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.