GRAPEVINE: Australian style in the world of wine

New World wine countries such as Australia, USA, New Zealand have a hard time in the world of fine wine when competing with the Old World countries such as France, Italy and Spain.

The Old World have native varieties and a history of wine growing going back centuries, while we are still working out what will grow best where and why it works. As we celebrate Australia, it is worthwhile looking at something that Australia has claimed as its own, and made a uniquely Australian style in the world of wine – the Cabernet Shiraz blend.

The roots of the blend lay in the old-world region of Bordeaux where Cabernet Sauvignon forms the basis for many of the blends from the left bank of the region. The firm Cabernet is blended with varying portions of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot to construct a more complete wine than the Cabernet may produce on its own. During the 19th century, they were far lighter, paler coloured wines referred to as Claret.

This eventually evolved to refer to wines of a similar style as Bordeaux. However, the blend would often not be the same as that in Bordeaux. While we did have Cabernet planted, we didn’t have as much of the other constituent varieties in a classic Bordeaux blend. We did have plenty of Shiraz though, pragmatism played its part and the firm, dry Cabernet often with the characteristic ‘hole’ in the middle of the palate was filled out by the use of Shiraz as a blending partner.

While Cabernet from Bordeaux and Shiraz from the Rhone were often blended in France, once the regional laws began to come in to effect in the early 1900’s this was no longer possible as the cross regional blend was no longer allowed. There are very good reasons for laws that protect the regions in France, our youth as a wine producing country meant we had no such history to protect and the freedom allowed us to be more flexible and make the blend our own. Yalumba is noted as producing some of the earliest blends in the 1800s when they shipped wines to the British Raj in India. Nowadays, their “Signature” is an iconic example of the blend. Max Schubert is credited with establishing the blend as a genuine contender in the world of fine wine with the legendary Bin 60A Cabernet Shiraz, Grange and Bin 389. Many other producers, principally in South Australian regions have put the blend to good use particularly with the use of Coonawarra Cabernet and Barossa Shiraz.

Part of the difficulty for the blend recently may be due to the pre-eminence of single site and single block wines. As we try to dial in on the intricacies of site, the skill in blending and the virtues of a well-constructed blend have been lowered a little to the entry level wines where the leftovers are blended to use up the juice. A single site in McLaren Vale combined with an owner/winemaker uniquely skilled at blending might be able to buck this trend.

Koomilya (Cabernet Shiraz – $65) is the project of Stephen Pannell whose family have a long history in Australian wine through the establishment of Moss Wood in Margaret River and Picardy in pemberton. It was during Stephen’s time as head winemaker at Hardy that he came across this site. It was so good that he used it as the basis for the 1995 Eileen Hardy Shiraz which won the coveted Jimmy Watson Trophy at the Melbourne wine show. After 20 or so years he finally convinced the owners to sell him the property and with a few years under his belt as proprietor he is releasing wines that are receiving critical acclaim, some even claiming it will become the Wendouree of McLaren Vale. Stephen has a knack for blends: not just putting varieties together in a bottle, but creating cohesive wines that would be no better with more additions and may well lose something if they were single variety wines. Seeing his work with this classic, and unique Australian blend drawing inspiration from those early examples is worth the effort to see just how good the blend can be.