Why Technology is so important to Australian wine

If Ben Lexcen, the guy who designed the America’s Cup winning yacht Australia II and invented the winged keel had been a winemaker, what sort of wine would he have made? How would he have directed his extraordinary technical vision towards the business of making wine?

For technology can be applied to an art/science like winemaking from a variety of perspectives. Technology can invent ways to do the same thing cheaper. The industrial revolution was all about replacing men with machines which, even if expensive to buy, are more productive and cheaper to feed. Our larger wineries are superbly equipped with large-scale state of the art winemaking facilities able to process more fruit into wine more efficiently and cost-effectively. However they’re also able to take more control of the winemaking process than the less efficient and less technologically capable wineries that preceded them. For in wine, technology is also frequently deployed to improve the quality of the end product as well.

Perhaps Lexcen might have invented a technique that might have helped Orlando Wyndham, makers of Australia’s largest export brand, Jacob’s Creek, to handle more fruit better and cheaper. But it’s my view that he’d have taken on a winemaking challenge laid down by nature, much like Australia’s leading wine innovators like Joe Grilli and the late Steven Hickinbotham. For several years Grilli made outstanding ‘cool climate’ wines from a hot climate vineyard by entirely removing the developing crop and then waiting for the vine’s secondary buds to develop into a smaller, later and more concentrated crop which he then turned into wine.

In the early 1980s Hickinbotham patented a system to replicate the technique deployed in Beaujolais to ferment whole bunches of red grapes, creating intensely flavoured, light-bodied red wine. Although the costs involved were negligible and the results excellent, it wasn’t enough to stimulate sales of light red. Technology can only provide the alternatives; it can’t dictate trends.

The giant French beverage company Pernod Ricard is the owner of Australian wine company Orlando Wyndham. Its International Wine Development Director is an Australian, Orlando’s former chief winemaker Robin Day, who said when addressing the Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference in Sydney: ‘One of our greatest challenges as a wine-producing nation is to communicate the correct messages about technology. It has become popular amongst the technically inept to malign technology as a fundamentally bad thing. New technology creates choices, which in turn create diversity.’

Its romanticised image usually belies the fact that the overwhelming majority of all Australian wine originates in places which, to use the words of Melbourne scribe Kevin Childs, outwardly extrude all the rustic charm of a Kuwaiti oil well. But the point is, according to Robin Day and his ilk, that that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Such is the technical competence of Australia’s wine industry that there’s less chance of a wine displaying a fault or dirty character if it’s Australian. Australian wine is considered by many of the most influential wine critics in the UK to lead the way in reliability and delivery of flavour.

Although wine has done well to retain much of its folksy, rustic exterior, in most cases it’s more of a facade. Romantic mud-brick or gabled timber buildings may successfully conceal the equivalent in winemaking technology of what it took to put man on the moon. While it’s understandable that most drinkers prefer to hold dear the ‘hand-crafted’ image of a premier or ’boutique’ wine made from a small individual vineyard, it’s often a fallacy to believe that such a wine might owe more to art than to science, however unfashionable the image of science may be.

While its influence might not necessarily be so visually obvious, science is often responsible for the precise management of the vineyard’s irrigation system, the design of the vine canopy, the determination of harvest time, the retention and enhancement of flavours during fermentation and the clarification and stability of the young wine. Many medium-sized and larger wineries can now be fully operated from a computer terminal. And it is to science that winemakers turn when in trouble. Modern technology can cover up the mistakes that occur when art and nature go awry. It can even effectively remove the vinegar, gluey and nail polish remover-like influences of volatile acidity from wine.

Robin Day perceives ‘an alarming tendency in certain sections of the media to portray wines with a high level of technical input as uniform in flavour and lacking in character’. While it’s undeniable that much cheaper Australian wine can be described in these terms, I agree that it’s not technology that is to blame. What’s the alternative? Oceans of bad cheaper wine? At least our cheaper wines are sound, clean and flavoursome. You would not wish to foister the average standard of cheap French wine upon the Australian wine drinker.

It’s Day’s view that the critics who point the finger at technology may actually confuse wine faults for elements ‘masquerading as character’ and suggests that ‘if the methods used by the Romans made better wines then we would still be using their technology today’.

Australian winemakers have more control of their activities than their competitors in most countries, whose current efforts to modernise simply mean in reality that they might have bridged the gap between where they were and where Australia was ten years ago. Australian winemakers are certainly helping countries like Moldova, Bulgaria, Rumania and even France to improve their techniques, but as Brian Croser commented back in 1995, it’s more important for Australia to push its technological edge even further, rather than to lament about the ‘export of yesterday’s technology and skills through the Flying Winemakers’.

Instead of bemoaning any lack of diversity that modern wines might display at the hands of technology, Day believes that with more technology at their fingertips than ever before, today’s winemakers are able to realise significant variations in style and flavour from their neighbours within the same region. This, says Day, is a good thing, although it may diminish the chances of regional consistency. ‘Regional differences only manifest themselves between wines if all other things are equal, and even then, they rarely do it strongly’, he says. While I would not question the existence of genuine regional differences between wines, I fully support the notion that technology adds different strings to the winemakers’ bow and as such provides a genuine source of diversity in wine. That alone should justify its existence.

By most accounts, Ben Lexcen’s concept which created Australia II began as a radical and unproven creative process which has since been adopted into science and emulated all around the world. Now that it has become a more common part of yachting technology, does that mean the winged keel is a bad thing? Please login to post comment