Interview – Brian Croser

Brian Croser is one of the most influential people in Australian wine. The company he founded and now chairs, Petaluma Ltd, is regarded as something of a model for modern wineries and wine brands. With varieties like chardonnay, riesling and cabernet sauvignon, Croser has set the winemaking trends which much of the industry has followed. Although now resigned from a number of industry boards and committees, many of which he chaired, Brian Croser has been the leading spokesman to emerge from within the wine industry over the last twenty years. Petaluma Ltd today owns Mitchelton and Knappstein Wines.

Now that Petaluma has successfully absorbed Mitchelton, are you looking around for something else to buy?

We’re looking around, but right now things are very expensive, especially since the Coldstream Hills purchase which has inflated market expectations. But there are very few companies with the sort of characteristics we’re interested in.

What are you looking to achieve with Mitchelton?

Mitchelton wines have always been under-sold for their quality and it has also far under-performed relative to its quality potential. We have improved the structure, which previously involved separate vineyard and winery management, each of which had a different agenda. Then we started to look at quality, getting the yields and irrigation right and giving Don Lewis, who is a talented natural winemaker, the tools to work with for the first time. Then we can begin to lift the perception of the products to achieve the prices they deserve.

What do you make of the current shortage and increasing price of premium red wine?

We are going through a phase in which our premium reds have been dominated by a single large company, while in every other market premium reds are dominated by small companies. Australians are now aware that there’s a whole range of other products worth just as much as the large company products. There’s huge fragmentation out there – a lot of pretend products not worth what they are asked, plus some very legitimate products, largely released in very small quantities. Their scarcity makes them more desirable, although their big test comes with when their sales go past a thousand cases.

We’re producing between 3,000 and 7,000 cases of Coonawarra Petaluma’s red flagship, although the reality is that we can’t make enough. We’re making sure we protect the domestic market and we’re also re-releasing significant quantities of mature wines. We’ve held back 1,000 cases of the 1987 and around 700 cases of the 1988.

Petaluma is one of the highest-profile proponents of varietal merlot in Australia. Can it make great wine in Australia?

Merlot is clearly one of the great varieties. It’s not as distinguished as cabernet, but it does have concentration, intensity and power. Like pinot noir it’s fastidious it – needs to be dryland, it needs small crops, it needs light and heat through the canopy, then it makes great wine. It’s more appealing at a young age than cabernet. If it’s not each of these things, it makes a quaffing wine – which is why it’s been labelled as such.

What sort of future do you see for the other newer varieties entering the marketplace?

The incoming Italian varieties will make for interesting niche players and should develop a small market interest, but smaller than that for pinot noir or sauvignon blanc or even for verdelho. As for the comeback being made by grapes like grenache and mataro, anybody who has handled thousands of tonnes of these grapes wil know they are not noble varieties. You see some pretty ordinary wine labelled as grenache/mataro. In the long term they all add interest and spice, but they won’t be the main meal, which are those wines with intrinsic quality, power and finesse made from noble varieties.
nWhat are your views on premium Australian pinot noir?

I think pinot is about to take a major turn. So far it’s been made to be pretty; the wines tend to lack substance and structure and vinosity. Everybody is chasing the lollies, the confection and not the depth or richness or complexity. That’s about to change. The next step will come from dry-grown Australian pinot noir on old soils which will produce genuine red wine complexity.

How do you view the industry’s pursuit of its export targets for 2025?

We’re way ahead of the 2025 targets, which were very conservative. If we kept up the current pace we would hit the billion dollars of export sales by October 1998, but we would run out of fruit first.

The growth in the value of exports is increasing around 40 on a moving annual total basis, which is pretty dramatic. It’s also a 10 year long phenomenon, not a flash in the pan. The soothsayers and criers of doom are all winemakers who are not participating and independent growers who are becoming marginalised by small makers.

Those in the Margaret River who say sooner or later export is going to stop and we will all be swamped by a tidal wave of wine are sitting in a fairyland at the edge of the Indian ocean. They don’t deserve the attention they receive. Please login to post comment