Yattarna – White Grange or Not?

It would hardly be possible to ignore the release of the Yattarna chardonnay in this Southcorp update. After all, it’s been stage-managed like no other wine in my experience, from its making all the way through to the publicity it has generated. And it’s not every day that a company such as Southcorp so publicly releases a wine to accompany a global icon such as Grange.

I happily acknowledge my role in publicising this wine, for a story I wrote for Flight Deck magazine the then Qantas inflight mag several years ago was, I believe, the first time the concept had appeared in print. Over the years I, like other journalists, have had plenty of opportunity to witness Penfolds’ progress through the various ‘special’ and ‘Trial’ Bin wines it has made as part of the development process for Yattarna. Most of these wines were not released but some, like the 94A Chardonnay, which was very nearly released as the first Yattarna, have been made available to the public.

Between 20 and 30 trial batches each year were made by a winemaking team supervised by John Duval and led by Senior White Winemaker Neville Falkenberg, working with grapes from a range of cool climate areas in NSW and Victoria as well as South Australia, largely from Partalunga in the north to Kuitpo in the south of the Adelaide Hills. Around 10 of McLaren Vale chardonnay found its way into the final blend.

Eight finished wines have been bottled as a result of this programme, which is having some thing of a ‘trickle-down’ effect on the quality and style of Penfolds’ entire white wine portfolio.

Recently I was given the opportunity to revisit some of these wines at a pre-release tasting in Adelaide at which strong, but not conclusive, suggestions were made as to which would wear the new badge of honour, the name of Yattarna at that stage not having been formally decided upon, or so we were told.

Until the Yattarna project, Penfolds’ wood-matured whites had history of developing quickly into the bottle into brassy, splintery wines which would tend to fatten out too quickly. There has certainly been a significant degree of refinement, as the winemakers have learned to better balance such elements as fruit intensity and length, wood treatment, malo-lactic fermentation and acidity. The company’s whites are better than ever before, but so is Australia’s soccer team.

Released at $75 per bottle, Yattarna has already made $180 at auction. This price simply reflects the ignorance of certain elements of the wine investor market. Unless the wine reveals some unexpected quality of longevity which has hitherto escaped the attentions of independent critics like me, those with Yattarna still in their cellars in six or seven years time might just be holding onto an expensive curio. Unlike Grange, this particular wine does not have particularly long legs. I firmly believe that by 2003 it will have begun to look tired.

Penfolds has used the Australian wine show system as a filter for the Yattarna concept. Many of the wines in the project have performed especially well. Yattarna itself swept the trophy pool at last year’s Sydney Wine Show, collecting trophies for best wine, best white wine and best white wine in premium classes. It also collected that most esoteric trophy of all – the Tucker-Seabrook Trophy for the best wine exhibited at capital city shows over the previous year.

As any examination of the sorts of chardonnay which succeeds in the show system will reveal, a strong show record provides little or no guarantee of longevity in chardonnay. One just has to think of the number of important trophies presented to wines like the quaffable Yarra Ridge Chardonnay to treat this aspect of a show pedigree with some scepticism.

‘Yattarna needs to show restraint as a young wine and fill out and gain complexity as it ages’, says John Duval. ‘This inaugural 1995 vintage is a chardonnay of exceptional quality, a very fine wine that will improve over at least the next five years and establish a line that I’m confident will have what it takes to earn a place alongside Grange.’ Please login to post comment