The Proudest Fightback of All

Who would have guessed that Australia’s best-known wine region would have to rediscover its own worth? The self-confident region which looks so proud and prosperous today is barely recognisable from the Barossa of the mid 1980s. For just over a decade ago the Barossa’s most sought-after wine, shiraz, was ripped out like a weed as prices tumbled so far it wasn’t worth harvesting. What happened to bring the Barossa to its knees? How has it fought back? And might the same thing ever happen again?

The Bad Old Days

There’s a whole generation of wine drinkers who are only now beginning to appreciate the Barossa for the first time. How do I know that? Because I’m one of them, that’s why.

Like me, this generation began to get interested in wine around the late 1970s and 1980s, just as the Barossa’s future was put to siege by two quite separate trends. Firstly, Australians suddenly ditched red wine for white. Secondly, if a wine was not obviously from a cool climate, its cork was hardly considered to be worth removing. Things went so bad for the Barossa that by 1983 one of Australia’s most influential viticulturists, Richard Smart, was predicting the area’s demise as a significant wine region by 2001.

Back in 1977 the Barossa copped its first major fruit surplus. Prices began their swallow dive as it became a serious glut the following year, when the region entered its most trying period of recent history. You could hardly give Barossa wine away. Unable to offload their product, major wine companies began to turn their backs on local growers. In 1980 Barossa cabernet fetched just $280 per tonne, shiraz a mere $200. Chardonnay, yet to hit its straps, sold for a paltry $140. But as the white wine boom gathered momentum, initially driven by riesling and later by chardonnay, Barossa growers began to graft over their old grenache and mataro now reborn as ‘mourvedre’ to white varieties, of which chardonnay was paramount.

This was the sorry, apologetic Barossa I first came to know in 1984 as a winemaking student at Roseworthy College. I remember staring at neglected vineyards and wondering at their future. Even at the wineries, including Penfolds, Seppelt, Orlando and Saltram, it was near impossible to taste a 100 Barossa wine. Since few drinkers wanted to experience its undiluted form, grapes were imported from cooler regions to blend away the Barossa’s unfashionable but uncompromising warm-climate richness and character.
Instead of the dense, concentrated Barossa reds that my lecturers would romance, most were simple, fruity and lacking in strength. Oak influence was virtually an unexpected bonus. And if you wanted a Barossa white, you just had to get ready for mouthfuls of splintery oak and enough fatness and flesh to keep Jenny Craig in business for decades.

Although by 1985 cabernet sauvignon’s price had risen to $460, shiraz to $275 and chardonnay to $420, supply still far outweighed demand. Worse was to come the following year, when a base price was set across all varieties of just $190 per tonne of dryland fruit in South Australia. By 1986 Barossa cabernet sauvignon was actually turned into sweet sherry! At Leo Buring, whose crush had declined from 9,000 tonnes in 1983 to 2,500 in 1985, no grapes were crushed at all. Around this time you could even buy shiraz in muffins!

In The Australian Wine Compendium, which James Halliday published in 1985 he wrote: ‘The Valley floor is indeed ideally suited to the production of fortified wine with very real possibilities for the as yet sparingly propagated Portuguese port varieties, while the East Barossa ranges have left no-one in doubt that they can produce a range of high-quality white and red tables wines’. Halliday was clearly just trying to put some positive spin on the fate awaiting the Barossa floor, for absolutely nobody outside the region was predicting its rebirth as a significant player in quality table wine.

When in 1986 the SA Government began its Vine Pull Scheme the pall of embarrassment which hung over the valley became a dark cloud of gloom. Many of the most valuable old vine resources were uprooted once and for all as the Barossa was reduced from 650 to just 500 growers. Nine percent of its vineyard was destroyed, including much of its oldest shiraz and grenache.
There was also widespread confusion as to where the Barossa Valley actually began and ended. At various times representatives of the Barossa wine industry appeared to claim the Eden Valley as part of the Barossa Valley’s birthright and wines were often confusingly labelled as a result. It became more complicated still since nobody could say with certainty where the Eden Valley ended and the Adelaide Hills began. So in just over a decade some individual vineyards have been ‘classified’ as Adelaide Hills, Eden Valley and finally, Barossa! Commonsense eventually prevailed and today the Barossa Valley and Eden Valley are both considered as part of the overall ‘Barossa’ region.

