Monthly Report - July 2014

Monument of African Renaissance - Dakar

It is simply bizarre and it shows no matter how old you get you can always be surprised, with this monument perhaps being the most glorious waste of money I may ever see.  I asked a cleaner in my shocking French on what she thought of it, and the word “merde” was perhaps the most printable comment of many she gave.  I was also very lucky to get out of West Africa as the Ebola Virus is now becoming a pandemic and this is terrible news for these poor and under resourced countries.

Enough of me and my greying hair, back to the important stuff, which is what is happening in the vineyard.  Well it is pruning, pruning, pruning with the kick off really being this month and we are slowly getting through it.  I will have a team come through in August to complete the spur pruning, but the cane pruning is always a labor of quiet contemplation and it is a personal thing so I do that myself.  Already thoughts are in front of me in regards to barrels and spraying regimes, and they tend to be evening jobs with me and my notebook.

And the winner is…

How do we go about picking winners?  In most cases it is a simple physical check of who finished first, that makes it easy and from Usain Bolt to Vincenzo Nibali, a photograph and a stop watch gives you the answer unequivocally.  In games such as most organized sports there is a scoring system and rules, and we all know who the winner is once the time expires or the winning point is struck.  But we do have those grey areas where to be honest, it is just perception and experience that can score a contest and announce a winner.

I went down to the Margaret River Pro surfing championship earlier on in the year and sat on the hill looking at the surf break and two tiny dots surfing the final.  To be completely honest, I had no idea who had won and at the end of it all I only found out because the guy next to me told me.  But, according to this bloke, the winner had scored really well in two rides and that was enough for him to claim the victory – I am sure the judges were surfing experts and the winner was easily determined and no-one felt aggrieved.  The fact I know beggar all about surfing does not diminish the result – and as all of us know, during an Olympics we can get pretty good at guessing a result for gymnastics and equestrian dressage yet have no idea on what we are actually scoring.

Which brings us to the topic of scoring wines; a wonderful world of mystery and miracle.

Unlike organized sports, or events with rules and regulations through the ages the evolution of scoring wines has been haphazard to say the least.  Wine has the habit of demanding to be ranked, as the makers of the said wines can charge more against an agreed public ranking.  The two most famous examples of this is the 1855 Classification of Bordeaux wines (Medoc wines mainly), and the grading of vineyard sites throughout Burgundy.  These two systems appear to have passed the test of time with only minor alterations, and pricing can be directly linked to their position, with only a few wines being able to break the bonds through continual excellence ahead of their “ranking”.

As a winery, scores actually play quite a big role in how we are perceived by the general public.  We wish that this was not the case, but the simple fact of life is that busy people really do not want to wade through long descriptive phrases, attend tastings around the country, or continually search for an answer.  They want a simple number, something to hang their hat on, something that will provide comfort and assurance, and they just want to know that an “expert” has assured them of their choice.

This month is the release of the James Halliday Wine Companion – which by all accounts is the most important set of “scores” in the Australian wine industry.  For those with little interest in wine generally, it may be the only time this year where they do sit up and take notice of high scoring wines.  So for the past week, many many wineries have been shouting out their scores – as this is the great drive by of public interest one could say.

But.  And it is a big but.  Many other wine critics are now beginning to note that a greater proportion of wines are scoring higher scores as each year passes.  From a wineries perspective that is fine, but we all note that the scoring system is “running out of runway” so to speak.  I will give you the breakdown of the Wine Companion scores as quoted on Winefront by a subscriber below:

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