Terroir Window

Things are getting sticky out there in grape-growing land. There’s a lot of talk around of over-supply, although I am yet to hear of an over-supply of good fruit. Ignoring all the warning signs, some growers are still pretending that winemakers are desperate enough to buy anything.

In the vintage just completed, ie 2001, a Mornington Peninsula grower actually demanded, ie he didn’t merely ask, that a certain quality winery in his region pay a certain high price for his over-cropped pinot noir. The fruit was poor and second-rate at best and the winemaker sensibly refused. The grower insisted, stating rather forcibly that the amount he asked was broadly equal to what it cost him to grow and that he wasn’t even making a dollar at his selling price. Welcome to the real world! While the vineyard sums may have looked fine on the accountant’s spreadsheet – given that there was actually a business plan behind such an enterprise – serious winemakers know it takes quality fruit to make quality wine. If shortcuts exist, they are simply not sustainable.

Consumers are already aware that there are several wine markets out there. You just have to look at some of the prices paid for the so-called ‘cult’ wineries in the Barossa to realise that not all wine is intended as a daily beverage. We have ‘occasion wines’, ‘drinking wines’, ‘prestige wines’ and even ‘investment wines’. From an industry perspective it’s possible to draw a line between the wines made to simply reflect their variety, while other, more interesting wines, are actually made to reflect their origin, even perhaps down to the single vineyard.

The wine industry around the world has quickly adopted a French term, ‘terroir’, to distinguish the wines made this way. Terroir relates to the natural characteristics and influences affecting a delineated area of land, such as slope, water supply, soil, aspect, and mesoclimate. The Oxford Companion to Wine says that ‘The holistic combination of all these is held to give each site its own unique terroir, which is reflected in its wines more or less consistently from year to year, to some degree regardless of variations in methods of viticulture and wine-making. Thus every small plot, and in generic terms every larger area, and ultimately region, may have distinctive wine-style characteristics which cannot be precisely duplicated elsewhere.’

Bass Phillip’s Phillip Jones reckons that for a wine to genuinely express its terroir it has to come from fruit cropped between one and a half and two and a half tonnes per acre or thereabouts, a range he refers to as the ‘terroir window’. While most of our genuinely high quality wines just scramble within Jones’ terroir window, most are nowhere near it. Even in Coonawarra, where according to most winemakers fruit averages around four tonnes per acre, fruit was rejected in 2001 at levels well above eight. What is going on and why?

Too many winemakers in quality regions simply don’t care about the region itself. Coonawarra is a classic example, where huge areas of vineyard are used simply to grow red wine at very low quality levels, and at very high crops. These cheaper wines have about as much chance of reflecting terroir as I do of understanding calculus. But of course their labels still proudly sport the name of Coonawarra, although from their taste they might as well have come from anywhere.

It’s really a case of buyer beware. Don’t expect too much from cheaper wines, although there are of course exceptions see attached list. But honestly, you’ll only really experience a genuine expression of terroir from the small number of makers that really crop at low levels. Fortunately that number is steadily increasing, although like our Mornington Peninsula friend, most of the new entrants to the wine industry are less concerned at low crops than recovering their investments by harvesting as much fruit as they can get away with.

Yes, it’s still broadly true to suggest that the wines of the Barossa are richer and rounder, possibly thicker in structure than those of Coonawarra. Yes, you’ll still find a herby, earthy character underneath most Margaret River reds. Regrettably, though, if you really want to explore the special qualities of terroir from our better vineyards, you’ll have to pay for it.


Bargain Basement Terroir – Ten less expensive wines that do reflect their sites:

Blackjack Shiraz
Bleasdale Bremerview Shiraz
Coriole Redstone
d’Arenberg d’Arry’s Original Red
Heggies Riesling
Huntington Estate Shiraz
Lindemans Hunter Valley Semillon
Mitchell Watervale Riesling
Tahbilk Riesling
Tim Adams The Fergus Grenache
Zema Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Please login to post comment