Little wonder it was hard to figure what the Barossa was really about. It wasn’t so much an identity crisis as a matter of having a once-established identity that nobody seemed to care for anymore. The Barossa was on its knees and the executioner’s blade was falling fast.

The Barossa’s Rebirth

The Barossa needed somebody to save it and the person who answered the call was Peter Lehmann. Lehmann first made a name for himself during his thirteen years at Yalumba before in 1959 moving around the corner to Saltram, taking over from the popular Bryan Dolan, who had himself moved to Stonyfell. It caused a major local headline since you simply didn’t do that sort of thing in the Barossa, especially to the Hill-Smiths. Lehmann says he learned about red wine making at Saltram as he and the cellar hands taught each other. The legacy of great red wine he eventually left behind suggests he wasn’t long in catching on.

Dalgety had no idea what it was getting into when it purchased Saltram in 1972. By 1977 the winery was in deep water, not buying any grapes from its growers in the Barossa. The following year Lehmann felt so strongly committed towards the growers’ plight that he took their fruit and made wine from it for his own, as yet un-named label. Next year he repeated his now-famous commitment, while a pool of local fortified makers took in 1200 tonnes of shiraz and grenache to provide some income to 120 growers.
After the 1979 vintage, Lehmann parted company with Saltram to establish Masterson Wines, the company which has since evolved into Peter Lehmann Wines Ltd. And, it’s pleasing to add, now with considerable success. Later in 1979 Dalgety sold Saltram to Seagram, the multi-national beverage giant. The year before it had also sold an under-performing Krondorf to a couple of energetic young winemakers in Grant Burge and Ian Wilson.

Lehmann’s integrity in his willingness to support Barossa growers and the immense financial risks he undertook in doing so helped galvanised the spirit of an emergent younger generation of Barossa winemakers. The decade of the 1980s saw the opening of twelve new Barossa wineries, including Bethany, Elderton, Irvine Wines, Rockford, Charles Melton Wines, Heritage Wines, Chateau Dorrien and Tarchalice. In 1985 the Valley Growers Cooperative launched Barossa Valley Estates, based at the old Lauriston winery at Angle Vale. The Barossa’s recovery was gathering momentum, but not quickly enough to prevent the Vine Pull Scheme from starting the following year.

A Reputation Restored

While its winemakers did not reduce their reds to the weediness and jamminess of so many from regions like Coonawarra and several in Victoria through what ultimately became a largely wasted decade of great vintages, the Barossa didn’t perform at its best until the later 1980s. The long, cloudless summer of 1990 could hardly have come at a better time. The first genuinely hot vintage since most Australian winemakers restored some sensibility into their red winemaking techniques, it gave this country its best chance yet at showing its emergent international wine drinkers how good Australian wine could be if made from truly ripe fruit.

This time the Barossa was in the van. Not only did Australian wine drinkers latch onto the Rhone varietal bandwagon that had started rolling in the UK and the US, but the Barossa’s traditional reds, especially shiraz, precisely matched the demands of new-found export markets.

Price is no longer a major issue, here or overseas. Although most were launched in the 1980s, wines like Henschke’s Hill of Grace and Mount Edelstone, Charles Melton Nine Popes, E & E Black Pepper Shiraz, Grant Burge Meshach, Rockford Basket Press and St Hallet Old Block virtually became wine currency in the 1990s.

Barossa winemakers now have an incentive to crop lower, to keep special parcels separate, to use better and more expensive oak, and to use to for longer. Give them their due, for they’ve responded in kind. You could put a case that they are now delivering the best wines they have ever made, although I’m not to be counted amongst the admirers of the alcoholic and expensive new-wave reds bordering on dry vintage ports which the USA’s Fourth Estate now appear to be enjoying so much.

And Once the Wagon Starts Rolling…

The big companies step on board. While it’s quite appropriate for BRL Hardy to align itself more closely with its historic base in McLaren Vale and to a lesser extent with Padthaway, each of Mildara Blass, Orlando and Southcorp have shown a renewed willingness to develop new premium Barossa brands.

