Industrial vs natural, sommeliers vs consumers, Australian wine vs imports – the cobweb spitfight continues.
But now we’re all polarised and fangy, we’ve forgotten exactly why. All these topics are merging.
It’s a mess. No referee.
The battle’s unfortunately forming along lines of age, not wisdom, creativity, gastronomic intelligence or experience.
Very early Saturday morning I was told that there are many young people everywhere in the wine business who are not about to go away so I’d better learn to like it.
As an infant who has never, ever gone away, I took this as a sign of misplaced aggression, spat the dummy, blocked the informant and cursed.
As an ancient warrior who knows better than any the value of a fresh young army, I’m pleased to see the colours hoist. All neat and tidy. Whichever side they’re on.
Dunno precisely how many laps of the sun the dude’s completed, as in Earth Years, but he’s sufficiently fresher than me. I speak of Banjo Harris Plane, who’s just been appointed by his own sommeliers’ guild as their best practitioner. He was also Gourmet Traveller Australian Sommelier of the Year in 2012.
You might like
I’d been trying, on Twitter’s 140-character Stalinist limit, to discuss Huon Hooke’s recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, where he complained about giant wine lists packed with unknown doubtfuls from Europe at the expense of many consistent locals. Huon had mainly stressed the lack of Treasury labels on these confounding new mega-lists. In one short piece uncomfortably corralled by Hungry Dan’s advertising, he’d dared to recommend Lindemans and Wolf Blass. But then he complained about the excess of multi-vintage Grange and Hill of Grace listings.
“Really fun article!” Banjo retorted. “What sort of wine list would you write? Aussie only, with heaps of NZ Sauvignon Blanc thrown in?”
After a stuttery attempt at constructive clarification using the old 140-character interchange, even my damp fuses blew. I went to bed.
Next morning, I learned the new Australian Sommelier of the Year had been mild after my huff.
“Hey all,” he wrote. “Late last night I had a conversation w @whiteswine about wine lists, somms etc. It ended with him calling me a dumb fuck … anyone else been exposed to vitriol from this bitter old bloke? Seemed a bit excessive … Unsure.”
Marketer James Scarcebrook shot back “can you be more specific mate? There seem to be a few too many with that description going around these days.”
Then senior show judge and Yarra Valley winemaker David Bicknell advised: “Relax. Take a teaspoon of cement and deal with him directly in a format >140 characters. We’ve all had a few blues on the journey.”
And so on. What failed to evolve was the important discussion which Huon had kicked off.
For this you can bow to the chaotic Shakespearean gossip of the internet: the strange ancient world of pamphleteers, tract-scribblers, message-boys, gospel-singers and street-preachers. It’s a bit like how it was before the big printing press, the television and the radio made possible the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Lord Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.
It’s a more fractal matter of weeny fiefdoms and power now; the exercise of influence, the backsheesh, the percentages, syndicators and remittance men. Everybody’s gotta have their slice, and their loyal gang.
Stay informed, daily
It terrifies the countryfolk: struggling winemaking families with real vineyards and real wineries are so scared of offending the new crop of big-smoke smellers that they’ll enter the gates of this discussion only by masked communication.
Permit me to attempt a more constructive discussion with one example of what we can get with lots of frustrated energy but little experience.
A decade back, a rabble of fresh winemakers poured over the drawbridges of the wine academies, all determined to carve out a new direction. For some reason – perhaps linguistic fashion, or maybe to please the few enlightened graphic artists of the day – they chose to suddenly plant varieties that end with O. Tempranillo, Greco di Tufo, Nebbiolo, Fiano, Negroamaro, Primitivo, Pinot grigio, Aglianico, Bastardo, Graciano, Tarrango … even that much misunderstood Portuguese white variety, Alboriño.
While O means nothing more than zero, Alboriño seemed to make some sense, so I’ll thin it out. A bit like a cross between Gewürztraminer and Riesling, it’s a high-acid aromatic white from bits of Portugal and Spain. It looked like a fine white that we could grow in warmer, unirrigated spots. Growers flocked to buy cuttings from the CSIR…O nursery: soon it was popping up everywhere.
But the first examples I tasted from Australia were nothing like the Iberian beauties. The highest point I made was 84/100. They were sweaty and oily. Then we learned it wasn’t even Alboriño. It was Traminer, the greasy Gewürztraminer-like white from Jura, a twee French appellation near Switzerland, where they make feral flor sherry.
“It’s the kind of wine of which more than a small glass makes you quite grateful it is so rare,” Oz Clarke explained well before this scandal blew.
Convinced they were onto a new thing they could call their own, the new sommelier gang pumped this new Aussie wine, which its makers were suddenly selling as Savignin, a Jura synonym for Traminer. It was handy that consumers confused this with the flood of New Zealand Sauvignon blanc that Banjo was taking a poke at.
Savignin is NOTHING like Sauvignon blanc. But coarse ocker versions of it cropped up like ebola outbreaks on the hipster lists. The poor winemakers couldn’t believe their luck: their dud grape was being flogged on and sometimes even paid for. At the expense of the Kiwis.
Worse than this was the consequent Jura boom: having discovered that Savignin came from Jura, which nobody’d ever heard of, somms began stacking their lists with arrays of browning Jura forgettables. Every list had to have some.
Seppeltsfield, awash with exquisite Australian sherries, many of them pristine flor styles, was going broke.
More than any other single thing, this boom in oxidised and burnished wines led to the bloom of Australian orange and cloudy wine.
Given the complexity of this argument, I’m open again to accusations of generalisation, but let me slide off leaving this example of what can happen during fad-driven revolution. As the Arab world is discovering, it’s one thing to throw out an old guard, but another thing again to suddenly devise and impose a new regime of law.
Sure, there are good sommeliers. There may even be a good bottle in Jura. And Bacchus knows there are horrid wine critics all over the joint. But now the revolution’s on, we’re gonna have to learn a new way of talking, or the whole damn thing will be wasted.
DECLARATION OF INTEREST: Although he forgets the credit, I’m the only critic quoted on Banjo Harris Plane’s 33-page wine list. In the late ’70s, I spent many a night socking away orange wines with the bloke who became his Dad. These powerful sauces were very close in style to the Jura product, if stronger (they were fortified). They were made in McLaren Vale by Gabor Berenyi, who claimed they were so natural and pure that having drunk enough of one, you could go on to drink anything else you liked and wake up without a hangover.
Want to see more stories from InDaily SA in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily SA as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily SA". That's it.
