The collaboration between master French winemaker, Alain Graillot, and Bibendum founder, Robert Walters, and their subsequent Graillot Australia wine project, is a subject close to all our hearts in our office. It has been an ambitious venture which has paid off, adding a set of wines to our portfolio, which we are proud to be distributing.

We were delighted to read James Halliday's thoughts on the wines in The Weekend Australian Magazine (April 14-15). Below are the scores, and here's a link to the full article, which you can read if you have a subscription with The Australian.

2010 Graillot Syrah

"Bright crimson-purple; a super-elegant medium bodied syrah that includes 10% whole bunches, plum and black cherry filling the bouquet and palate alike. It has great line, length and balance, but the key to the wine is its texture, built on fine tannins and totally integrated oak. As it turned out, the barrel-by-barrel selection resulted in the all the new oak wines going into Project No. 2. 13.5% alc; screwcap." 96 points; drink to 2025, James Halliday, The Weekend Australian Magazine , April 14-15 2012

2010 Graillot Project Syrah No. 2

"Deeper crimson-purple, it is a substantially bigger and bolder wine, with more power, more tannins and new oak. There is some clonal difference, and the grapes come from further down the slope; it is more Australian in style, but the balance is good. This wine will be made each year for the foreseeable future, and not simply as a recipient of the new oak. 13.5% alc; screwcap." 93 points; drink to 2025, James Halliday, The Weekend Australian Magazine , April 14-15 2012 

2009 Alain Graillot Syrocco Syrah (current import)

"The wine is from Morocco, between Casablanca and Middle Atlas, a region identified by Graillot as a result of consultancy work there. Bright, light red-purple, it is very fragrant and spicy, with Provence herbs and red berries. The palate is extremely lively and savoury, verging on mouth-watering, and genuinely different and intriguing. 13% alc; cork." 94 points, drink to 2023, James Halliday, The Weekend Australian Magazine , April 14-15 2012

For more information regarding any of these wines, please email orders@bibendum.com.au

Photographs © James Broadway Photography

Eden Road is now firmly ensconced in their new digs – a winery in Murrumbateman, replete with a mature vineyard on the local volcanic soils. Their neighbours include a 'little-known' producer called Clonakilla who apparently make a tidy Shiraz or two? Eden Road is already recognised as one of the hottest prospects in the domestic wine scene and the quality of their new Estate fruit is bound to further enhance their reputation as a producer of wonderfully elegant, site-driven wines.

Here we have a young yet experienced winemaker, Nick Spencer, with a crystal clear, long-term vision, making a range of exceptional, high-grown wines at remarkable prices. Already this producer has won the Jimmy Watson Trophy (with its first, very elegant Shiraz), received a Halliday 5 star rating in the recently released 2012 edition of Wine Companion and was awarded the ‘Best new winery’ gong in the Age/SMH Good Wine Guide. The overall quality across the range is simply exceptional for the prices being asked while the style is all about elegance and refined drinkability. This is new wave Australian at its best.

Images c/- Eden Roads Facebook page.

Vintage 2012 - By Nick Spencer

Despite a record breaking period of rain that brought ­floods to most of NSW in early March we have had without a shadow of a doubt the best vintage in our relatively short history.

With a relatively wet outlook for most of March we worked very hard obviously in our vineyards but also in the winery to be in a position to pick all of our Shiraz from Gundagai and the lion’s share of Chardonnay from Tumbarumba prior to the rain that started falling on Tuesday 28th Feb.

Prior to March, the growing season had shaped up to be one of the best on record given a healthy amount of rain and cooler than average temperatures.

Gundagai
2012 has solidified my position that Gundagai is one of the most exciting areas to grow Shiraz in the country. In 2012 we worked closely with our growers with an aim of minimizing and in some cases completely irradiating the use of herbicides in the vineyard. Whilst the effect on the soils may not be realized for a year or two, certainly the increased grass and weeds in the under-vine helped soak up rain when it did fall. Yields were kept very low in 2012, averaging 5 tonnes/ hectare and as a consequence the fruit, when given the opportunity ripened quickly allowing us to pick Shiraz at 13be prior to the rain. Phenological ripeness at low baumes was another key factor in the quality of fruit from Gundagai in 2012.

