Coonawarra – Australia’s Premier Red Region Re-invented
Its reputation as a source of premium red wines is without peer in Australia. Its cigar-shaped outcrop of eroded terra rossa soils above their limestone base is perhaps the best-known viticultural soil type in the land. The ability of its winemakers to collect trophy after trophy on the Australian wine show system is without peer. Yet, from the mid 1970s to the start of this decade, all has not been well at Coonawarra.
Massive plantings on inferior soils to the west of the red soil strip threaten to dilute its red wine quality. Innovative viticultural techniques, especially mechanical pruning, were introduced to the region in the mid 1970s principally to reduce costs, rather than to improve fruit quality. Yields were pushed beyond the limits for quality red wine. Irrigation was a standard procedure, needed or not.
Cool red wine fermentation, a technique developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s and which coincided with the height of the cool climate revolution in Australian viticulture created a spread of grassy, herbal wines with simplistic fruit flavours. Very few reds of substantial quality were made this way. And, almost incredibly for our leading red wine district, one of its most widely planted grape varieties until recent years was riesling, most of which went into sparkling wine!
The Geographical Indications Committee, responsible for the delineation of Australian wine regions, has demanded that Coonawarra’s vignerons submit a single line which borders their region, a task which becomes more complicated the more you know about it. At time of writing, nearly thirty submissions have been received in objection to the proposed line. The solution to this problem, perhaps the most difficult of all faced in over a century of Coonawarra viticulture, is today all that stands between the region and the stellar future its wines now surely merit.
Rediscovering Coonawarra’s priorities
Coonawarra’s wine community has learned that it cannot be Australia’s best wine region without having Australia’s best vineyards. Not only have its growers refined their mechanised vineyard techniques and reduced yields to sensible levels, but they are now harvesting more of the right varieties at superior levels of ripeness than ever before. It’s pleasing to report that most of Coonawarra’s riesling, which Wynns’ former owner, Mark Babidge, was responsible for in the 1970s, has been replaced with shiraz and cabernet sauvignon. Southcorp has only 130 ha of riesling remaining, to be reduced by 30 ha each year.
Max Arney anticipates that pinot noir, of which Southcorp has 70 ha in Coonawarra, is the next in line for replacement. Initially planted for sparkling wine, almost all is deployed for still dry reds.
Early excursions into mechanical pruning resulted in vines carrying too high a crop load and with more fruit shading than initially anticipated, both of which undoubtedly contributed to under-ripe fruit characters. Lindemans’ Greg Clayfield acknowledges that Coonawarra’s winemakers remain conscious of the problems associated with the excessively herbaceous and greenish flavours of many Coonawarra reds of the 1980s. ‘We’re still trying to identify the reasons behind those wines’, he says.
Clayfield remembers his 1980 St George Cabernet Sauvignon, a hugely successful show wine which lists the Jimmy Watson on its pedigree. ‘It tastes today just as it did as an 18-month old wine, all green beans and asparagus. Today I would have made it from riper fruit and with entirely new oak, as we have done with the St George and Limestone Ridge since 1984. Now you’d regard it as more of a blending component than a complete wine’, he says.
Doug Bowen says the very same greenish qualities we decry today were actually sought after as cool-climate fruit characters and rewarded in spades on the show circuit. ‘The wine judges of the day were the people making those wines’, he says. ‘Then we found the flavours were dimethyl sulphide and overnight they got a bad name.’
Making the problem worse in the early to mid 1980s was the belief that red wines should be fermented longer and cooler, with the resulting sacrifice of richness of fruit and character for weedy, simple berry flavours and greenish tannins which highlighted the undesirable herbaceous components of the fruit. Red ferments are now conducted in the mid to high 20s, with better fruit expression and texture of tannin.
According to Bowen, the principal way to avoid greenish influences is to get fruit riper. ‘I try to pick at a maximum sugar level around 14-14.5 degrees, without getting any resultant alcoholic flavours on the palate’, he says. ‘Wines made from fruit picked less ripe show those intensely spicy flavours while riper fruit creates more berry fruit flavours, with significantly less spice.’
Clayfield agrees, saying that in 1997 everyone was hanging out for riper fruit than he had ever observed before. He recalls: ‘Nobody was looking for parcels of 10-11 Baume to enhance their wines with grassy, vegetative characters any more.’
