Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  The reaction in Australia was overwhelming. Consumers had never tasted a Sauvignon Blanc like Cloudy Bay. There was something about theterroir of Marlborough that gave it a unique taste. The response was similar when the wine was released into the British market the following year. Cloudy Bay entered the U.S. market in 1991 to little critical attention or press notice, but it soon had a cult following among consumers.

  French winemakers watched the developments in New Zealand and the world wine market with attention. Only four years after Cloudy Bay hit stores, Veuve Clicquot, the French Champagne producer that is part of the LVMH Group, bought land in Marlborough with the intention of producing Sauvignon Blanc. At the same time, Hohnen’s investors, who were anxious to reap the rewards of their runaway success, wanted to cash out of the company and were pressuring him to find a buyer. Eventually Veuve Clicquot bought not only land in Marlborough but also controlling interest in Cape Mentelle and Cloudy Bay. Hohnen retained 20 percent of his company, but eventually sold his share in 2001.

  Another French company has also made a major investment in Marlborough. Domaine Henri Bourgeois, one of France’s leading producers of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé, two Sauvignon Blanc wines, in 2000 bought 173 acres of Marlborough land after first looking at making wine in California, South Africa, Chile, and Australia. New Zealand appeared to offer the best place for them to practice their Sauvignon Blanc skills. Their first vintage was in 2003, and the winemaker was Sally Denious, an American who had gotten her wine training in Australia. To help celebrate the first harvest, Domaine Henri Bourgeois invited forty-six French winemakers to look at its operation, and the company expects eventually to produce as much Sauvignon Blanc in New Zealand as it now makes in the Loire Valley.

  As employees of Veuve Clicquot, Hohnen and Judd these days try to keep up with demand for one of the world’s most popular wines. Hohnen works out of Margaret River, traveling to New Zealand four times a year, and Judd controls day-to-day affairs in Blenheim. Production is now approaching 100,000 cases a year. Unfortunately, many American wineshops run out of their allocation a few weeks after it arrives each spring. Despite large unmet demand, however, Hohnen is only increasing production by about 10 percent annually in order not to compromise its quality. Judd fine-tunes the taste of his international success, but is not making significant changes. Now that Cloudy Bay grows about half of its own grapes, Judd has more control over the viticulture side of the process. He’s using riper grapes to give the wine more tropical fruit tastes, and blends Sémillon into it only in rare years. His goal remains to make a Sauvignon Blanc that continues to make the world say, “Wow!”

  Barossa Valley and Margaret River, Australia

  At the Paris Tasting of 1976, California wines had bested the best French red Bordeaux and white Burgundy wines. Three years later at theGaultMillau Wine Olympics, another icon of French winemaking fell. A 1971 Penfolds Grange Hermitage, an Australian Shiraz, walked away with a first prize in Shiraz, a field long dominated by the French. Shiraz is the Australian version of the French grape Syrah, which is widely used in Rhône Valley wines.

  It took another sixteen years before theWine Spectator magazine declared the 1990 Grange the Red Wine of the Year in December 1995, and British wine critic Hugh Johnson has since called Grange the only First Growth from the Southern Hemisphere. Those international accolades for Grange marked not just the success of one particular Australian wine but also the recognition that the land down under has become one of the world’s leading producers of quality wine.

  Max Schubert, the determined chief winemaker at Penfolds, Australia’s largest wine company, literally willed Grange into existence more than a half century ago. Schubert had to overcome a long and loud chorus of criticism, and it took years for this wine to find its place in the pantheon of world wines.

  In 1950, the Penfolds board of directors sent Schubert on a trip to Europe to study the making of Sherry in Spain and Port in Portugal. At the time, Australians drank mainly those fortified wines rather than dry table wines. After finishing his work in Spain and Portugal, Schubert went on to Bordeaux to check out French winemaking. In Bordeaux he met Christian Cruse, one of the leading figures of the wine trade, who introduced Schubert to the wonders of aged Bordeaux. Just as the new breed of Americans starting with James D. Zellerbach returned from Europe with dreams of making wines as good as the French ones, Schubert came home with the goal of producing in Australia a wine that would be as rich and intense as those of Bordeaux and would also last twenty or more years. He called the wine Grange in honor of the Adelaide homestead where his company’s founder, Christopher Rawson Penfold, had lived. Schubert had grand ambitions for Grange and he later wrote that his objective was “to lift the rather mediocre standard of Australian red wine in general at that time.”

