Stop the war on terroir
By Andrew Jefford

Financial Times
Published: August 20 2004 17:10
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Australia is beginning to look like the alpha male of the world wine
herd. Last November it crept past France to become the primary
supplier of wine to the UK by both volume and value. Even more
significantly, Australia is munching ahead in the US, with 41 per cent
volume growth in the year to June 2004 alone. European wine producers
are traumatised; those of South America and South Africa intimidated.
You'd expect Australians to be swaggering. Oddly enough, they aren't.

Australia also is busy becoming the cheap wine supplier to the world.
Over half its exports are what is euphemist-

ically called "popular premium" wine, worth between A$2.50 and A$4.99
(£1-£2). Unbottled bulk sales are also rising, especially in the UK.
The most expensive wines, meanwhile, are actually losing their share
of shipments, with premium wines down 7 per cent and super-

premium down 3 per cent last year. Much (some estimates suggest most)
Australian wine in the UK is sold discounted; and the fact that five
large corporations produce about 70 per cent of the national total
adds to the sense that Australia's main contribution to the wine world
has been a kind of industrial revolution.

The solution, many feel, is for Australia to develop a repertoire of
celebrated vineyard sites producing great wines that cannot be
duplicated elsewhere. It needs, perhaps, less Grange and more Grace.

"At present, Penfold's Grange is absolutely the most influential wine
in Australia, and everybody's copying it," said Brian Croser of
Petaluma, Australian wine's leading theoretician. As he spoke, he was
standing in Stephen Henschke's Hill of Grace vineyard as a hot summer
wind blew from the heart of the continent. He was referring to Grange,
Penfold's celebrated multi-site blend, whose exact components vary
each year.

"Grange is a copyable formula. I would hate to have to copy Hill of
Grace. You'd have to own this vineyard. You'd have to murder Stephen,
and find a way to ensure that his will recommended you. If you didn't,
you wouldn't make the same wine," he said. "Hill of Grace is terroir;
Grange is a wine style. I'm not being disparaging about Grange, which
has done an enormous amount for Australia; but I think it has misled a
lot of young winemakers."

I was travelling with Croser and top viticultural geologist Dr Doug
Mackenzie through Victoria and South Australia on a short journey of
discovery, assessing what the French would call its terroirs, its
vineyard sites. The first shock was, quite simply, how old most
Australian vineyard sites are. The bedrocks beneath Hill of Grace, for
example, are about 600m years old, while the siltstones and mudstones
of Coldstream Hills in the Yarra valley are about 400m years old.

"The chief difference between Australia and France," said Dr
Mackenzie, "is that France is a much younger piece of country, with
fresher rocks and soils."

Another surprise was that many of Australia's greatest present-day
vineyard sites are, from a European perspective, in the "wrong" place.
They were initially planted, in other words, by pioneer farmers on
fertile alluvium as part of mixed farming activities, since such sites
would guarantee a reliable and generous crop to keep poverty at bay.
This is true of Hill of Grace itself, which is not on a hill at all
but in a gentle valley deeply filled with silt, loess and loam. Much
the same is true of top vineyards in the nearby Barossa Valley and of
McLaren Vale, south of Adelaide, [between them the source of many of
Australia's most sought-after modern day cult wines, such as Clarendon
Hills or Torbreck, as well as some of the parcels which go into the
Grange blend]. In Europe, great wine tends to come from austere
hillside sites; alluvium is for cheap wine. Why, then, are Hill of
Grace and its peers so good?

The answer lies in the old vines for which Australia is so famous. The
"grandfathers", as Henschke calls his Hill of Grace vines, were
planted in the 1860s; (the average age of David Powell's Torbreck
vines is 50 to 125 years, with the oldest up to 153 years). When the
vines were younger, they would have produced uninteresting wine, since
the sites were over-nutritious; vine age has tamed the natural vigour
of the soil. This fertility is also, of course, the reason the vines
are still alive at all.

"If the vines hadn't been sitting on all that alluvium," said Croser
as he surveyed the "grandfathers", "they'd be dead now." Like Croser,
prospectors of new vineyard sites no longer look twice at warm-climate
alluvium, since it might mean a 50-year wait for a vineyard to come
good. Instead they are hunting younger, cooler sites where propitious
basement rocks reach the surface, such as the "shining vineyard" of
mica-schist in the Mount Barker area of the southern Adelaide Hills
from which Croser is growing the Petaluma Shiraz.

But it's no good having the greatest sites and climates if viticulture
and winemaking practices don't do them justice. "A great terroir
butchered," is Croser's description of Coonawarra, referring to the
effects of a decade of mechanical pruning and harvesting in the
vineyards of this cool-climate region of South Australia. Its thin
topsoil over freshwater limestone is extraordinarily young in the
Australian context (just 200,000 years or so), and the greatest
Cabernets of Coonawarra fine-grained, fragrant, elegant and intense
show how good the area can be. Many modern-day Coonawarra wines,
however, are characterised by unpalatable hardness and angularity, and
green, herbaceous flavours, which result from over-heavy crops grown
in shaded conditions.

Despite all this, the statistics keep improving, and few would want
to bet against Australia's world performance being even better in 2005
than in 2004. "Around 60 per cent of Australia's premium wine-making
grapes come from Riverland and Riverina, and 100 per cent of its bulk
varieties," Croser confirms. Yet as individual vineyard sites of
quality and character, these inland regions have little to offer:
they're simply too hot. For most customers of Australian wine, it
would seem, terroir is still an optional extra.

Five Great Australian Terroir Shiraz

*Shiraz, Hill of Grace, Eden Valley Henschke Dense yet pure and
refined, ageing to a fragrant, delicately balanced maturity.

*Shiraz/Cabernet Franc, Emily's Paddock, Heathcote, Jasper Hill
Powerfully aromatic, expressive and mouthfilling wine, with
provocative Outback notes of plants, leaves and herbs.

*Shiraz, Mount Barker Vineyard, Southern Adelaide Hills, Petaluma
Classically perfumed, with stone and mineral flavours to ballast the
spice.

*Shiraz, St Peter's Vineyard, Great Western, Seppelt Typical cindery
fruits within a delicate, graceful and gratifyingly subtle frame.

*Shiraz, Wendouree Vineyard, Clare Valley

Powerful, thrusting, firmly structured Shiraz with the potential to
turn truffley with age.

Jancis Robinson's column returns in September


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