Riverina Botrytis Semillon

It was 1985, it was the Victorian International Exhibition of Wine, known as VIEW 85 for short and well do I remember the smile that never left Darren de Bortoli’s face, not even for a moment. For several days the De Bortoli stand was packed four or five deep as winemaker Darren and marketing sister Leanne wowed the hearts and palates of the wildly enthusiastic crowd of sucrose-deprived Melburnians with pour after pour of their impossibly sweet and luscious ‘1982 Semillon Sauterne’.

Along with the release of the inaugural and exceptional 1982 vintage of Wynn’s John Riddoch Cabernet Sauvignon, it was the highlight of the show, even if it didn’t win its sweet white class in the international wine judging which accompanied the event. Darren de Bortoli clearly recalls being told by one of the judges that there was no way he had won the trophy, since the successful wine was finer, more restrained and more elegant. It turned out to be his 1983 vintage!

Such was the impact of this startling elixir that Australians immediately changed their views about indigenous sweet wine. Finally we had something to put on the same table, if not quite the same plane, as a premier Sauternes. All over Australia dentists began placing new orders for diamond drills.

It wasn’t so much that we had a new expression of sweet white dessert wine, and one of considerable excellence at that, but where it came from. Griffith? Sure it might have had the best varietal mix of any of the major irrigated regions in Australia, but could you imagine a less likely source of a wine that went on to win 45 gold medals and 10 trophies in Australia and around the world? What on earth could Griffith have in common with Sauternes and could it ever hope to create such wine on a consistent basis? Sure, the Hunter Valley has pulled a surprise with pinot noir every ten years or so, but De Bortoli’s 1982 Semillon Sauterne was about as unexpected an event as a loving embrace between Saddam Hussein and Richard Butler or even a Collingwood premiership.

But the signs were always there, if you were prepared to look for them, something I confess I actually hadn’t done. It was back in 1958 that the Riverina’s first late-harvest botrytis-affected wine was actually made, not by De Bortoli, but by McWilliams. And not from semillon, but from pedro ximines.

Now forty-one years of age, the 1958 McWilliams Private Bin 903 Pedro Sauterne has every right to look a fraction tired. Given that it’s highly unlikely its makers had not the first idea of what they were doing, it’s a remarkable thing that the tiny number of well-cellared bottles remaining of this wine actually drink well at all. It’s a medium burnished amber, with the sorts of complex, dried out honeyed and toasty honeyed bouquet you’d expect of a really old Hungarian Tokaj. It still packs a good length of luscious walnutty fruit, hints of musk, tea leaves and green olives, before drying our beautifully with lingering flavours of dark treacle. Sure, it was slightly madeirised, but so will I be at that age.

So a prelude had indeed been written for the improbable events of 1982. Here Darren de Bortoli takes up the story. ‘Despite the impressions given by some of our marketing people, it wasn’t entirely the accident it was talked up to be. Back in 1981 we noticed some botrytised infection on some pedro ximinez fruit. There had been high humidity and constant light rainfall, and after that a dry period during which the infection dried up. But part of crop remained infected, and that got us interested.

‘So in 1982 we deliberately held out on some pedro and semillon with the intention to leave it out if conditions stayed right. Luckily it turned out to be a great year for botrytis. It was also the year in which San Bernandino encountered some financial difficulties and were unable to take the fruit from several growers with whom they had arrangements. So we were able to take a lot of really good botrytised fruit from our own vineyards and growers, but from several San Bernandino growers as well who we managed to persuade to leave it out in the vineyard. Most of them thought we were completely crazy, paying good money for rotten fruit.’

De Bortoli now jokes that he and his team didn’t have much idea of how to handle the fruit, saying much of what they attempted was just trial and error. He now knows that once you have the right infection and you’re careful about oxidation after fermentation, the major problem with this genre of wine, you’ve basically got a wine that isn’t going to deteriorate quickly. ‘With their high sugar levels and alcohol strengths they’re very stable biological products, although we did have to learn things like their tendency to block up membrane filters.’

Accident or not, a style was born. Which turns the mind again back to Griffith, the improbable source of what is now unquestionably Australia’s finest regional collection of late harvest dessert wines. So for the moment, remove from your mind any thoughts of established European regions which specialise in botrytised wines, such as Sauternes, Tokaj and the Rheingau and consider what a fungus like botrytis needs to thrive on late-harvested fruit.

You need humidity for the fungus to kick-start into life and for its spores to germinate. Too dry a situation and it will never happen, too humid and the favourable noble rot expression of botrytis turns instead to its schizophrenic alter ego of grey mould, the destructive outbreak responsible for the ruination of many a grape grower’s season.

