Boutique Mystique

I’ll bet there isn’t a single winemaker at one of Australia’s hundreds of small wineries who doesn’t hate the term ’boutique winery’ with a vengeance. Admittedly, though, the use of the word sometimes flies in the face of rather extraordinary pricing, which does nothing to discourage the popular use of the term. One Yarra Valley winery recently introduced a straight merlot with a wholesale price tag of $100 per bottle! Petrus it’s not; starry-eyed the winemaker and distributor without question.

The redoutable Macquarie Dictionary defines ’boutique’ as “a small shop selling fashionable or luxury items, especially for women”. Granted that wine is fashionable, small wineries are even more fashionable, and that most of Australia’s wine is purchased by women; but ’boutique’ winery? It simply isn’t on.

Winemaking is a dirty business at times, and it’s frequently hard yakka. The word ’boutique’ is too clean, too precious and too misleading. Visit the Barossa Valley from March to May and without any difficulty you will take nor time to convince yourself that the prevailing aroma has more in common with waste channel number three than Chanel No. 5.

Ok, but what about that boutique…sorry… small winery mystique? What does it stand for? After all, aren’t the more exclusive wines always the best? Those of us with that opinion would do well to consider that Australia’s most prestigious wine of all, Grange Hermitage, is made by our largest wine company, Penfolds. It is also worthy of note that regardless of what quantity of Grange is made each year, Penfolds has hundreds of tonnes of potential ‘Grange material’ available to it each year from which to make its selection.

The truth is predictably simple. There are advantages and disadvantages attached to making wine from single vineyards and in small wineries. Let’s consider the advantages first.

Owners of small wineries have the potential to exploit nature by siting their vineyards in particular specific and advantageous locations which especially suit the varieties they intend to plant. Gordon Cope-Williams’ Romsey Vineyards is ideally sited in a cool, late-ripening region of Victoria which appears excellently suited to his aim of making premium sparkling wines. The large companies are reluctant to establish vineyards so far off the beaten track, for they’re unable to economise by utilise existing plant and machinery. Seppelt, to their credit, did pioneer the Drumborg region of western Victoria, which when it doesn’t rain, grows riesling and traminer of rare class.

Because of the small scale of their operations, it is essential for many small producers to extract the maximum potential from each vine on the property. Quality is inevitably enhanced. This sort of intensity is still rarely seen with the larger companies, whose mechanical approach to vineyard management still tends towards a broad-acre philosophy to viticulture.

Small wineries frequently exhibit the sort of flexibility even the most progressive of the big companies can only dream about. They’re generally dealing with small areas of land, don’t have rigid long-term marketing plans, and therefore have the ability to chop and change as market demands require, and as new knowledge, varieties and techniques become available.

It was the small wineries which led the way with the use of traditional French techniques to make dry reds from pinot noir, the use of barrel fermentation with chardonnay, improvements in vineyard foliage management and the introduction of new varieties, most recently through the Cassegrain’s release of their new light red wine made from the recently-bred Chambourcin variety.

On the other hand, there are tremendous disadvantages in being small, which can make life competing against the large wineries rather a one-sided affair.

Most Australian small wineries are under-capitalised and poorly managed from a business perspective. Most were established with incomplete knowledge, insufficient funds and most without even a business plan. Large companies come complete with on-board accountants with a full-time brief to avoid the fiscal disasters frequently encountered by the little ones. Many, if not most, small wineries do not have the financial reserve or access to funding to see them safely through a disaster season.

They are also labour-intensive, with high costs that are spread across a smaller volume of wine. With large and sophisticated mechanised systems it is possible for the large wineries to run with a fraction of the labour cost per litre of wine than their smaller counterparts. By increasing crush from 150 to 600 tonnes per vintage, winemaking costs can drop by over fifty percent.

Size counts against the smaller wineries again when it comes to purchasing power. They pay full whack for bottles, corks, chemicals and the like because they deal in such tiny quantities. Most large Australian wine companies will process in a day what an average small winery will handle in an entire season. To simply bottle and package a dozen bottles of wine can cost a small winery over twenty dollars. It might cost $15 for fruit and $8 for oak, all for a wine that might only wholesale for $70. There isn’t much margin for relaxation.

Like true farmers, small wineries ebb and flow with the season. In an ordinary year they have little option but to release ordinary wine, if they decide to release anything at all. And if they are wiped out by hail, frost, drought or disease, their vulnerability is exposed. They do not have the access to the blending or buffering material that large wineries have on tap, which can fill out quantity, flavours, or add body as required. For this very reasons, some have instituted ‘second labels’ made with fruit brought in from other vineyards.

From a winemaking perspective, it is actually easier to make wine in large quantities. Every barrel counts if you only have ten or so of each wine, whereas a poor tank or barrel can be ‘lost’ in a large commercial blend. Winemaking is a controlled natural process, which occurs more evenly and predictably with larger volumes. To make small batches of wine, such as a Mount Mary Pinot Noir, is about as risky a hand-crafted process as nature could conjure.

And what if the small winery makes a wrong decision? Sometimes its flexibility could act against it. If a vineyard that made its name with high-quality shiraz is uprooted and converted to chardonnay, which it grows to a lesser quality, it could be goodnight. Larger companies, through their greater resources and inbuilt inertia to rapid change, have the chance to evaluate new options more thoroughly before comitting themselves. Then their greater marketing budgets can help them make up for lost time.

Unquestionably however, that intangible small winery mystique does exist. That attraction experienced by so many enthusiasts towards the small wineries just because they’re small is real indeed. As far as I am concerned, ’boutique’ or not, they deserve every assistance they receive. Please login to post comment