Mechanised Viticulture – Economic Necessity or Ace in the Hole?
The miles of untidy, scrappy-looking vine canopy that flank the path of the Riddoch Highway through the length of Coonawarra make its almost complete conversion to mechanical pruning impossible to conceal. Only a tiny fraction of Coonawarra’s 3,800 ha of vines remains pruned by hand. This cost-cutting technique has dramatically altered the configuration of the standard Coonawarra vine canopy from a two-tiered cane-pruned system to a close-cropped vertical hedge. Superficially at least, the region appeared to have taken its viticultural reputation for granted. Reaction from visiting viticulturists ranged from curiosity to outright derision.
Although it was no overnight phenomenon, the 1990s have proven that mechanical pruning has finally worked in Coonawarra. Truly. But it has taken time. Vines were initially left with too many buds and too much fruit to ripen, ripening was uneven and mechanical pruning was initially blamed for the strange flavours that appeared in the region’s red wine.
‘It was first developed as a poor substitute for hand pruning, but mechanised pruning is now working to the extent that our main problem is now how to raise the standard of fruit from our hand-pruned vineyards to mechanically pruned levels’, says Max Arney Southcorp’s Manager of Coonawarra Vineyards. Arney, who oversees more mechanically pruned vines than anyone else in Australia, attributes the improvement in mechanically harvested fruit to a renewed focus on vine balance and bud numbers, and how they affect the shape and pruning regime for each vine.
Coonawarra cropping levels have reduced to 4 tonnes per acre for shiraz and 3.5 for cabernet sauvignon, well below initial expectations. Much of the region’s best fruit comes from ancient non-irrigated 70-year plus vines, whose crop level is significantly lower. Growers have also learned to water only when vines are stressed, not to increase yields.
Active bud numbers for machine-pruned vines are similar to those for the now-obsolete cane-pruned system, 60-80 buds per vine. ‘The light inception in a hedged canopy in our premium blocks would exceed what is considered good for the new age systems of trellising’, says Arney.
Mildara Blass’ head viticultural honcho, Vic Patrick, one of the first viticulturists in Coonawarra to adopt the concept, says there is now less variation in ripening within a single vine than there is from vine to vine within a single vineyard. ‘Fruit ripens at the normal time, with normal bunch weight and the same flavour. If it’s free of disease and you’re making smaller bunches and berries and you have a higher skin to juice ratio, why is there a problem? Sure it’s the cheapest way to grow grapes. But the quality still meets the standards’, he says.
So what kind of red wine does Coonawarra do best?
With a few notable exceptions like the Wynns John Riddoch 1982, you have to go back a long way to find Coonawarra reds the equal of those made so far in the 1990s. Doug Bowen has packaged the region’s development into its three most recent decades. ‘In the 1970s the growers had all the influence. The emphasis was on planting vineyards will-nilly, for there were hardly any winemakers in the area’, he says. ‘The 1980s was the decade of winery development in which permanent winemakers began to establish themselves here. In the 1990s the two have got together, taking a serious look at vineyard management and winemaking as a single entity.’
To date, the 1990s have presented a wonderfully mixed bunch. The decade began with the year nobody could believe, making powerfully structured, concentrated and jammy wines whose weight of fruit far exceeded anything ever made in Coonawarra before. 1991 was a classic and perhaps more balanced season than 1990, whose wines combine all the finesse and elegance expected of the region with pure, pristine fruit. A cooler year, 1992 produced lighter, leafier wines, while 1993’s crop are more heavily-proportioned again, but lacking the steel of 1990.
It is only now becoming obvious that the 1994 season, always highly rated, could approach 1991 for its elegance and fineness. For me, this is the year when most makers got their fruit, tannins, oak and other winemaking influences just right. As far as I have seen to this time, the less said about most red wines from the very cool, late 1995 season, the better. Tasted out of barrel, the 1996 drop looks encouraging as a lighter expression of 1994.
Wynns John Riddoch shows at a pinch how with requisite winemaking effort, including a large percentage of juice ‘bled off’ from skins to alter the skin-juice balance, Coonawarra can make uniquely statuesque, blockbuster reds from its best low-yielding vineyards. Never cheap to make or to sell and empirically too expensive to become widely emulated, they can either err towards dry port or hold back in a more sophisticated way as revealed by the 1994 vintage, perhaps the closest yet in style to the 1982.