  Even though he was chief winemaker, Schubert had to make lots of compromises in his ambitious project, for starters in the type of grape he would use. The classic Bordeaux grapes—Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot—were unavailable in sufficient quantities in Australia, so he used the country’s most widely available grape, Shiraz. Schubert called the wine Grange Hermitage in honor of the best-known French Syrah.

  Aging in oak is the centerpiece of Bordeaux winemaking, but Schubert couldn’t get enough French oak in Australia, so he used more readily available, although very different, American oak.

  In 1951, Schubert launched his project with an experimental vintage. His objective, he later wrote, was “to produce a big, full-bodied wine, containing maximum extraction of all the components in the grape material used.”

  By today’s standards, or even those of Bordeaux in 1951, Schubert’s methods and equipment were primitive. Unlike most great wines, which come from a single vineyard to assure uniformity, he selected grapes from two different Penfolds vineyards located in the Adelaide region. Schubert, though, had exacting demands for ripeness and acidity for the grapes. They were fermented in a wax-lined, open concrete tank. Schubert wanted to achieve maximum contact between the fermenting juice and the grape skins and other material in order to produce the rich color and taste intensity he desired, so he put wooden planks on top of the tank to keep the skins and seeds immersed in the fermenting juice.

  Schubert also introduced some other innovative procedures. He wanted the fermentation to last much longer than normal in order to get a richer taste—twelve days rather than the customary three or four—and so he used a heat exchanger, a device like a car’s radiator, that drew off heat, thus lowering the temperature of the juice and prolonging fermentation. Before the process was complete, the liquid was pumped into five 300-gallon American oak tanks, where the process was finished. By continuing fermentation in oak, the fruit and oak flavors integrated more completely: the wine took on a more concentrated taste but did not pick up additional green, harsh tannins from the grapes. That gave the Grange a soft and rich flavor. The first batch of wine remained in the oak barrels for eighteen months before bottling. The total output in 1951 was just 160 cases.

  While this experimental Grange was maturing in bottles, Schubert turned out additional vintages each year. The first two Granges, 1951 and 1952, were 100 percent Shiraz, but starting in 1953 he blended in a small amount of a particularly good Cabernet Sauvignon that provided additional aromas, tannins, and flavor and improved the wine’s structure. Cabernet has since been added in most, but not all, years.

  Schubert believed that he had created a great wine that lived up to the objectives he had set, but just about everyone else thought he had produced a monster. A tasting of Granges from 1951 to 1956 turned into a humiliating experience for Schubert. One respected critic called the wine “a concoction of wild fruits and sundry berries with crushed ants predominating.”

  Shortly before the 1957 vintage, the top management at Penfolds gave Schubert written instructions to halt the Grange project and cut off all funding for it. Undeterred and unbowing, the sometimes-cantankerous Schubert st
ealthily continued his work. The 1957, 1958, and 1959 vintages were stored in a cellar behind a false wall, and since he couldn’t get the money to buy new oak barrels, he reused old ones.

  The Grange wines from the early 1950s eventually started to mature nicely and some of the rougher edges smoothed out in the bottle. They were now less aggressive and more refined. The Penfolds board of directors in 1960 retasted the early wines and told Schubert he could start making Grange Hermitage once again. He was also finally given the money to support the project properly.

  Two years later, Penfolds decided to enter Grange in the Sydney Wine Show in the Open Claret classification even though it was not that type of wine. Schubert chose the 1955 vintage, which was much older than other wines in the category, because Grange takes longer than other wines to mature. The 1955 Grange won a gold medal at the show, one of more than fifty golds it eventually won before being retired from the wine show circuit in the late 1970s.

