My 89-94 OZ Shiraz collection has become pretty dull. However, they
were great while they lasted. I find the OZ for the US(RP) market to
be great.

I find no thrill real thrill in my 80's bordeaux as a today wine.

I also like fresh Zin, and hated it back in the 70's when it was made
in a style to emulate Bordeaux.




On 20 Jul 2004 16:25:55 GMT, ojunk (Bill Spohn) wrote:

>I was reading the latest Tanzer newsletter and some of his comments on recent
>trends in Australian winemaking struck me as quite thoughtful.
>
>Steve opined that:
>
>- there is a recent style of winemaking in Australia that favours ripeness,
>concentration and power over structure
>
>- this style of wine, while garnering big points from some reviewers and awing
>the average consumer, is often made from overripe unbalanced grapes, sweetened
>by too much oak and acidified to rectify the high pH that such late harvested
>highly extracted grapes entail
>
>- he theorises that these wines will not age well – says you’ll end up with
>“a lot of dull, alcoholic wines with oxidized aromas, dry tannins, spiky
>acidity, and only a memory of fruit”.
>
>I find myself agreeing with all that he has said, and it raises a point that he
>doesn’t address. I have observed this tendency in some wines that I would not
>class with the true ‘ooze monsters’ (or should that be ‘Oz monsters’?),
>yet I think that some of these wines will age much better than he posits. Yet
>when I discuss these marginal wines – some of the Fox Creeks, for example –
>with aficionados of the plush plump new wines, they tell me that my choices for
>ageworthy wines will not hold up at all.
>
>I have reflected upon this and conclude after tasting some of the older
>vintages of these (to my mind) much better balanced wines, that the problem
>here may be one of expectation. A certain segment of Ozwine fans have been
>told, or have convinced themselves, that the big sweet juicy fruit style is
>only good as long as the big juicy fruit holds up and that they are too old and
>not worth drinking once that has abated. Through inexperience, or mistake, they
>apply this principle to ALL Ozwines, including the ones that will age
>gracefully, yet display some pretty darned lush, sweet fruit in youth.
>
>This is similar in some ways to the Zinfandel situation – lots of big high
>alcohol wines with overpowering oak and fruit in youth, and then they collapse
>a very few years later, going all blowsy, or all angular, or just all
>uninteresting. But in this case too, there are the exceptions – Zins that age
>well for a decade and more, and yet are quite difficult to tell apart from the
>short lived type when very young.
>
>If you agree that my theory is correct, that there are some Ozwines (and some
>Zins) that show pretty big, sweet and in-your-face in youth, yet have something
>in their make-up that allows them to retain our interest even into middle age,
>that still leaves us with the problem of telling one from the other, and I
>haven’t yet built up much confidence in my own ability to do this – I’ve
>had both failures and great successes in judgement with both Californian and
>Australian wines. The successes have been frequent enough that I have at least
>some confidence that these ‘new’ Australian wines will be a similar
>situation, but we’ll have to wait another half decade to see if the big boys
>from the late 90s still have it, or if not ‘it’ then something at least
>that still interests us.