McLaren Vale and Barossa: Pursuing the Lightness of Being

McLaren Vale stands out as world-class wine region because of its seaside location, the relaxed atmosphere, good people and the polyglot of meso-climates and geologies that fuel the charge of grenache and its Mediterranean picadors – mourvedre, grenache blanc, roussanne, picpoul and fiano, among other cultivars. The inexorable rise in plantings of well-suited varieties such as these augurs for a bright future as vines become established and the comprehension of their idiosyncrasies is consummated as better wine. In essence, this charge is irrefutably the most exciting thing that has happened to Australian wine for a very long time.

Yet it is important to acknowledge that despite the fanfare, that inveterate lean-to, shiraz, continues to define much of the Vale as it does virtually every region in the country, including the most famous of all, Barossa, where I also recently tasted. The sheer pervasiveness of its plantings, its old-vine patrimony and its many fine wines consecrate a commercial hegemony that must be respected.

However, prices for shiraz fruit have been surpassed by grenache for the first time. This has shifted the commercial paradigm, causing headaches and more for the intransigent grower, winemaker, or for those who put all their eggs in a mono-varietal basket. This was encouraged, mind you, by Wine Australia’s forefathers, the egregiously named Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation and their incentivized vine-pull scheme of the mid-1980s, along with other misguided enterprises. These momentous stumbles eviscerated older shiraz vines and worst, the gnarled limbs of ancient mataro and grenache, bent into a sum of quality over quantity, that failed to shimmy with the myopia of the corporate bean counter.

I heard tales of reinvigorating grenache and mataro and of attempts to embrace a mantle of white Rhone varieties. Fiano and Nero d’Avola, too, at least in the Vale. These varieties are all suited to dry Mediterranean climates. Variables of sands and shales and clays and smatterings of limestone here and there work well, grape variety-dependent. In the Vale, the heat of summer is mitigated by the cooling effects of the ocean and the cold waters of the Gulf of Saint Vincent. In the Barossa, it is more a matter of a subcontinental climate defined by wet, cold winters that establish the water table, before the onset of summer heat. Mesoclimates within each region vary based on soils, aspect and geology.

Blewitt Springs in the Vale, for example, has become the regional equivalent of a grand cru, yet recent experience suggests that Seaview and Clarendon, too, are well up the subregional totem pole, the former darker and earthy of type, while the better wines of Clarendon and its ironstone soils boast a cooler aura and a ferrous, grippy carapace of tannins over Blewitt Springs’ sands and its precocious violets, bright acidity and exotica.

In Barossa, things move at a steadier pace. As Torbreck’s Ian Hongell opined (while discussing, oddly enough, the miracle of Bordeaux 2022), the physiognomy of established Barossan vineyards is becoming more accustomed to warmer years. By virtue of Darwinian serendipity, the wines are largely becoming fresher as a result.

Hongell strongly suggests "that newer alternative varieties are not the answer" to global warming’s challenges, and believes that as in Bordeaux, "Barossan vineyards are regulating themselves." As a result, he said, "shiraz will continue to thrive as the regional mainstay." This said, he is pleased with his old-vine reservoir of grenache and mataro. Pitifully, due to the poor decisions outlined above, these varieties constitute less than five and two percent, respectively, of total Barossan plantings today. Optimistically, many producers are planting more.

However, despite the prescience of many, I was privy to saddening stories of growers who are unwilling or unable to stray from the course that they were told was the righteous one for so long. After all, it is not an inexpensive exercise to replant, graft over vineyards to suitable varieties, or to rejuvenate sites that have been pushed too hard. People get old. Tired. Banks come calling. It is not inexpensive, either, for those who make wine to replace smaller oak formats for the larger neutral and less invasive types of oak, tulips, amphorae or concrete. There is still plenty of clumsy wine out there: poorly extracted, too ripe, overly manipulated in the cellar and handled with the wrong oak.

Speaking to the Barossa’s Marco Cirillo, the custodian of some of the oldest grenache vines in the world, the irony that swirls around grenache’s mantle of fashionability is palpable.

Cirillo is a candid, purposeful man, generous with his time. He inherited a glorious swathe of vines on the sandy mile between Vine Vale and Nuriootpa, where his winery lies. His father, a Calabrian emigre of an impecunious pragmatism, coaxed them into a basket type pattern to ensure that the fruit “would not touch the ground and rot.”

And so, they remain today, these grenache centurions that Cirillo stood by through times of adversity, as the public hounded him for “heavy shiraz” that he declined to offer. Today, Cirillo is the hometown iconoclast come good, still making a style of grenache that is neither of the pinot-like zeitgeist, nor the head-numbing older-school idiom. His local earthenware is juxtaposed against the kiln of forensic exactitude at Alkina, a melody of experimentation, soil analyses and huge capital injection, just down the road. The results at Alkina speak for themselves: invariably brilliant!

