What’s so querky about modern shiraz?

Doesn’t the wine pendulum swing quickly? Glancing back through a five year-old contribution to this magazine I witnessed myself expressing the concern that those who persisted making fuller-bodied wines from the shiraz variety should be amply rewarded for standing by them. At the time, as I recall, the true and ample traditions of Australian shiraz appeared to be drowning under a welter of lighter, sweeter styles in which carbonic maceration was playing an increasingly dominant role.

I needn’t have worried. Not only is the root’n, toot’n Aussie shiraz back in town, but it’s bigger, meaner and more rip-roaring than ever before. There is still little doubt that excessive volumes of shiraz are still converted to lighter and simpler wine than that of which it is ultimately capable, but there’s no denying that the fashion for heavier, richer Australian shiraz has returned.

Propelled by thousands of newly-found devotees of Australian flavour and freshness, especially from the United Kingdom and United States, warmer-climate wines, shiraz especially, are back in the spotlight. Shiraz has helped push the cool climate fad to a timely end, as consumers and media finally switch their attention to the questions of quality and drinkability – and not simply whether or not a wine shows obvious cool-climate characteristics.

The resurgence of the Barossa Valley has everything to do with the way people clamour for the ripe, spicy shirazes of Peter Lehmann, Grant Burge, Rocky O’Callaghan, Charlie Melton, Charles Cimicky, St Hallett, Bethany, et al.

It’s somewhat ironic that it has taken our wine trading partners to demand our own respect for our truly distinctive red table wine. Shiraz has now an equal claim to cabernet sauvignon for new oak. Consider the prestige now afforded such abels as Henschke’s Hill of Grace and Mount Edelstone, Jim Barry’s The Armagh, Wynns’ Michael Hermitage, Grant Burge’s Meshack, St Hallett’s Old Block, Laira’s Original Vineyard, Tahbilk’s 1960 Vines Shiraz, Mount Langi Ghiran’s Shiraz, Rothbury Estate’s Reserve and the Hanging Rock Heathcote. Incredible wines, all. There’s no shortage of quality at the top.

But in a bid to satisfy the wants of markets foreign for ripe, sun-kissed Australian shiraz, have we gone over the top? These days I hardly ever see an Australian shiraz under 13.5 by volume of alcohol. Many leave that in their wake. Even in Coonawarra, the very region famed for the elegance and restraint of its complex reds, winemakers feel tempted to mix it with the strongest and ripest of the rest. You just can’t carry that amount of alcohol unless the wine’s concentration and power of fruit is something extraordinary.

Then there’s the issue of oak. Having bumped into quite a number of visiting English oenophiles in recent weeks, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that almost to a man or woman they think our shiraz is over-wooded. What a can of worms this opens up!

We all know how well shiraz is suited to the coconut-vanillin of American oak and to the silky creaminess it imparts to the palate, but when is enough enough? The fact that oak gets more expensive each passing year is doing little to curb our winemakers’ enthusiasm for the stuff.

Forget the barrel. Sprinkle in the shavings by the sackful, oak powder by the keg or simply splash a plank or two into the stainless steel. You now have a very oaky wine which nobody could deny.

Early in the 1980s oak shavings from coopers’ off-cuts became a common resource in many of Australia’s larger and medium-sized wineries. They can impart a pronounced, pungent wood character when used after fermentation, but during fermentation can create an effect very similar indeed indistinguishable in some cases from conventional barrel fermentation. The risk they represent is that the material from which they were created might have been mouldy or else sappy in nature; characters that might be taken up by the wine.

Next to appear were finer forms of powdered oak: processed, roasted or heated in a controlled fashion to eliminate risks associated with shavings and to create a more consistent medium which allows winemakers more control over the rate at which their wines sop up oak character.

Most recent has been the Inner Stave concept, which involves the placement of whole oak staves inside stainless steel tanks, a technique particularly suited to efficient and cost-effective take-up of toasty new wood characters.

The problem with techniques of this nature is that if anything, their use is swinging the balance between fruit and wood further than ever towards the wood. Oak character is now cheaper than ever before, and it is invariably rewarded in Australian wine shows – especially Melbourne, where ambient air temperatures marginally above Absolute Zero encourage judges to reward anything that smells at all. In the chill it’s the oak aromatics that stand out. Just ask Wolf Blass.

It’s worth noting that these techniques are becoming more widely adopted with each passing Australian vintage and are certainly not restricted to the ‘commercial’ labels. Nor can they ever entirely replace the barrel and the slow, controlled oxidative and softening maturation function it performs.

When used excessively, the powdered and shavings form of oak extract create a heady, pungent aroma reminiscent of dirty spirit. It also gives me hangovers. I discover this phenomenon more and more in Australian shiraz, especially those from warmer climates, made with the clear objective of matching their increasingly ripe, jammy and porty fruit characters with a commensurate dollop of oak. Consumers say these wines are too oaky. So do I and so do the representatives of foreign markets I regularly meet.

Shiraz is the Australian wine grape of the 1990s. It presents us with a rare chance to perfect our own styles of a grape variety whose international demand far exceeds its plantings. What’s more, it’s been growing in our own back yard for decades and was even the major victim of a vine-pull scheme is South Australia which looks more inexcusable with each passing year. Let’s hope we concentrate a little more on the fruit flavour of shiraz, rather than the degree of alcohol it can produce or the amount of oak we can dissolve in it. Please login to post comment