Griffith’s temperature in the critical April to May period averages around 14.3?C, with a near-perfect morning humidity of around 77. The misty, often foggy mornings which are simply tailor-made to encourage noble rot then clear to reasonably warm, sunny days whose heat and lower humidity act as a natural break on the tendency of botrytis to go berserk. In short, in the key months late in the ripening season for dessert wines, Griffith is as close to ideal for botrytis cinerea as a lush, verdant tropical island paradise might be for homo sapiens.


Although there are distinct season-driven variations in the wine now known as De Bortoli Noble One, it’s to their credit that De Bortoli quickly identified, refined and persisted with a distinct house expression of botrytis semillon. Sure there have been some major alterations in winemaking approach which have seen an increased use of oak since the early days and a reduction in the levels of obvious volatile acidity, but Noble One has achieved the level of style recognition only shared by a small number of Australian wines. These might include such wines as Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay, Rosemount Roxburgh Chardonnay, Bass Phillip Pinot Noir and perhaps the most recognisable of them all, Penfolds Grange.

The concentrated citrus marmalade, apricot and pastry flavours and luscious, thick mouthfeel of Noble One have obviously served as a benchmark to other makers of late harvest semillon in Griffith. Given time they develop the toasty, toffee and caramel flavours now seen in the superlative 1987 wine and, as the initial 1982 vintage shows even now as it approaches its dotage, they continue to dry out into more reserved, savoury, nutty wines of great character and complexity. My experience suggests that they enter something of a flat, brassy phase between five and eight years of age so my suggestion is to enjoy them before or after, but not during. The 1992 wine is still looking to forward, varnishy and clumsy, while the 1996 wine, made from a lighter year, brings a more delicate, floral and lemony perspective.

Darren de Bortoli recognises that his is not the only valid expression of regional late harvest semillon but believes, and correctly, I feel, that it would be a major mistake to make any major changes in the present Noble One style. Since 1990 it’s been matured in French oak barriques, although the proportion of new oak has been phased down from its 1990 level of 100 to its present usage of around 60. ‘They’re very resilient wines and they could probably take more wood’, says de Bortoli, ‘but we leave them in for around 12 months.’

The vibrant, attractive Late Semillon in De Bortoli’s Vat series is made into a lighter style, while the company is now directing its marketing focus on the large volumes it can make of genuinely dry noble rot-affected semillons, which Darren de Bortoli says can be viewed as a valid alternative to dry chardonnay when matching wine with food.

After De Bortoli’s initial success with its Semillon Sauterne, other wineries began to make a mark with their own late harvest semillon. In 1987 Miranda made a real show-stopper of a wine which it initially sold as Wyangan Estate Semillon Sauternes. Recently the 3,000-odd 750 ml bottles of this wine which remained in Miranda’s cellars were each uncorked and tasted. The best bottles were put into tank, corrected for acidity, freshened with 8 of Miranda’s 1997 Golden Botrytis and then bottled into halves. The wine now shows very developed brioche and citrus flavours and its palate is beginning to break up, but has become the first in the lineage of Miranda’s very popular Golden Botrytis wines. The next vintage was 1991, and from 1993 the wine has been made every year.

While Miranda’s style is less opulent than De Bortoli’s, it’s clearly taken a style lead from this maker. While it’s quite varnishy, the 1993 wine reveals a marvellous length of delicious savoury and sherry-like development of flavour. From 1996 onwards Miranda’s Golden Botrytis has become very consistent in both style and quality. Less heavily botrytised than the Noble One but generally faster to develop, the Golden Botrytis presents typically marmalade and apricot fruit when young, maturing with caramel and vanilla flavours.

Cranswick Estate was another of the first Griffith wineries to recognise the opportunity presented by De Bortoli’s early success. According to senior winemaker Andrew Schulz, the company was very impressed by the 1991 late harvest semillon made by Wilton Estate, a wine I remember well and fondly, and the first to seriously challenge De Bortoli’s dominance of the national show circuit. Although it started making botrytised semillons for other companies in the late 1980s, this wine was the model chosen by Cranswick on which to model its Autumn Gold, first made in 1993 and my pick at the present time as the second most important of Griffith’s late harvest semillons.

Although they’re harvested at a similar time and indeed from several of the same vineyards and are both made into substantially oaked expressions of the style, there are substantial differences between the Autumn Gold and Noble One. With 12-14 months inside small French oak, of which 80 is new, the Autumn Gold receives marginally greater oak influence than Noble One. While young it is also livelier and more vibrant, due in part to a gentler pressing, more vigorous filtration and centrifuging, and a greater emphasis on fining away any phenolic or bitter edges. Schulz confesses his team ‘interferes’ a lot with the wine, but I’m utterly convinced the results speak for themselves. The Autumn Gold matures slowly and gracefully and attained at least a temporary zenith in quality with the long, elegant and sherbet-like 1996 wine.