Yet whether in the Vale or Barossa, with grenache or shiraz, I found that the pursuit among better winemakers is one of a paradoxical lightness of being, despite the inherent extract in the wines. Yet to speak of the wines becoming lighter and fresher is a cliched trope; a bandwagon that virtually every winemaking region on the world has been on for some time. By lightness of being, I mean better viticulture, optimal (rather than excessive or anemic) levels of ripeness at judicious alcohol levels, courageous extraction of polyphenols, less clunky oak and with that, superior tannin management at large, resulting in wines of poise, detail and drinkability. As far as I’m concerned, tannin management is the salient point of demarcation between the wines of yore and the better wines of today.

To achieve ripe tannins requires physiologically ripe fruit. Grenache ripens late. Its natural proclivity is for wines at 14 to 14.5 percent, unless making semicarbonic, ersatz rosé in the hipster mold. Mataro ripens even later, with the benefit of ample tannic mettle. Picking earlier is to render wines that are simply too green. Indeed, in previous vintages, including the lauded 2021, I felt that too many producers in the Vale pushed the ripening envelope in pursuit of acidity, negating grenache’s visceral deliciousness in the process.

THE PLEASURE DOME OF GRENACHE

Grenache can be many things, but its most singular role is one of a pleasure dome. In 2022, a similarly attenuated La Niña vintage on the cooler side, I felt that more and more producers hit a sweet spot of vitality melded with flavor, even if the fruit was slightly less concentrated in all.

As a side note, many growers in the Vale are excited by Nero. It is responsible for some fun wines, often marked by a dusty swath of tannin, bright acidity and pulpy dark to bitter fruit allusions. Yet its imminent pleasures are as much its limitations. It is no star. Conversely, grenache is responsible for many of the world’s most compelling wines. There is a real “pinoté” to the Vale’s best grenache, attesting to the veracity of the notion that pinot noir and grenache are brothers from another mother. Nero, on the other hand, is not one for any great complexity be it here, or in its spiritual Sicilian home of Noto.

Shiraz is an earlier ripener than grenache and needs to be handled differently. It is still capable of avuncular, powerful wines, bolstered by plenty of oak. The heft, alcohol and residual sugar of these styles can make more than a sip a challenge to the health. Yet better shiraz from the Vale and Barossa is fragrant, refined and refreshing, with no paucity of grape tannins. But not the stiff-upper-lipped-type found in cabernet. We’re speaking of something suaver and more generous. Promoting this generosity and a structural refinement is achieved via lower fermentation temperatures, longer and gentler agitations and more refined oak handling. The best wines are less reliant, too, on overt reduction to promote tension and under-ripe stems to confer green and unattractive aromas of mescal and peat.

Top shiraz from the Vale include Chalk Hill’s Alpha Crucis and Paralian’s Blewitt Springs, while in the Barossa, pretty much everything from Alkina, Hayes Family and Head make exceptional wines of noble tannic fortitude, serving to compress teeming fruit into a vortex of tension. Then there is the beautiful jewel box of Sami Odi, so delicate and refined that the wines seem to come from an idyll far away. As far as mataro goes, Cirillo, Torbreck’s Pict and various iterations from Teusner, a value producer on the up, impressed.

Of course, grenache needs tannin, too, yet one cannot extract from a relative paucity in the first place. Long and gentle is the name of the game. Just ask Thistledown, Yangarra, Bondar, Brash Higgins, Aphelion, Vanguardist, SC Pannell, Alkina, Tscharke and new arrival to the pantheon, Thomas Saint Vincent. Sorry, there are so many good wines that I have taken the artistic liberty of one giant, emotional sprawl!

These producers extract with different techniques and for different periods, but with a common philosophy of “easy does it.” Stems remain integral to many of grenache’s better expressions. Yet the percentages used in 2022 felt lower overall and the “lasagna technique” of whole berries and/or crushed fruit atop whole bunches to release a semi-carbonic lilt to the aromas seems better placed. There also seems to be a greater awareness of what best represents a wine and its message of place, over extraneous winemaking cladding and stylistic rubric. More wines are defining a stronger regional narrative.

Place is a story. A tale. A narrative. It works something like this in my mind: geology is the stage, the grape varieties the protagonists, the winemakers are the narrators and their approaches in the cellar, the act. The viticulturists, meanwhile, are the playwrights. Without their intuits and direction, the play runs off the tracks irrespective of nature’s capricious dictum each vintage. The dynamic is one of growing not only that which is profitable, but that which tells the story best: a confluence of the right grapes and their suitability to place, a sustainable long-term future and affirmation of one’s conscience.

The status quo of burly wines that have long defined the Australian landscape, particularly those from the engine rooms of South Australia, is being challenged. Arbiters of taste are taking notice.

Australia is tucked at the bottom of the world, sometimes unable to fathom criticism or exaltation due to an ingrained sense of resentful obscurity. The inexorable drive toward poise, transparency and fealty to geology and culture in Australia’s best wines is something to be celebrated. For while Australians know that their script represents considerable cultural diversity, enviable old vine resources and a welcome chameleonic nature, others elsewhere may not.

– Ned Goodwin MW, Senior Editor

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