Advice for the Discerning Sweet-Tooth

Looking back, I couldn’t have been much further from the truth. With a degree in agricultural science under my belt, initially prompted by a desire to breed the ultimate Hereford bull, I very nearly went to California to learn how to make sweet white dessert wine. Thank heavens I didn’t.

These wines, if you remember, were all the rage in the early ’80s, when Australians caught the botrytis bug to an unprecedented degree. Back then, the chardonnay set had genuine, albeit short-lived competition. Late-harvest botrytis-affected rieslings were bought, sold and set onto the most glitzy of tables, not just after the meal, but through it as well. The country developed a collective and passionate sweet tooth. Great fortunes were surely made in the dental profession.

This sticky trend, however, was short-lived. Sugar-sated wine consumers came to accept there was indeed a limit to the amount of concentrated, sweet and cloying beverage you can ingest in a single sitting. Having made the stuff by the truckload, certain winemakers were quickly caught napping with enough sweet wine to satisfy the want of most nation states until the turn of the century. Prices fell, the fashionable image dissolved like sugar in hot water, and the fad deflated.

Today the amount of sweet white dessert wine sold in Australia is but a honeyed dribble next to the early expectations. Most of it, too, is sold in half-bottles of 375 ml capacity, since even the certified sweet-tooth rarely looks twice at a full 750 ml of the stuff.

Now that we hardly drink them anymore, wine makers have shelved their thoughts of mass-producing these saccharine dollops. The contemporary scene in Australian sweet white dessert wine is dominated – if indeed such a minuscule market can actually be dominated by anything – by those specialising instead on select and small volumes of individual style. Like their European role models, these wines tend to be made either from riesling or semillon, itself frequently blended with sauvignon blanc.

Those to have survived have generally had to be good, for the good news is that the reshuffling has indeed unearthed some genuine liquid treasure. Australia has now unquestionably become a maker of some of the very best sweet white wine in the world, although those made today bear little resemblence to those we first cut – or decayed – our teeth on.

Like children playing with a set of new toys, winemakers of the ’80s were infatuated with the flavours and textures that the newly-introduced bug of Botrytis cinerea could impart to wine. The intense apricot-orange peel flavours and syrupy viscosity it generated were allowed to dominate the expressions of the grapes used to make the wines. And since botrytis produces the highly-oxidative enzyme of laccase, on the many occasions it was used to excess, the wines would usually age prematurely.

Modern late-harvest dessert wines are unquestionably a superior cut to those which preceded them. They rely less on straight-out botrytis oomph and impact, but rather on more of the synergy developed when the intense, concentrated flavours of late-harvest fruit are cleverly matched with the botrytis effect, resulting in more finesse and balance. The best wines now reveal delicacy and restraint, where previously there was simply an insurmountable barrier of sweetness and viscosity.

I’m quite convinced that many of the earlier wines of this style were made more out of an attempt to make the sweetest wine possible, rather than simply the best and most drinkable. Some of the early late-harvest Petaluma wines from Coonawarra – one of which was labelled ‘Botrytis Essence’ – displayed their remarkable levels of sweetness on their back label with the same shameless statistical glee one might more expect of a Playboy centrefold.

Today most of the top riesling styles – like their Germanic counterparts – tend to hail from the cooler regions like the Yarra Valley, Tasmania and the high Eden Valley. The better semillon-based wines, however, are grown in the warmer climes of Griffith, Clare and the Barossa Valley.

Our winemakers are now handling botrytis better than ever, and have greatly improved the cellaring potential of their product. Even the 1982 De Bortoli Semillon Sauternes from Griffith, itself a largely unsophisticated wine that also happened to show the world just how good Australian dessert wine might indeed become, has lasted impressively to this time. The 1990 vintage, rechristened ‘Noble One’, is a great development on De Bortoli’s first start and should last and improve for even longer.

Although more competitors of quality emerge each year, I still submit that Darren De Bortoli makes Australia’s most remarkable dessert wine. Its richness and strength place it squarely at the more robust end of the spectrum, but for sheer concentration and complexity of flavour, its only peers are French.

Two other Australian wines regularly compete with De Bortoli and they’re both made with riesling. Brilliant and innovative wine maker Joe Grilli harvests riesling from his own Primo Estate vineyard in the Adelaide Plains. Since 1991 he has augmented this with fruit from the Eden Valley and Clare, prior to inoculating the entire batch with botrytis post harvest. The fungus then struts its stuff in a temperature and humidity-controlled room and the results in the bottle are extraordinary. Essence-like riesling aromatics are retained and enhanced with the botrytis touch to create a world-class wine.

Former medico Peter McMahon tells me it’s all too much trouble to make, but he should be prevented from discontinuing the Seville Estate Riesling Beerenauslese at all costs. Its only rivals in Victoria are the Crawford River Beerenauslese style and that of St Huberts. Since neither are made with inoculated fruit and all depend on precisely the right climatic conditions to be made, their appearance, however sought after, is irregular.

Other excellent riesling-derived Australian dessert wines are made by Tollana, Brown Brothers, D’Arenberg and the Yalumba-based twins of Heggies and Pewsey Vale.

De Bortoli aside, the late-harvest semillon-based wines of Tim Adams, Morris and Peter Lehmann subtly integrate the more melon-like and tropical flavours of this variety with the fungus in question. Semillon, being a richer and broader wine than riesling, is more suited to oak maturation, so look for more richness, plus nutty, vanillin and lemony oak-derived characters in these wines.

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