From Cult to Classic – The Story of Charles Melton’s Nine Popes

So what, exactly, is the story of the now-famous Barossa red that helped pave the way for so many blends of grenache and shiraz? The wine whose name attracted so many drinkers just for the fun of it, but which today stands entirely on its merit as one of the resurgent region’s classic reds?

He’s first to admit it was the Rhone connotations that first attracted its early attention, but today Graeme Charlie Melton is adamant that his signature wine, the Nine Popes, is a distinctively Australian blend of grenache, shiraz and mataro. And he’s happy with that.

Even those of us with the most basic knowledge of French wine would identify Nine Popes with Chateauneuf-du-Pape, although Charlie has never pretended that his ‘unashamed connection’ of the early years was an accurate translation. It’s also interesting that in conversation he uses the varietal name of ‘mataro’ more often that its more fashionable French alternative of ‘mourvedre’.

But neither does Charlie Melton aim to make Nine Popes resemble a Rutherglen durif. ‘I’m looking more for intensity of flavour rather than monster structure’, he says. ‘When I began tinkering with the wine I didn’t wake up one day and say “Rhone is the way to go”; it was nothing that far-sighted. I’d come to the valley in 1973, living in a bachelor shack with a regular parade of other young winemakers on Krondorf Road and liked the idea of buying a winery in the same area. It came with a neglected block of old bush grenache vines whose fruit went into sparkling base for the first couiple of years. Then John Stanford rang up looking for cuttings and he told me that my block of bush vine grenache behind the church was some of best in the country.

‘In 1988, the next year, I kept it separate and it made some fantastic wine. I then had all this grenache and I was wondering what the hell I could do with it, so I thought I’d put it out as a grenache shiraz dry red. I’d considered what grenache did best in the world and obviously I’d thought about the Rhone. I could never have sold the wine by labelled it as ‘Grenache Shiraz dry red’, so I had to come up with a scheme. To get people to understand that grenache does make classic long-living wine in a world context, I mangled up the Chateauneuf idea to get people to respect the blend in its early years. That’s how the whole Rhone thing kicked off for me.

‘It seems to have worked he says modestly, but we had the wine before we had the name and the idea. But at the time when my peer group had money to spend on overseas wines we always bought Bordeaux, vintage port, or occasionally Burgundy. Only once in a blue moon would we buy something from the Rhone.’

Melton has tinkered with Nine Popes over the years, mainly reducing its exposure to American oak and moving towards its present level of 70 French cooperage against its early levels of 80 US. ‘I wanted to stop that excessive vanilla development. Grenache is a perfumed, sweet-fruited variety and if you overlay that with too much American oak its becomes like a lollypop and too sickly sweet.’

Although he concedes that the alcoholic strength of Nine Popes has tended to rise marginally over the years, he’s ‘not heading for the 16 grenache school by a long shot. We’re rapt if we can get ripe flavours between 13.5-13.8 Baume’, he says. ‘Sometimes it gets to around 14 alcohol and once we were over 14.5, but that really shortens the life of a wine dramatically.

‘Every half a degree above 14 alcohol you knock 4-5 years off a wine’s longevity. There are no subtleties that you can build into these wines. Everything is jammed in so much in the first instance and the alcoholic skeleton always remains. We’re not looking for this at all.’ Amen. ‘In 1988 the Nine Popes was only 12.5 alcohol, the lightest of the wines, but it’s not a light wine and it’s still in great nick.’

With exception of 1992, whose lighter edition of Nine Popes he doesn’t rate as a favourite, Melton has enjoyed a consistent run through 1990s. 1991 saw the introduction of 10 mataro to the wine. Depending on whether or not its frost-prone vineyard at Kalimna can crop to its full potential, mataro contributes between 2-10 of the Nine Popes, which seems to vary between 54-68 grenache, the balance then being shiraz.

The vintage of Nine Popes which firmly convinced me that the wine had really broken into the top grade was 1996. Melton agrees that it’s one of his best wines and finds in it a flavour he relates to an old Mortein brand of pump flyspray called Flytox, a ‘quality’ he occasionally experiences in Peter Lehmann’s Stonewell Shiraz. While I remain mystified about this character – and confess I am happy to remain so – there is indeed something very special and distinctive about the 1996 Nine Popes and its remarkable richness and elegance.

Melton reckons that the 1998 wine is possibly a richer version of the same style, and although it wasn’t blended at time of writing this article, says that his grenache from 1998 has some of this character, in addition to being sweet and perfumed in its aroma, balanced with briar and spice. As the notes from this tasting confirm, I’m totally convinced about the Nine Popes phenomenon, which has paved the way for countless other Australian blends of the old vine red Rhone varieties, in which this country is singularly blessed. Please login to post comment