Looking for a normal Australian season

Shane Warne has retired from Test cricket and I know that in my lifetime I will never see his like again. And, as the 2007 Australian wine vintage comes ever closer, I can’t help wondering if I will ever again experience what I once accepted as a ‘normal’ Australian season.

2007 is early, very early. Already ravaged by drought and stress, its crop will be somewhere between 20-35 below expectation. Hammered by frost and in small parts wiped out by fire, it might well be a harbinger of future Australian seasons. If that’s the case, the sooner we forget the past the better, for we are going to need to focus all our attentions on what might be a future of indescribable difficulty.

Consider the various items of climatic news to have slipped out from various parts of the media in recent months. We have been informed that by 2050, it will be uneconomic to operate 40 of the land presently under vine in Australia with temperatures in most Australian wine regions projected to increase by between 0.3?C and 1.7?C by 2030. We have been told that the year 2007 is likely to be the hottest ever on planet Earth since records have been kept. Furthermore, total Australian freshwater resources have been reduced by something like 50 over the last decade.

In other words, it’s possible but extremely unlikely that the climate change that has finally become all too evident around us is anything but a genuinely explicable blip. It’s not going to go back to being what is previously was; not tomorrow, anyway. Ground zero, from a climatic perspective, has well and truly moved. And if climate moves, wine simply has to follow in its wake; there are no other possibilities.

1997 was the first of the recent Australian vintages to have been seriously affected by heat. It was an extremely long, hot, dry summer in January and February, especially by the ‘then’ Australian standards. In several warmer regions this led to greatly accelerated sugar ripeness well in advance of ripe fruit flavours, while in others it had the negative impact of actually slowing ripeness, as vines simply shut up shop in a bid to survive the heat. Few regions made good wine in 1997.

By global standards, 1998 was the hottest then experienced. It was a very dry season, but received just sufficient rainfall to enable the vines to bring their fruit safely to near-perfect ripening. A warm year that effectively enabled most growers to harvest at a time of their own choosing, it was a season which began and finished early. Its wines won instant appeal for their ripeness and richness, but by and large, they are not cellaring well.

1999 was a contrasting year, in much the same way that 1991 was to 1990 in Australia and 1983 was to 1982 in Bordeaux. A largely unheralded season that responsible for a large number of exceptional wines, it began warm to hot but chilled down to a normal, if rather late harvest in cool but relatively dry weather over much of the continent. Its wines reveal a fineness and elegance seen only since in 2002 from South Australia and from 2004 at large.

2000 was a simply dreadful year in most of viticultural Australia. The hottest year on record for South Australia, it managed to stay hot around the clock for several weeks right in the ripening season, with little to no overnight respite. The wines are typically over and under-ripe, with high alcohol levels and a very unsatisfactory amalgam of cooked, porty qualities and physiologically under-ripe herbaceous influences. Very few regions escaped this disaster.

But the climatic records were re-written just twelve months later. 2001 was even hotter – a pig of a red wine vintage with just one saving grace in that temperatures did moderate overnight. By and large the wines are better than those from 2000, but there are very few classics from the eastern half of the continent, and all of those come from the cooler regions.

Just to confound the experts, 2002 delivered the poorest-yielding, coolest vintage in the history of eastern Australia. Shiraz and cabernet sauvignon from the Barossa and McLaren Vale enjoyed a purple, signature season, but there was very little joy elsewhere. This was the season that bucked the ongoing trend, to the joy of few and the chagrin of many.

2003 was hot and early. Its wines have much in common with those from 2001, which suggests plenty of meaty, ultra-ripe and early-drinking red. Not unsurprisingly, the best wines came from the cooler regions.

Despite a late summer heat spike that shook the faith of many, 2004 is a source of great joy for those who lean towards natural, balanced wines of great depth, flavour and effortlessly natural structure that suits them equally to drinking while young or cellaring for exceptionally long periods. It’s a season that has again bucked the recent trend. Given the expectations for 2007 and a likely tough outcome for 2008, it could very well prove to be the last decent vintage we experience until at least 2009.

2005 was hot and rough, and despite some brilliant white wines from cooler South Australian regions, is not yet looking convincing as a red wine vintage. 2006 was hot, early and dry, and other than a small number of growers in what used to be ultra-cool-climate regions, there are only modest expectations of quality. The whites released to this time are largely cooked and confectionary by their previous standards.

It’s always dangerous to write about or write off a vintage before it is in the can, but for 2007 to produce much in the way of quality would be an immense surprise to most of those involved in its making.

Where will this lead us and when will it end? Will the Barossa be able to remain a producer of quality wine? And what of McLaren Vale? Other than its most elevated vineyard sites, will the Yarra Valley still be able to produce top-level New World pinot noir? What will happen to the drier regions in central Victoria and inland New South Wales? Have we already seen the best from them?

Global warming appears to be a reality not for the short-term future, but one that the wine industry needs to address today. And while it is providing immense benefit to growers in cool climate Tasmania and Victoria, the devastation it stands to wreak on the viticultural landscape of mainland Australia is nothing short of frightening. Right now, it appears that the viticultural map of Australia is about to experience a significant re-write.

All I can say is that with immense sincerity, I really, truly hope I am terribly wrong. Meantime, I refuse to part with any good wines I still might have from years like 1991, 1994 and 1996. Please login to post comment