NO MATTER what field you’re in, the evaluation of results or key performance indicators will aid your relevance to the field.
This is definitely so with wine ratings.
About 20 years ago, Robin Bradley’s Little Gold Book, Australia’s original annual and ongoing wine ratings effort, listed about 30 per cent of Australia’s greatest wines as being pinot noir and just over 50 per cent of Australia’s greatest wines as being from Victoria.
Despite the best of intentions for that era, each of these figures were highly improbable.
When Jeremy Oliver’s Australian Wine Annual was evaluated some 10 years later, he placed about three per cent of Australia’s finest wines as being from pinot noir and his state and varietal breakdown was also far closer to what you’d expect it to be.
With the release on November 8 of Australia’s most influential individual annual wine column, James Halliday’s Top 100 colour liftout in The Australian’s Weekend magazine, it is interesting to reflect on James’s website’s (equal) 75 highest pointed Australian table wines of all time.
Fifteen of the 75 are pinot noirs, reflecting his proud and parochial love of the variety, 22 are shiraz, 13 are cabernet sauvignon, 13 are chardonnay, seven are riesling and NSW’s Hunter Valley chips in with all five of the semillons.
The shiraz is correctly weighted with 15 in SA and five in Victoria and a couple in Canberra and NSW.
The chardonnays, as you’d expect, have seven of the 13 from Margaret River, four from SA and two from Victoria.
The cabernets too are what you’d expect, with one from Victoria, seven from SA and five from WA – of which four are from Margaret River.
The seven rieslings selected may be a surprise with Tasmania receiving one, SA’s Clare Valley gaining two (although only one from the master Jeffrey Grosset), while Victoria’s south-western districts have gained three of the equal highest rankings.
Thirteen of James Halliday’s all-time highest pointed Australian table wines are from here in the west and while two of those – the absolutely outstanding 1997 Howard Park riesling (which the Western Suburbs Weekly reviewed as their greatest riesling ever in last week’s column, 18.7 points) and the Houghton 1999 Jack Mann cabernet blend (18.5 points) – are from the Great Southern, the remaining 11 are from Margaret River.
The Cullen cabernet merlots from 1992, 1995 and 1998 and the Houghton grown and produced Thomas Hardy cabernet sauvignon 2004 are the four Margaret River cabernets.
The Cullen cabernet success will meet with general approval though most consumers have not realised how marvellous the Houghton cabernet releases have become since the late 1990s.
James has placed the 2002 Ashbrook Estate amongst Australia’s greatest 13 chardonnays ever, which may raise a few eyebrows, but his remaining six, all from Leeuwin Estate, and from the classical vintages – 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2005 – is exactly as we have called it for the past 20 years.
If there are any queries in a subject necessarily full of personal preferences, it may be the number of 15 pinots being amongst James’s top wines, with 10 of them being from Victoria.
These results are on the money. This guy is good.
There is another relevant issue here. The two labels that gained the highest number of equal highest ratings were Penfolds Grange Hermitage vintage and the Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay.
Two weeks ago, we hosted two Leeuwin Art Series Chardonnay tastings and the quality of the 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2005 vintages was such that no other variety (i.e. cabernet or shiraz) could combine its greatest releases and come up with such a highly rated range on an international scale.
These four vintages gain higher points on a consistent basis on my tasting sheets than any rieslings, semillons, sauvignon blancs, pinot noirs, cabernet sauvignons (or blends) and any shiraz other than the Clarendon Hills Astralis 2006, in the past 10 years.