy.

Blending is not a dirty word – far from it. It is an art essential to the making of premium wine to a consistent quality standard. Understanding blending is critical to the continuing improvement across the wine spectrum in Australia. In a word, listen to Jim Zitzlaff and others like him – and buy their blended wine. Please login to post comment