Winemaker of the Year

It’s funny, judging people and not wines. And while their wines naturally reflect their winemaking achievements, some achievements are harder to compare than wines which can simply be lined up along the tasting bench and evaluated.

Take a moment to think about what our eight finalists have managed to do and it would be easy to make the award to any of them. But then seven others would miss out. How would you decide? Let’s bring ‘em on, one by one.

Brian Croser still makes the wines that other winemakers use as their yardsticks. The Petaluma Chardonnay is the consummate Croser wine, tightly crafted and blended from a variety of ‘distinguished sites’ in a carefully delivered expression of Piccadilly Valley chardonnay. It reflects his personal vision of the sovereignty of certain vineyards above others, a concept he grasped more than a decade before Australians even heard of the word ‘terroir’.

Vanya Cullen’s remarkable ascent with her refined and utterly beguiling Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot becomes all the more worthwhile amid the present plethora of over-oaked and over-extracted red wines from most regions and varieties. Here is a deep, dark and concentrated claret with superbly integrated oak, ripe fine tannins and sensible levels of alcohol.

No other wine has rekindled riesling’s fire like Polish Hill. Its heady, musky aroma, its tremendous length of piercing lime juice and lemon zest flavours and its bracing finish have made abundantly clear to even the most doubting Australian palate that riesling can rival any chardonnay for sheer quality and class. That’s quite an achievement, Jeffrey Grosset.

Surely it’s only a matter of time before Henschke’s Abbot’s Prayer is accorded similar status to the other classic reds of Australia’s most illustrious boutique stable. Fleshy, supple and refined, this silken and ethereal wine owes it all to the vibrant intensity and composition Prue Henschke regularly achieves at the family’s Lenswood vineyard. After then, it’s in Steve’s capable hands.

It’s difficult to pin a single wine on Ian McKenzie, Southcorp’s senior white wine maker since he’s had a hand in so many, from Salinger to Sunday Creek. Best exemplified in recent years by the robust, deeply flavoured and complex 1986 vintage, the Seppelt Show Sparkling Shiraz is a perfect expression of Australia’s indigenous wine and a style very close to McKenzie’s heart.

One man’s understanding and instinct for wine can also turn out a range from Rosemount’s Shiraz Cabernet to its stylish Reserve Chardonnay and opulent Roxburgh. In this case it’s Philip Shaw, whose greatest recent achievement must surely be the Balmoral Shiraz, a deftly handled and deeply flavoured wine of rare finesse.

John Vickery’s name has long been synonymous with many of Australia’s finest rieslings, especially from the Clare and Eden Valleys. Now developing a new heritage with a collection of long-living wines under the Richmond Grove label, Vickery’s precise attention to minute detail helped fashion an enduring legacy of greatness with Leo Buring.

Having burst into the limelight in 1985 with the release of the first Wynns John Riddoch Cabernet Sauvignon, John Wade dashed off west to assemble a remarkable collection of wines under a host of different labels. The most illustrious is his own landmark wine, the Howard Park Cabernet Sauvignon. Robust, deeply flavoured and complex, this classically proportioned cabernet blend has become the Mouton of the West. Please login to post comment