Saltram has become an important ace in Mildara Blass’ hand and even though its days as a functional winery are numbered, one hopes that the excellent Saltram No. 1 and Mamre Brook reds made by Nigel Dolan are guaranteed a long and deserving future. The new 1996 reds from Blass, which include a Barossa Cabernet Sauvignon and a Barossa Shiraz, represent an important break from the multi-regional traditions of this successful label.

Although stablemate Seppelt made consistently excellent cabernet sauvignon from the Dorrien vineyard, it was not until its 1993 Old Vine blend of shiraz, grenache and mourvedre that Penfolds released a genuinely regional Barossa wine, despite the high proportion of Barossa fruit in Grange. Later this year Penfolds will release its first red wine in decades from 100 Barossa cabernet, a Special Bin edition called 1996 Block 42 Kalimna Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s an enormous, but beautifully balanced wine for which John Duval’s bubbling enthusiasm is entirely justified.

Block 42 is from the same single Kalimna vineyard responsible for the 1953 experimental Grange Cabernet Sauvignon and the first vintage of Bin 707 and Duval believes its century-plus vines represent Australia’s oldest viable plantings of cabernet sauvignon. It’s to be released as a pair with the wine that almost became the first Yattarna, Penfolds Bin 95A Chardonnay. Penfolds will also launch a new regular label from mature Barossa shiraz vineyards around March-April in the year 2000. Still known only by the initials RWT, the new wine is not intended to be a second label to Grange, but is a constrasting and finer style matured in French oak. Expect to pay Bin 707-like dollars per bottle.

In recent years Southcorp has supported some of the region’s better growers in a different and less publicised way, presenting realistic financial incentives for them to crop lower but better, by offering prices based on a per acre basis, rather than tonnage. Reports indicate it paid more than $3000 per tonne for premium Barossa shiraz in 1997/98.

Orlando was next in line, with its smartly produced, fine-grained and silky Centenary Hill Shiraz 1994, which was sourced from a single mature Barossa vineyard. Rightly so, it has been positioned with the Lawson’s Shiraz and Jacaranda Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon at the top of the company’s pricing scale.

A Shiraz Led Recovery?

Although grenache and mourvedre are unlikely to challenge the impact and image of its shiraz, the Barossa should certainly support a growing international niche market for these varieties. The ripeness and richness of its cabernet sauvignon will always command attention. The region’s next challenge has to do with dry white wine and it will be fascinating to watch whether or not the region can perform a similar fix on its ‘indigenous’ white variety, semillon.

Outside Sydney, semillon is hardly a fashionable wine. Better examples from the Hunter are sought after for their youthful zest, but more for their great longevity and the complexity they can acquire. Margaret River semillons produce a grassiness, fleshiness and tangy acidity which sets them apart from the mainstream, while Barossa semillons have historically been over-oaked and have tended to age very quickly towards excessive fatness and flabbiness.

It’s a fine line to grow semillon in as warm an area as the Barossa. Let the grapes get too ripe and you end up with the broad, confection-like wines we are too used to seeing, but pick them too early and you end up with grassy, weedy fruit lacking sufficient roundness to counter tart acids. Peter Lehmann’s Andrew Wigan is meeting with some success in attempting to fine-tune a middle course whose bright, lightly herbal fruit can deftly be married to a lighter oak treatment than typically associated with Barossa semillon. A number of other Barossa makers are working on a similar front, but I can’t help but wonder if their expectations might be set too high.
I don’t see much value in growing chardonnay and riesling on the valley floor. Chardonnay is everywhere and too many other regions do it better. And since the Eden Valley is nearby, riesling should hardly take up good red wine space in the Barossa Valley.

The Barossa Vintage Classification

It’s not every day a group of winemakers publish something like the Barossa Vintage Classification. In fact, I can’t recall anything quite like it. The makers themselves have outlined a year-by-year account of the region’s wine history from 1947 to 1998, with particular emphasis on climatic conditions, yields and grape prices. Vintages are linked chronologically with the introduction of new vineyards, wineries, viticultural and winemaking techniques, plus political and economic influences on the Valley. The region’s early history is presented from a local perspective and if there’s an inevitable measure of local aggrandisement, that’s a small price to pay for the book’s disarming honesty and authenticity.

To order your copy of this attractively presented A4-size book, contact one of the Barossa wineries or the Barossa Wine & Tourism Association on 08 8563 0600. Cost is $19.95 plus postage and handling. Please login to post comment