West Australian 2006 Tour Diary Summary

With past Tour Diaries, a week before publication of the first chapter, I have set the scene with a vintage report which covers the past five years or so.  With this Tour Diary I am going to break tradition; as well as providing a minimalist vintage summary, I am going to delve a lot deeper.

Ask most Australians or those who know a lot about Australian wine, and most of them will extol the virtues of West Australian wine. In the past, most wine drinkers believed if you bought a bottle of red wine that had been produced in Western Australia, and specifically in Margaret River, there was an excellent chance the wine would be high quality.

Indeed, the state, and Margaret River in particular has an awesome reputation and one that the local industry goes to a great deal of trouble to protect.

According to Tourism WA in regard to Margaret River it states, "(Margaret River is) Responsible for producing less than one percent of Australia's wine but over 15 percent of Australia's premium wine, the 60 or so wineries in the region open for cellar door sales and tastings offer the visitor an impressive selection.”

If you listen to the people involved in the local industry, they will tell you that one of the major reasons for the good quality wine is the fantastic weather and very consistent vintage conditions which results in little vintage variation.

Enter the Bigot Brothers Myth Busting Team

Brian and I have just spent over a week in WA, the majority of which was spent in the Margaret River region. When we embarked on this trip, our objective was to try as many good red wines as possible. With this in mind we selected the wineries to visit very carefully, based on both feedback and their reputations. In addition, as I have done on all previous trips, a few “pot luck” cellar door visits were made to see if any hidden gems could be uncovered. Unfortunately much of this particular endeavour uncovered a pile of manure and not one gem.

During this trip to Margaret River we visited over forty wineries, and I wrote tasting notes or vibes on close to two hundred wines; so I now have a fairly good idea of what the region has to offer. Whilst we did find some excellent wines and quite a few that represented real value, overall the trip was a little disappointing. On every wine trip I have ever undertaken, there is always a mix of good wine and not so good wine; great value wines and overpriced wines: on this trip, even though the majority of the wineries visited were carefully selected, the percentage of “vin ordinaire” was far higher than expected and the percentage of wines that represented poor value was ridiculous.

So let's bust a few myths around WA wines in general and Margaret River in particular.

Myth One - Margaret River does not suffer from much vintage variation

If you believe this one, I have some bottles of Penfolds 1901 Grange going cheaply than I would like to sell you.

Let's go back and look at the last 10 vintages to bust this myth. 1997 was a very good vintage for red wine in Margaret River. 1998 defied the conditions and the rest of the country and turned out some ordinary red wine in this area. 1999 was a welcome return to form and above average. 2000, to a certain extent, was tarred with the same brush that wrote off most of South East Australia, but the reality was that the local vintage conditions were better than in SA, and they turned out some pretty good wine.

2001 was an exceptionally good vintage, possibly the best for quite some time. 2002 experienced a very long cool summer which resulted in difficulty getting the grapes ripe; as a result the vintage was not particularly good with many of the reds showing searing acidity and loads of green characters. In some ways 2003 was even more difficult and many of the wines we tasted should be avoided. From what we tasted many of the wines from 2004 are far better than those from 2003, so this vintage looks like being a good one.

In 2005, there was a massive dump of rain right towards the end of vintage. Those that got their grapes off prior to the deluge will probably make some pretty good wine; but those who didn't get their grapes off in time, and from what I hear there were quite a few of these, will be producing a very ordinary product.

As far as 2006 is concerned, whilst the grapes haven't been harvested yet, it has been an incredibly difficult vintage. When we were there most wineries were three to four weeks behind (normal vintage schedule), most of the grapes were still green and had not been through veraison yet. A number of the wineries we visited were already stating that it is unlikely that that will make either their top end wines, or in some cases they may not even bother to harvest some varieties of grapes. Anyone who has shares in the company that makes or sells sulphur sprays will be happy as the area has used record amounts of spray.

So in the last ten vintages, there has been one terrific vintage, four good to very good vintages, one very patchy vintage, and three that were ranging from very difficult to shocking. So much for not having vintage variation; myth busted!

Myth Two –Buy a bottle of red wine from Margaret River and the chances are it will be pretty good.

If you believe this one, I have some shares in a company called Enron that are bound to make you a fortune that are going for the fantastically low price of only $100 a share.

If you listen to many of the people in the wineries, everything is rosy on the red front and they all are selling out of everything in a reasonable timeframe. Whilst this may be true for some wineries, frankly it's not true for all of them now; and over the next few years the ability for Margaret River to dispose of its red wine will become increasingly more difficult.

If you examine the following chart, on the plus side you will see 37.2% of the wines tasted were rated as either Excellent or Highly Recommended which looks like a good result; however approximately one third of those were rated as either * or ** stars for value.

