Australian wine ratings are harming Australian wine

Right now, the very last thing you’d want to be is a young Australian winemaker with talent. 

Imagine it. You completed a three-year winemaking degree at the University of Adelaide, you’ve crammed in vintages all over Australia and around the world and you’ve paid more than you can afford so you can taste as many benchmarks – local and international – as you can. You’ve served your apprenticeship as an assistant or cellar rat under the guidance of a real professional and now you’re ready to step out of the shadows. You’re humble and you know you still have much to learn, but you’re ready to stand up and be counted. You are confident in what you know, what you can do, how you discern quality and you have good people in your corner. And maybe, one future day, you might even make something special.

But maybe you’re seriously thinking of going to work someplace else. Why?

History, we know, has a habit of repeating itself. When I was first learning about wine, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a widespread view across Australia that we were making the best red wine on earth. Some of the finest Australian wines ever made came from the decade of the 1960s, while in all truth there was a tiredness and laziness throughout much of Europe in the 1970s – Bordeaux and Burgundy included – which took Robert Parker’s justifiable enthusiasm for the 1982 Bordeaux vintage to revert. Back in Australia, however, very few winemakers bothered even to taste wines from other Australian wine regions, let alone from overseas. I spent much of 1983 in Coonawarra and came away with the view that its winemakers were largely concerned with telling each other how good they were.

Throughout the early 1980s, led by a coalition of senior wine judges and media, Australians were told that the thin, green, pyrazine-dominated cabernets from South Australia and the Yarra Valley must indeed be great wines because of their close resemblance to those from Bordeaux. Despite the fact that they weren’t -– on either front.

The wine that collected trophies at the Adelaide Wine Show in 1984 for the Best Cabernet and the Best Red of the Show was made by Geoff Merrill. It was around 11% or even less alcohol by volume and you could run a lawnmower over it. Yet we were told by the opinion leaders of the day that this was world’s best practice.

Around the same time, the media and trade weren’t much interested in traditional Barossa shiraz and grenache.  So they were made and marketed so apologetically you could buy them in muffins. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s you could hardly find a red wine from Barossa floor fruit made and labelled as such. Next was the disgraceful and irreparable South Australian Vine Pull Scheme of the mid 1980s, during which many of its most valuable old vine resources were pulled up for good. Prices for Barossa fruit were so bad that in 1986 cabernet sauvignon was actually turned into sweet sherry! The Barossa was reduced to just 500 growers, as 9% of its vineyard was destroyed, including much of its oldest shiraz.

What was going on? The wine shows, the wine media and the retail trade collectively thought Australian wine began and ended with riesling, semillon and cool-climate cabernet. Chardonnay was a problem child, pinot noir a light tonic and sauvignon blanc a mere curiosity. Shiraz was simply a poor relation to cabernet and you could forget about everything else…

Jump forward 35 years and the wine show judges, the media and the trade (the sommeliers) are today making the same old mistakes and again they are falsely using comparisons to international benchmarks to justify them. Trouble is, as we know, these mistakes actually affect the way that makers craft their wines. 

Just as our makers of cabernet in the 1980s were trying to strip the fruit from their wines, they are now doing exactly the same thing with chardonnay, pinot noir and shiraz. Under-ripened, under-flavoured and misunderstood examples of these varieties are constantly topping best-of lists in the wine media, dominating the wine lists of restaurants and walking away with major trophies at wine shows. And, as a winemaker, if you don’t conform to the patently obvious requirements for success, good luck!

Available evidence suggests that poor winemaking decisions that result in bitter and green-edged stalk-derived ‘complexity’, raw and discordant oak, unbalanced and often tooth enamel-threatening acidity, dull and often oxidised fruit are actually being rewarded, and massively so.

A gong such as a ‘Winemaker of the Year’, ‘Young Winemaker of the Year’, ‘Young Gun of the Year’ or whatever will pop up next can make someone’s career. And your chances of collecting an award of this nature can be massively helped if you’re seen to be part of the in-crowd, online and offline.

Little wonder then that overseas wine media, judges and makers look at the stratospheric scores constantly given by Australian ‘experts’ to Australian wines that are pedestrian at best and then form the view that something rather strange and parochial is going on down here. Our international perspective and heightened engagement, which drove the immense improvement across Australian wine in the decade of the 1990s and which managed to continue into the tough climatic decade of the 2000s, has been trashed. 

Four decades after they last tried it, Australia’s wine judges, media and trade (sommeliers in these days) are again attempting to redefine the very parameters of wine quality. Competent, but unspectacular wines are frequently given scores well beyond their merit, something the wine-buying public is finally waking up to. Honest, pedestrian wines are treated like the superstars that in the cold light of day they are emphatically not.

Thanks to most of the Australians who use it, the hundred-point scale has today become a national embarrassment. Most Australian ‘expert’ users of this scale appear to operate only between the scores of 93-99, while some of our most feted wine critics appear to think that by rating a wine at 94/100 they are actually giving it a low score. Little wonder that Australian winemakers are conditioned to expect a rating of at least 92 for their most basic wines. 

If I give a wine a score of 97, by definition that means there are only three levels of quality above it, and one of those is perfection. Look online, however, and 97/100 is little more than commonplace.

All this has done is lead to complacency where it’s least warranted, arrogance where it’s unjustified, disbelief amongst those in the trade and the public who really understand wine and an unpleasant sense of entitlement amongst those winemakers who know even before their new wines are tasted that their fans in the media and the trade will not let them down.

It would be very unfair to name this particular individual, but some 15 years or so a very talented and likeable young Victorian winemaker began releasing small volumes of interesting and ambitiously styled wines that were widely extolled by the media and the sommeliers of the time. They were pumped up well beyond their merit and their maker became an instant cult hero. 

Today, a significant time later, and with massively enhanced experience now behind him, this now not-so-young winemaker has begun to do what he was told he was doing way back when, by releasing some very fine wines indeed. Honest to a fault, he says that for the first time in his life he is getting close to what he really wants to achieve, but still has much to learn. The trouble is that he’s now yesterday’s news; his moment is gone. His reputation, apart from within the circle that really understand what he is now delivering, is based on wines he is frankly embarrassed about. 

Fortunately, this individual was sufficiently level-headed to ignore the shouty noise of yesteryear and stay focused on quality. Most however go the opposite way and are intent only on pleasing the influencers, no matter how far off track they might actually be.

Put yourself in a young winemaker’s shoes today. What choices should this person make? To stick to what they know about quality and how to achieve it and in all likelihood remain a winemaking unknown? Or should they bow to the nodding but influential Australian clique of makers, judges, media and sommeliers, deliver them the sub-par wines they want to see and then reap the rewards that follow?

As I began, the very last thing you might want to be right now is a young Australian winemaker, especially if you felt you had the talent to make great wine and had a commitment to international expectations of quality. You’d be wanting to keep your passport up to date and your eye over the horizon.