  After those early victories in Australia, Grange slowly rose in stature on the international wine scene until today, when it is now recognized as perhaps the world’s greatest Shiraz. In 1990, the company dropped the word Hermitage from the name, calling it simply Grange. The Australian wine no longer needed the support of an association with a famous French wine; Grange could stand on its own.

  Grange is the world’s best Shiraz because the Barossa Valley north of the city of Adelaide has perhaps the bestterroir in the world for growing Syrah or Shiraz. Although it’s called a valley, Barossa is at an elevation of about a thousand feet that varies between undulating hills and flat ground. The annual rainfall is about twenty inches. The soil is red and brown, with sandy loam over deep clay. Summer temperatures regularly hit 85 degrees and sometimes top 105. There is never any problem about the fruit ripening, and the grapes are always rich in flavor and deep in color. It rarely rains during the February–March harvest.

  Selecting Shiraz grapes from a variety of vineyards has also been a hallmark of Grange and remains so today. Steve Lienert, who is something like the chief operating officer of Grange, works with more than a dozen growers whose grapes have shown the greatest potential to be used in Grange. All the grapes are fermented separately and then only the best go into the Grange blend. About two-thirds of the finalists make it. Lienert says he has never had a case where all the finalists were selected.

  One of the most important sources of Grange fruit is the Kalimna Vineyard, which is located in Nuriootpa in the northern end of the Barossa Valley. Grapes from Block 3C, which has a heavy clay soil and produces less than a half ton per acre, consistently go into Grange. Block 42 has gnarly Cabernet Sauvignon vines that are said to be more than a hundred years old. Until a recent string of drought years, the Barossa Valley Shiraz was dry farmed, but drip irrigation has now been installed for emergencies. It is used sparingly.

  Grange has always been a very expensive wine, but after it began receiving recognition the price reached the almost unthinkable. The 1976 Grange was the first one to top twenty Australian dollars a bottle upon release. At the time the average Australian red wine was selling for about two Australian dollars. The 1999 vintage, which was 100 percent Shiraz, was released on May 1, 2004, at a recommended price of $225 in the U.S. market. There is also a strong market of old Grange vintages and oversized bottles both in stores and on the Internet. The highest price ever paid for a bottle of Grange was $46,080, which went for a six-liter bottle of the 1998 vintage. The highest price for a regular bottle was $27,100 for a 1951 vintage.

  Grange is expensive, in part, because of its scarcity. Penfolds makes only from 5,000 to 10,000 cases a year depending on the availability of quality grapes. Château Lafite Rothschild, a Bordeaux First Growth, produces about 20,000 cases. Despite the temptation, the company has not pumped up production to meet demand. The 2000 Grange, released on May 1, 2005, consisted of only 2,000 cases because poor growing conditions limited the amount of grapes deemed of Grange quality.

  Only four winemakers have had the final authority over Grange since the wine was first made in 1951. Max Schubert made it until 1973. Don Ditter, his longtime assistant, made it from 1974 to 1986, when he retired. John Duval made it between 1986 and 2002. Peter Gago took over as the chief Penfolds winemaker in July 2002. He had worked for the company since 1989 and reached the top via a circuitous route. Originally trained as a science-and-math teacher, he taught and was a school administrator for nearly nine years. A man of eclectic interests, Gago sprinkles his conversation with musical references or song lyrics (“As Joni Mitchell says, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’”).

  Gago told me he would “love to make five, ten, thirty times the volume,” but there are simply not enough quality grapes to enable them to do it. “We could still do it and lower the quality, but bit by bit it would come back to bite us.” Gago knows he is carrying a heavy historic burden, but does it with a light touch. He says his goal is to make the exact same wine Schubert originally made, while realizing that no two vintages of any wine are ever identical.

  A few changes in the name of modernization have been made in the way Grange is made. Fermentation has not been done in wax-lined concrete tanks since 1973. It now takes place in stainless-steel tanks. Over the years the length of the process has been cut from twelve days to five or six.