The elegance and sweetness of Mildara’s ever-so-reliable white label Cabernet Sauvignon serves as the other end of the region’s style spectrum. ‘My ideal red is a little short of the John Riddoch, although I respect the style for its essential qualities and Christmas cake effect, but I still feel there is a role for elegance’, says Greg Clayfield who, like me, prefers the wines of 1991 to those of 1990.
Of Clayfield’s two premier individual vineyard wines from 1994, I find the Limestone Ridge the perfect expression of his view, with sumptuous palate weight complemented by lingering, fine tannins. The St George is no less spectacular, the best wine I have ever seen under this label.
The Terra Rossa Riddle
Whatever line is drawn around the Coonawarra region by the Geographical Indications Committee, it will be imperfect. According to GIC rules, it must be single and unbroken. The proposed line, which does not extend beyond the 1984 model which restricts the use of the Coonawarra name to the Hundred of Penola and the Hundred of Comaum, excludes a number of prominent local developments such as those near the Koppamurra Vineyard and St Mary’s.
Around 50% of the space within the Hundreds fall within the proposed line. Petaluma’s Sharefarmers Vineyard misses out by the width of a road, which happens to be the northern edge of the Hundred of Comaum. ‘Once you break the rules for one maker, there will be no stopping it’, says Doug Bowen.
The task facing those drawing the line could hardly be more complex. Coonawarra is anything but a consistent strip of red earth. Most existing vineyards on ‘the strip’ contain some lesser soil types, which are extremely unlikely to produce fruit of the same standard as from the true red terra rossa. The sandy soils on the easterly extremity are potentially better for red wines than the thick, heavy clay-based ‘terra negras’ of the west, since their vineyards will be far less vigorous.
Some of the developments off the strip may actually be planted on better soil than those presently on it. Some developments off the strip were initiated under the conviction they were to be granted ‘Coonawarra’ status. Can they be retrospectively denied that right? If so, what compensation might be required?
Should Coonawarra be extended to include the entire south-east of Australia, as some are suggesting? If so, how are the vineyards established on premium-priced land to be compensated for the loss of their unique identity and a potential downgrading of their regional brand? ‘We need to protect those who have made a financial commitment, to the area’, argues Brian Lynn, one of those responsible for the proposed line. Anyone with a simple answer to this question is either an undiscovered genius or just hasn’t studied the issues.
To Greg Clayfield the black soils present an unknown factor. ‘Viticultural techniques like trellising and pruning levels will evolve only with experience. Some soils are clearly better than others, some have subsurface limestone, but the downside is that they’re more subject to flooding.’ Max Arney expects that sauvignon blanc might perform well on the darker soils, but harbours doubts over shiraz and cabernet.
Mildara Blass is not planting on the black soils over the railway on Coonawarra’s western border. ‘We’d rather go to the top red soils at Koppamurra, where it’s warmer’, says Vic Patrick. ‘There we will grow much better cabernet on any trellis than on the terra negra.’
If, as it appears inevitable, a less-than-perfect line is drawn around the region, the owners of premium soil types do have alternatives to distinguish themselves from the rest. One alternative is to create a sub-regional name other than Coonawarra, which will be established as the regional name. Again, this is fraught with danger. The proponents would have firstly to draw another line, which nobody seems willing to do, while also having to create and establish a new identity as a superior brand to Coonawarra itself. That would be a challenge.
The alternative is the most likely: that growers on premium soils will join together in an unofficial and self-regulating marketing ‘club’ with a name like ‘Terra Rossa Coonawarra’. I would expect this name to feature on their labels to identify the quality of their vineyard sites and to be marketed as an unofficial ‘first growth’ concept. The danger with this approach is intra-regional politics, but I doubt if the makers will have many alternatives. Until then, as Joy Bowen says, ‘People will have to be quite discerning when they buy their Coonawarra.’
It may have gone its own way with viticulture, but Coonawarra is no longer out on a limb. Its self-taught expertise with its own mechanised techniques has paid handsome dividends in recent years. Given there is no immediate end in sight to the problems associated with defining its boundary, it is nevertheless appropriate that viticulture has again taken centre stage in Australia’s premier red wine region, a title Coonawarra should confidently carry well into the next century.
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