While it no longer seems to collect the awards in wine shows that it used to do, Cranswick hasn’t altered its style. ‘We haven’t changed; the judges have’, says Schulz. ‘It’s like they’re expecting auslese riesling styles in semillon classes.’ Personally, I don’t think the show judges of sweet wine classes in most shows really know what they’re doing these days, since far too many show winners resemble travesties of the late-harvest style, whose exaggerated in-your-face botrytis usually makes them lose fruit and develop far more quickly than they should do.

Jim Brayne is McWilliams’ head winemaker and a very well credentialled wine show judge. He’s also worried about the excessive sweetness of Australian late-harvest semillon and also questions whether or not the show system is itself promoting a parody of the style while the better European wines are more savoury and better balanced. ‘A lot of awards seem to be given on the basis that twice as much equals twice as good’, he argues. ‘We should try to achieve a wine you can enjoy a couple of glasses of with over dessert, not a liqueur. But it is a fine line. Some judges need to evolve into the next level of understanding what it’s all about.’

What makes Brayne so keen to get it right is that he believes that there’s a large amount of fairly ordinary botrytised wine sold overseas and that only moderately good brands of Sauternes and Barsac fetch huge dollars. ‘So these wines are one thing that Griffith could really hang its hat on’, he says.

‘I like to see both elegance and generosity of flavour, together with a capacity to age and develop lovely apricot characters between 8-15 years of age and not 1-2 years of age. Some of the older styles which begin by lacking fruit depth tend to develop excessively towards caramel and toffee.’

Brayne is also concerned to achieve a ‘clean, lifted botrytis lift’ on the nose of his wine without raisined or ‘concentrated’ fruit aromas. Like many other makers in the area, he’s also concerned that levels of volatile acidity are kept well below the level at which they intrude into the wine’s aroma. ‘I think it’s a bit of a red herring and an excuse that they need to be around 1.5 grams per litre to be great wines.’

McWilliams is shortly to change again the packaging and branding of its late-harvest dessert wines. Currently sold within the JJ McWilliam range, which provides rather unflattering company for the excellent 1996 Botrytis Semillon, future releases will be packaged as Limited Release Botrytis Semillon. While the 1996 wine presents a long, luscious mouthfeel of bright citrusy fruit, the 1997 release marks McWilliams’ first step into truly international standard dessert wine. A wine which basically entirely meets its maker’s brief, it’s smart, balanced and refined, with a wonderful fragrance of tangy sherbet, pear and peach fruit and pure, almost tropical palate which finishes long and fresh without ever coming close to cloying. It’s seen a lot of new French oak, but you’d never guess it. So Brayne has increased the dose with the 1998 wine which, just a day after bottling, looked rather enticing.

Like several of the region’s other leading winemakers, John Casella is paying more attention to the vineyard than ever before. He’s moving away from vineyards which are ‘too well looked after’, since he finds they tend to develop ‘overly bloated’ characters in wine. ‘I prefer vineyards with smaller berries which are harder to infect, but make the best botrytis styles’, he says. ‘Quality berries are small and much of their flavour is locked up in the skins, making more intense wines. Some vineyards in excellent health become infected very easily, but that alone doesn’t mean they will make outstanding wines.’

Casella’s best wine is his brand-new 1999 Carramar Botrytis Semillon, stylistically poles apart from the richer, more raisined wines of other makers. ‘It’s a finer, less sweet but more authentically fruity botrytised wine. I think it’s the style seen the world over more than the raisined type of wines we have seen in drier years’, he explains. ‘Raisined fruit actually loses fruit as it raisins, so in a wine you get raisin and botrytis, but you lose the fresh fruit elements.’

Whether you prefer the lighter, fresher, less ripe and concentrated style favoured by Casella, the oakier, richer and more luscious wines of De Bortoli, Cranswick Estate et al, or the emerging middle ground which McWilliams appear to be claiming with its recent wines, there’s little doubt that the winemakers of Griffith have a unique opportunity to create a world wine.

And, as Jim Brayne points out, if you take into account that most of the winemakers in the region would only have made three or less vintages of late-harvest semillon to this time, the refinement of the various styles is really something of a formality. ‘We’re only just starting to get a handle on where we’re going. We’ve yet to start talking about making wine together, making wines in the pub and that sort of thing.’
When that happens, and as I remember Darren de Bortoli beaming back in 1985, Sauternes had better look out! Please login to post comment