Winespeak in the ’90s

My, how things have changed! In just over a decade since I studiously spat my way through ‘Sensory Evaluation’ classes at Roseworthy College, the thought tends to strike that most of the undesirable facets of taste and texture that I attempted to commit to palate memory have become things of the past. The wine taster of the 1990s has an entirely new set of variables to come to grips with.

There are two main reasons for this dramatic change of affairs. Firstly, the professionalism evident throughout the winemaking community has all but eliminated the sometimes extraordinary faults which used to find their way from time to time to the dinner tables of unsuspecting customers.

Only rarely am I ever troubled today by the reeking burned-rubber pong of reduced sulphur and mercaptan. Only from time to time do I encounter wines bottled with enough sulphur dioxide to preserve an entire orchard of dried apricots. It’s no longer all that common for bottled wine to flaunt enough volatile acidity to suggest it may well double as a nail polish remover or permanent adhesive.

My hazy memories of cloudy protein deposits, of unscheduled and thoroughly unpalatable second fermentations, of accidental malolactic fermentations in bottle, of pungent bacterial infections stark enough to frighten you off the stuff altogether – these are as irrelevant to Australian wine in the 1990s as the generic names of Chablis and White Burgundy are shortly to become.

The second reason is that despite their great knowledge and application of technology when they need it most, our winemakers are introducing more traditional age-old European techniques to create elements of complexity and quality hitherto unseen in premium Australian wine. These very techniques, of which barrel fermentation and malolactic fermentation in white wines are but two, have introduced an entirely new spectrum of taste to the Australian palate.

So let’s wander through ten of the most common faults, deficiencies or points of contention in modern bottled Australian wine.

1. The Damn Thing’s Cloudy!

If you find your 1990s wine cloudy, I’ll wager good money it’s a cool climate pinot noir, possibly from New Zealand, the USA as well as Australia. A large proportion of winemakers who devote considerable energy to the almost Don Quixote-like task of perfecting this grape are convinced that if you filter it to remove all fine solids prior to bottling, you risk removing some flavour as well. So don’t panic – just enjoy the drink.

2. The Fruit Goes AWOL

These are the short wines, those whose fruit flavour doesn’t extend down your whole palate. Wines should feel as though they have fruit flavour from the front on your mouth around your teeth all the way down the tongue, before rolling off the end. In these accountant-driven days of modern business, many vineyards crop their fruit far too heavily and as a consequence the wines made from them appear thin and ‘short’ in the fruit department. Top wines, regardless of grape variety, have terrific ‘length’.

3. Once it’s swallowed, it’s gone!

Related to, but separate from the issue of length of flavour is the matter of persistence. Once again, regardless of what it’s made from or what it costs you, top wine must last on the palate after you’ve swallowed or expectorated, if the occasion demands. Quality and persistence go hand in hand. Once you wake up to this, the number of wines that simply disappear will amaze you.

4. You’re certain there’s fruit it there?

Just as winemakers were getting over the problem of using excessive barrel maturation, onto the market comes an entire range of natural means to quickly impart fantastic dollops of wood extract and flavour into wine. They’re available as powders, shavings or special cuts of oak, and you use them by simply dropping them into a stainless steel tank of wine. Ever wondered why a six-month-old chardonnay can have enough wood in it to construct a respectable beach house? Wonder no more.

5. It’s that Nail Polish Remover again!

As long as there’s wine, some will be volatile. In the winemaking context, this means they smell of vinegar, nail polish remover or aeroplane glue. If they do, they will also taste strangely sweet. Now it’s quite true that a small amount of what the trade calls VA may ‘lift’ the fruit qualities of some wine, but here it’s a matter of degrees. Don’t be alarmed if your sweet white botrytis-affected dessert wine tastes of the stuff. The most famous of them all, Chateau d’Yquem, is likely to be above the legal limit, so who cares?

6. Around the Rugged Riesling…

Although some wine show judges seem unwilling to consider it a flaw in their make-up, rieslings shouldn’t taste grippy and phenolic at the finish. This noble grape is best made into elegant, seductive wines, whose finesse and length of fruit are contrasted against the crispness of their clean finish. Some rieslings are phenolic enough to suggest they might have been oak-matured. You feel this sensation on the lining of your mouth. It’s not something to aim for.

7. Think Dry, Think Sweet

Cold, hard commercial reality suggests that if the wine is completely bone-dry, you won’t sell more than 20,000 cases of the stuff. Since our best-sellers are way over this mark, many of them, whites especially, can be quite sweet at the finish. You pick up the sugar at the tip of your tongue. It goes without saying that the best dry white wines should be exactly that – dry as the Gobi Desert.

8. The Cool Climate Excuse

Just because a wine was grown in a southerly latitude approximating the Antarctic Circle; made by a doctor, lawyer or stockbroker; its label can trace its ancestry to a Ken Done design and because it costs upwards of $25 a bottle, it doesn’t mean that it can get away with tasting like it was actually made from capsicum, asparagus and cut grass – rather than ripe grapes. The so-called ‘cool climate’ character is nothing more than an excuse for under-ripened flavours in grapes, which don’t necessarily correlate with sugar ripeness. Of course you may like these flavours, in which case your monthly drinking budget should include a large allocation of pongy New Zealand sauvignon blanc.


9. Do you drink it or chew it?

Australian winemakers really have gone for the malolactic fermentation in a big way, especially with those small boutiquey chardonnays from cool climates. The malolactic fermentation is a bacterial process which converts green, apply, malic acid into milky, creamy lactic acid, which is far softer. It’s standard operating procedure for the white wines of Burgundy chardonnay, of course, but has to handled wisely in Australia since the acid make-up in our grapes is quite different. Over-malo-ed wines taste of nothing but butterscotch and toffee. They tend to fall apart as well.

10. Not the cork!

Depending on who you talk to, around 1.5 – 2/5 of corks used for Australian wine are able to adversely affect the flavour of the wine they are made to protect. It’s a similar story the world over. As Australians wake up to the mouldy, wet cardboard taste of ‘corked’ wine, we are getting rather excited about it. It’s no drama – just take it back to where you bought it from. And a word of advice – never, ever cellar a wine sealed with composite corks for any significant length of time. Please login to post comment