We have begun to source fruit from two new vineyards in Gundagai in addition to our two regular vineyards, Bangawalla and Yabtree. One of our new vineyards is located near Bethungara on the northern tip of the Gundagai GI. The vineyard sits on very hungry volcanic soils with yields just pushing the 5 tonnes/ hectare mark. The resulting wine is particularly exciting as it displays very strong white pepper characters and reminds me more of wines out of the Grampians or Pyrenese. The other new vineyard we sourced from lies on the hills behind Jugiong and sits on Shoalhaven sands. You feel like you are in Bondi walking through the vineyard! Again the wine displays very spicy red fruits and pepper. The Yabtree vineyard which is the source for our ‘Gundagai’ Shiraz again looks very good with every extra year of vine age appearing to provide added layers of depth and density to the fruit.

Tumbarumba
Tumbarumba has again produced some incredibly exciting fruit from perhaps one of the most marginal seasons on record. We source fruit from two sub-regions in Tumbarumba. Maragle which lies at 450 meters above sea level and Courabyra which sits proud at 780 meters above sea level. The fruit from Maragle on average is picked 3 weeks prior to Courabyra on account of its uniquely warm micro climate within the Tumbarumba GI. This year, this unique site delivered incredibly intense and expressive fruit picked on Feb 24 just prior to all the rain. The Courabyra sub region was unable to escape the rain on account of its altitude and subsequent later ripening pattern. Despite this we were able to pick the fruit following a week of drywindy weather after the rain. The result was lovely bright ripe fruit with very typically high natural acidity. In fact the Chardonnay came in at 12.4 Baume and 12.5g/L total acidity! The wines post fermentation look incredible with both power and finesse balanced on a knifes edge.

Canberra
It could be argued that Canberra has fared perhaps the worst from all this rain in March. However I am still expecting to pull a small amount of very good quality fruit from our estate vineyard in Murrambatemen. We have done a huge amount of work on our vineyard to ensure we will be picking Shiraz. So far we have fruit thinned on two occasions and leaf plucked the entire fruit zone to allow as much air ­flow in to the canopy as possible. The yield currently sits at around 3 tonnes/ hectare and we plan on picking this week, fingers crossed.

Vintage 2011 releases
We have some exciting new wines to be release over the next 6 months.

2011 Tumbarumba Chardonnay
The Tumbarumba Chardonnay is our ­flagship Chardonnay. 2011 was a great vintage for Tumbarumba although growers lost a lot of fruit in the effort of getting clean ripe fruit off. To sum up 2011 in Tumbarumba purity and elegance would be the two best words to describe the vintage. We have worked very hard in the last two years to secure a couple of very good vineyards in Tumbarumba and we are now in the position to build the volume of our Tumbarumba Chardonnay. The Tumbarumba Chardonnay is a blend of wine from two sub-regions in Tumbarumba – Courabyra (780 meters above sea level) and Maragle (450 meters above sea level).

In 2011 we also bottled a small volume of Chardonnay from the sub region of Courabyra which we intend to release in 2013. The wine was tank fermented and left on gross lees for 6 months prior to bottling. Courabyra is at 780 meters above sea level and is located adjacent to the Tumbarumba town ship. Its altitude results in very bright, pristine acid driven Chardonnay very similar stylistically to Chablis.

2011 Tumbarumba Pinot Noir
The 2011 Tumbarumba Pinot Noir is a great expression of Tumbarumba Pinot. Light to medium bodied, perfumed, elements of graphite and minerality, elegance. tightly woven.

2011 Canberra Shiraz
I am very excited about our 2011 Canberra Shiraz. The 2011 vintage was a very wet and very cool vintage and I was relatively uncertain about the results for our Canberra Shiraz up until about 6 months ago. The wine has matured beautifully in barrel and in my opinion is perhaps the most exciting Shiraz we have made to date. The wine displays bright red fruits, gravel and pepper with an incredibly aromatic nose.

2011 Gundagai Shiraz
The 2011 Gundagai Shiraz takes a bit of a stylistic shift on account of the vintage. The 2010 was dense and powerful whilst the 2011 is bright and pretty. Both the Canberra and Gundagai Shiraz represent exactly what we are trying to achieve with cool climate Shiraz.

We have waited to speak personally with members of the team at Huet before buying into the rumour and innuendo caused by Noël’s sudden departure. According to the Domaine, a lot of incorrect information has been bandied around since the announcement was made. Most prominently, the idea that Noël left because of the Hwang family’s (the majority owners) desire to put more emphasis on dry wines. According to everyone we have spoken to at Huet, this was not at all the case. The Estate will continue, as it always has, to let vintage dictate the style of wine produced in any given year. So it was that a lot of sweet wines were produced in the wonderful Moelleux vintage of 2009 and more dry wines in 2010 – a brilliant dry vintage.