 

Rating	4 or 5 Stars for Vale %	3 Stars for Value %	1 or 2 Stars for Value %	Total
Excellent	0.7	4.6	2.6	7.8
Highly Recommended	6.5	13.7	9.1	29.4
Recommended	6.6	18.3	10.4	35.3
Agreeable	2.6	7.8	7.8	18.3
Acceptable		2.0	5.2	7.2
BD and Cats Pee			2.0	2.0
Total	16.4	46.4	37.2	100

Whilst on the subject of value, over 37% of all wines tasted were either rated as * or ** for value; not a good result and shows that on average, there is far better value to be found in Victoria or South Australia, especially for 2002/2003 reds.

A shocking 27.5% of the wine tasted was rated as Agreeable or lower. This percentage of ordinary to poor quality wine is far higher than any other major trip I have undertaken; so myth busted! And if you take into account the value aspect, with so many wines representing poor value, it's more like myth nuked.

The reality is that as we drove around WA we kept on seeing big signs that said “Industrial Area” – we wondered if that is where they made much of the industrial swill we waded through!

Reasons

There are a number of reasons for this poor showing.

1. First and foremost, many of the wines we tasted were from the 2002 and 2003 vintages. As already stated, these were both difficult vintages yet some wineries managed to produce some very good wines that were clearly worth buying, so how did they do it? Basically the secret can be summed up in one word: “viticulture.”  Those with good viticultural practices managed to produce some excellent wines, those with ordinary to poor viticultural practices produced ordinary to poor wine; it's that simple.

2. There are a number of new or wineries, and indeed some older well-established wineries that are either making wines “by the numbers,” stretching the quality of the wine to reach production targets set by bean counters, or have taken their eye off the winemaking ball.

3. There are a lot of immature vines in the area that are not producing high-quality fruit yet.

Implications

Brand “Margaret River” (for reds) will soon be in trouble. It's not going to take drinkers long to work out that some of their $80 Margaret River Cabernets are no better than some of the wines from this region that are half the price; and that many of the wines that cost $40 from this region, can be replaced with better $30 wines from Coonawarra or other areas.

There is a red wine grape glut out there and whilst Margaret River may not have been greatly impacted by it yet, “the train is a coming” whether producers like it or not, and the glut will catch up with the majority of producers very soon.

Some wineries have delusions about the value of their product and whilst they may have been able to dispose of them in great years like 2001, you can't sell ordinary wine at inflated prices for long and get away with it; it will eventually catch up to you and destroy your reputation.

Scratching Head

Whilst we were travelling through WA both Brian and I kept on scratching our heads wondering how Margaret River was managing to get away with so much ordinary wine, and so much of it at inflated prices. What was even more puzzling was the amount of the new plantings that we saw, and we wondered how the heck they were going to sell these grapes.

As WA is also well-known for its “Classic Dry Whites” (mostly Semillon/Sauvignon blanc blends) and Chardonnay, we thought that many of these plantings, and much of the harvest in general may have been white wine varieties, so as soon as I got home I did some research. The following chart, to some extent contradicts our thoughts.

 

Western Aust	Bearing Grapes Hectares	Total Grapes Hectares	Increase	Yield t/ha	National Average
Red Grapes	6,909	7,244	4.8%	6.5	11.3
White Grapes	4,839	5,727	18.3%	8.3	16.2
Total	11,748	12,971
		= 7.7% of national total			= 4.8% of national yield

Currently almost 59% of the states wine production is red wine. However as the chart shows, the majority of those new plantings are in fact white wine grapes. So how is it that WA does not have a grape glut excess like the other states? For a start, they produce less than 5% of the country's output of wine, so overall volumes are small but those numbers do not tell the whole story.

In 1996 there were thirty-four wineries in Margaret River; ten years later there are more than a hundred and ten of them. This will give you some idea of the growth in this region. Most of those wineries are utilising vines that are relatively young; (in comparison to South Australia and Victoria,) and as a result, there is very little old vine material available. The reality is a large percentage of the region is utilising fruit from immature vines.

Whilst many wineries will tell you there is no excess, a number of established players, some with excellent reputations admitted that selling wine in the current environment was extremely difficult and that the reality of the situation was that it was very tough out there and things were expected to get worse before they would get better. My bet is that many of the small wineries that have opened up recently won't to be around in five years time.

That's the bad news; the good news is that we still managed to find high-quality wines, some wines that represent excellent value; we consumed far too much good (and some ordinary) food, travelled vast distances, and had loads of laughs. As well as the antics of my good mate, Red Bigot (Brian;) on part of the trip I had to endure the presence and not so subtle humour of a local GP known as “Davo” (David Pearson) and let me tell you, his humour is more acidic than some of the wines we tried. All will be revealed next week in Chapter One of the WA 2006 Tour Diary, so look out for it.