Is chewiness next to manliness Down Under?

Jancis Robinson

Saturday 14 May 2005 • 5 min read

To red wine lovers, Australia is most famous for Shiraz but it produces almost three-quarters as much Cabernet Sauvignon, the country’s second most important red wine grape. How good is Australia’s best Cabernet Sauvignon?

On a particularly muggy day in Sydney last February I met up with five eminent Australian wine writers and Masters of Wine to find out over a day-long blind wine tasting organised by Australian Gourmet Traveller’s Wine magazine, the country’s leading consumer wine glossy. It is always interesting to taste with a tight-knit group of people who know each others’ palates well but with whom you have never tasted before, and I thought there might be some variation between what I and they were looking for.

There was an important added twist to the tasting too, as evinced by the slightly breathless arrival of NZ Master of Wine Bob Campbell who had just flown across the Tasman from Auckland to join us. Among the 24 top Cabernets from Coonawarra and 21 from Australia’s other prime Cabernet region Margaret River had been interspersed 20 of the most highly regarded Cabernets from the only region in New Zealand to manage to ripen decent quantities of this late-ripening variety with any consistency, Hawkes Bay in the temperate east of the North Island.

I should add here that when I say Cabernet, I really mean the producer’s finest offering which could be any combination of the Bordeaux grape varieties Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Malbec together with, in a few cases, a little Shiraz. This is a style of wine that is made around the world – with notable success only in Bordeaux’s most favoured sites, Sonoma and Napa Valley in California, some Washington state vineyards, Maipo just south of Santiago de Chile, Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast, and parts of Penedes in north east Spain.

Each of these regions puts its own stamp on this style of wine, as do the three regions providing the wines for our tasting. Coonawarra in the cool far south of South Australia has been producing Australia’s most distinctive, if sometimes austere, Cabernets since the 1960s. Margaret River’s first fine Cabernets emerged a decade later and are perhaps the most bordeaux-like reds that Australia makes. New Zealand’s reputation for red wines on the other hand is in its infancy. Its Pinot Noirs have rapidly become more famous than its Bordeaux-inspired red wines and it has been only from the late 1990s that these have been ripened with any degree of regularity at all, thanks to careful canopy management and site selection within the most suitable wine region, Hawkes Bay. (When I was there in 2001 there was a concerted effort to establish a particularly propitious subregion, the so-called Gimblett Gravels, although they do not have the monopoly on ripe Hawkes Bay Cabernet, as John Buck of Te Mata proved back in New Zealand wine’s pre-history.)

I don’t know about my fellow tasters, but I was certainly expecting the New Zealand wines to stand out in this tasting (in which the wines were served from young to old but otherwise in random order). New Zealand’s climate is much cooler than Australia’s and a bracing acid level has long been the hallmark of its wines. I was anticipating therefore that this feature would rather obviously identify them. In the event, the only two wines in the tasting which seemed to me to have dangerously low levels of acidity came from New Zealand. And I would reproach quite a number of the Australian examples for having obtrusive levels of acidity which were, furthermore, not integrated into the wine – very much an add-on. As Huon Hooke, the Sydney Morning Herald’s wine writer, observed towards the end of the tasting, Australian tasters tend to be inured to added acid (generally added to reduce dangerously high pH levels).

So it was not the New Zealand wines that tended to shout their origins, but rather those from Coonawarra because of their very particular combination of calcareous terra rossa soil, old vines and relatively cool climate (together recently with some dubious viticultural practices which can result in excessively herbaceous wines among lesser examples). In our tasting the Coonawarra wines tended to jump out of the glass declaring “Aussie and proud of it”, even if – or perhaps because – they are generally made rather more traditionally than some of the other more consciously crafted wines with their carefully managed tannins and, sometimes, exaggerated oak treatments.

Very few of these wines were marked by the sort of excess alcohol that leaves the taster anxious to avoid naked flames, although some wines seemed to me to have some unappetisingly overripe notes and a lack of freshness. It amused me that the one wine that seemed most over the top in all these respects was not Australian but Esk Valley Estate Reserve 2002 from New Zealand. I suppose it illustrates that we all over-compensate for what we don’t have naturally.

The principal faults in the Australian wines seemed to me to be this jagged, bolt-on acidity and some pretty rasping tannins, another component that Australian tasters seem more tolerant of than I am. (Australian winemakers generally seem to have decided to opt out of the otherwise universal quest for gentler, riper tannins – see Bordeaux 2004 – the virtues of tannin. Perhaps chewiness is regarded as next to manliness down under.) I noticed that my fellow tasters on the other hand were particularly severe on wines that did not seem intense or youthful enough, even if they tasted delicious on the day. And they were much more forgiving of relatively simple ripe cassis fruit such as that in the Arlewood and Cullen wines from Margaret River – perhaps a reflection of the current vogue among Australian commentators for fruit at any price as opposed to oak.

For me the two finest wines of all came from Margaret River (see below) but otherwise I was rather surprised by how the region performed, with the bottles from two of my favourite producers, Cullen and Moss Wood, slightly disappointing in different respects. Hawkes Bay supplied the only two serious disappointments of the tasting, but otherwise performed extremely creditably. And if Coonawarra lacked any single stand-out, it was certainly very solid across a range of vintages, not just the lauded 2000.

The wines we tasted ranged from 2003 back to 1999. All of the vintages from 1999 to 2001 were universally stoppered by cork but six of the 19 wines from the 2002 and 2003 vintages had been bottled under the screwcap that is fast being adopted as standard in both Australia and New Zealand.

The tasting took place in non air-conditioned conditions on a particularly hot, humid day before and during one of Sydney’s more dramatic thunderstorms so that, with tasters and wines wilting, there came a point when I wondered whether I was being fair to the penultimate flight of 10 wines. But the sheer quality of what I found in the final, oldest flight shone through, so perhaps in this case we triumphed against Nature. Nature certainly provided us with a number of extremely good wines which in most cases admirably expressed their own particular twist on this popular wine style.

Favourite Oz/NZ Cabernets

UK stockists given where possible.

BEST

Cape Mentelle Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 Margaret River

£19.99 Wine Direct of Hailsham

Xanadu Lagan Reserve CMF 1999 Margaret River

BETTER

Trinity Hill Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot 2001 Hawkes Bay

The 2000 is about £12 from The Vintage House, London W1, Cobblers Corner of Harrogate and Penistone Wine Cellars

Cape Grace Cabernet Sauvignon 2003 Margaret River

www.capegracewines.com.au Aus$38.50

VERY GOOD