  But there is more Australian wine than just from the Barossa Valley and Grange. The Australian wine business is highly concentrated. Only 4 companies produce 60 percent of the country’s wine and 20 turn out 95 percent. Some 1,500 wineries make up the last 5 percent, but today they are the most interesting part of the Australian wine business. The country’s small wineries produce some of their finest products in the Margaret River area, a region 180 miles south of Perth on the country’s southwestern coast.

  In 1973, Robert Mondavi traveled with Rev Cant, an Australian who had worked for him at the Charles Krug Winery, to Australia hoping to buy some land there for a vineyard and winery. At the time Margaret River was virtually unknown except to a small band of enthusiastic international surfers in search of the perfect wave. The town of Margaret River had the highest unemployment in the country, and local farmers existed mainly on dairy farming.

  Mondavi honed in on Margaret River as an area of great wine potential and in 1973 met with a Perth lawyer to see who owned the tract of land there that he wanted to buy. The lawyer thought that Denis Horgan, a local thirty-two-year-old accountant more interested in drinking beer and surfing than in balance sheets, owned the 1,650-acre property. Horgan had bought it four years earlier from a man with health problems who was trying to clean up his business affairs. The lawyer telephoned Horgan to see if he were interested in selling. Horgan said he wasn’t but invited Mondavi and the American lawyer who accompanied him to drop by for a drink at the end of the day. Horgan then sent his office boy out to buy the most expensive wine available in Perth and asked his personal assistant to go to the local library to find out anything she could about Robert Mondavi.

  Mondavi and his lawyer arrived at Horgan’s modest office located on St. George’s Terrace, the city’s main street, and the three men adjourned to a courtyard to talk about wine. Mondavi was enthusiastic about the potential he saw in the Margaret River area, which seemed ideally suited to the New World wines he was producing. Horgan was still not interested in selling, although they reached an agreement under which Mondavi invested in the property and directed the development of the vineyards and winery that would be called Leeuwin Estate.

  Mondavi was not the first person to spot the special characteristics of Margaret River, a hunk of land that juts out from the Australian mainland into the Indian Ocean, stretching sixty-six miles from north to south and sixteen miles from east to west. John Gladstones, a researcher in plant breeding at the University of Western Australia, in 1965 published a study that showed a strong resemblance between Bordeaux and Margaret River. Water on three sides moderates temperatures and provides almost perfect conditions for gr
ape cultivation—forty inches or so of rain annually, but 85 percent of it in six months of the year and almost none during the grape-growing season and harvest. Margaret River’s clay subsoil is topped by gravelly loam rich in minerals. Pockets of broken-down granite and limestone also provide an ideal foundation for viticulture.

  When Mondavi arrived, wineries were already slowly growing up in Margaret River, the first four having been financed by three doctors and a mining engineer, mirroring the amateur development of northern California winemaking in the 1960s. Young Australian winemakers began gravitating to Margaret River in the 1970s, attracted by the area’s promise. The early leader of the group was Bill Hardy, whose family was a major player in the wine business and who had studied winemaking in the 1960s at the University of Bordeaux under the famed Émile Peynaud.

  Keith Mugford, who became the winemaker and owner of Moss Wood, remembers hearing the results of the Paris Tasting while a student at the Roseworthy winemaking program at the University of Adelaide. That convinced him that great wine could be made outside of France and inspired him to try to do it in Margaret River. In December 1978, he went to the Napa Valley to visit wineries including Robert Mondavi and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Winemakers at both facilities opened their doors to him and explained their philosophies of bringing balance and complexity to Cabernet Sauvignon, which strongly influenced Mugford when he returned to Australia.

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mugford was part of group of about two dozen Margaret River winemakers who got together once a month on a Thursday night at the Transit Inn in Perth to sample some of the world’s great wines. Since Bill Hardy had a French orientation, the group tasted mostly French wines, although they also tried California’s Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and Spring Mountain, two of the wines at the Paris Tasting. Just as Napa Valley winemakers had done in the 1960s, the Australians a decade later tasted great wines—now from France and California—and then tried to match them in what would become a period of great experimentation and sharing of winemaking experience.