Riesling State of excitement
No matter which way you look at it, everything about Penfolds Wines is big. In fact, huge would be a better descriptor for the company. It's been on top of the Australian wine game for more than 60 years. Home is a 25 million-litre production facility at Nuriootpa in the Barossa Valley.
Iconic labels like Penfolds Grange, Yattarna Chardonnay and Leo Buring Riesling are celebrated world-wide.
It's hardly a company where you'd expect to find a winemaker like Glenn James being excited about a paltry 2000 litres of Riesling juice that's just about to finish fermentation. But this is no ordinary batch of wine he's keeping a watchful eye on, says the Penfolds senior winemaker. It's intended to become the first release of Tasmanian wine under the prestigious Leo Buring Riesling label.
That will be a significant milestone for the State's handful of Riesling growers. If ever there's a name that's become synonymous with top flight Rieslings in this country it's Buring. Indeed, wine judge and critic James Halliday refers to the company as "Australia's foremost producer of Rieslings."
Ask anyone who's ever tasted its distinctive white-labelled wines from the 1950s through to the present day and they'll invariably recall fond memories of the genius displayed by legendary winemakers like John Vickery, and the dazzling brilliance of the varietal characteristics that appeared in his wines from the Barossa, Eden and Clare Valleys.
Glenn James is hoping that the small release of Tasmanian wine that is scheduled to appear in November will be the start of something big for lovers of this great white grape.
"We're aiming to make a higher grade of Leo Buring wine from this vintage and we've really been trying to push the boundaries in terms of our fruit sourcing," he says.
"And as Leo Buring nowadays is a 100 percent Riesling brand, we're determined to take advantage of that and create some of Australia's best Rieslings from each of the variety's main regions."
This past vintage, the company cast its Riesling net into the Great Southern region of Western Australia as well as the Tamar Valley. The wine potential for each batch already looks very exciting. A small component of juice from southern Tasmania was also intended to make its way to the Barossa, but for the time being at least that remains in the vineyard.
Vintage shortfalls are no surprise to the bloke who was instrumental in gaining reliable Tasmanian fruit sources for Bay of Fires and Eileen Hardy table wines when he worked for Hardys between 1997 and 2002. He remembers he began the latter vintage with 20 tonnes of Riesling on the books. He finished with just 400 litres of wine, thanks to the vagaries of the season.
"Sure there were times when we'd put in a lot of effort just to pick up a few tonnes of fruit, and you'd begin to think it was questionable in an economic sense, but it's what you've got to do if you want to get a good picture of new sites at the edge of the viticultural boundaries," he explains.
Don't expect the excitement to stop at Riesling. This year's Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay will receive a valuable contribution from Tolpuddle Vineyard in the Coal River Valley, and that may be just the beginning of bigger things to come.
"After all, the best Tasmanian vineyards haven't even been planted yet," James adds.
First published 12 May 2005: The Examiner