Regardless, it is clear that Noël felt his position had become somewhat obsolete, ahead of time. And the fact that he had to involve the Hwang family in many day to day decisions, as could be expected in a transition phase, eventually took its toll. There were clearly disagreements: there have also been whispers regarding the Hwang’s desires to allow their largest importers to have more wine at the expense of smaller importers – yet we have been given every assurance that our allocations will continue. All indications we have is that any disagreements had to do with the commercial and administrative side of the business rather than viticulture or winemaking. We can only take the Domaine at their word and quite frankly, our main concern was to find out if there would be any changes to the vineyard management or winemaking practices. To this end we have spoken to members of the winemaking team and have been given every assurance that it is business as usual in these areas.

Of course this was what we had expected. The Hwang family have invested heavily in the Estate since Anthony Hwang bought a majority shareholding in Domaine Huet in 2003 and, if anything, quality has improved under their stewardship. The Hwangs established their dedication to quality very early on when they stopped making wines from the Vodanis estate (a long time contributor to the Huet dry range) as they did not consider the quality to be up to Domaine Huet standards. Anthony’s children Susan and Stefan have now been installed to run the commercial side of the business. It should also be pointed out that the Hwang family had originally persuaded Noël not to retire several years ago, asking him instead to continue until 2015, which makes this turn of events even more surprising.

At the end of the day, the key fact of the matter is that one of the Loire’s greatest ever winemakers has retired. And yet we are confident that the quality will not suffer for the following reasons: firstly Noël’s hand selected and well established team will continue on. This team consists of Jean-Bernard Berthomé, Huet’s cellarmaster & vineyard manager for the last 33 years, and Noël’s nominated successor, Benjamin Joliveau who has now worked full time under Noël for the last 4 years. It was Benjamin who last visited Australia to represent Huet a couple of years ago. Jean-Bernard Berthomé is now chief winemaker and vineyard manager – a title that reflects the roles he has performed for a long time. The vineyards stay the same, as will the viticultural work and the winemaking, along with the Hwang family’s apparent total dedication to the highest possible quality. Their track record in this regard has been exceptional as the wines released since 1993 clearly demonstrate.

In short, everyone close to the Domaine is, on the one hand, disappointed Noël’s tenure has ended ahead of time and yet they are all (including Noël) ademant that the benchmark quality level set by Domaine Huet, under Noël's stewardship, will continue on. Having already witnessed significant, sudden and tragic changes at two of our most famous Domaines (Domaine Denis Mortet & Didier Dagueneau) where, in both cases, the wines have gone from strength to strength, we see no reason at all to doubt their confidence. But time will tell. Noël himself has written publicly twice to reassure lovers of the Domaine, including a co-signed letter to ourselves. In one such statement he wrote, “After 40 years of vinification, I leave a place for the new generation and I have total confidence in the team who worked with me for a long time and who continue with the same spirit...I’m going to profit now more often from our house in Noirmouiter, as well as go fishing and spending more time with my granddaughters.”  He obviously has not finished up the way he would have liked and yet he appears to have left the Domaine in good hands.

And there we have it, one of the greats of the Loire departs. Noël, we wish you all the best in your retirement. Thank you for a wonderful ride. We feel blessed to have worked with you and the wines the Domaine released under your stewardship in recent times and of course we will always carry the warm memories of your visit to Australia a few years ago. We look forward to what the so-called ‘new generation’ that you fostered will produce in the years to come. Rob Walters

A recent ‘discussion’ on twitter (if you can call anything that happens on Twitter a discussion) got me thinking about the difference between small wine producers and larger ones and specifically how size relates to quality. The discussion was sparked by an Australian producer who was clearly feeling frustrated, as many do, about what he believed was a general assumption in the wine community that smaller producers necessarily produce higher quality wine and that large producers necessarily produce lower quality, more industrial wines. I can’t speak with any confidence as to whether this assumption is actually out there or not, but when phrased in this way, the claim is obviously wrong. It is self evident that large companies are able to produce very high quality wine and small wine businesses, as we all know, are more than capable of producing terrible wine. We might even make the argument that larger wine companies on the whole, if we take Australia as our example, produce more consistent quality than their smaller colleagues. However to frame the discussion this way, as it is often framed, is to miss the point. There is, in fact, a major advantage to being a small wine producer if you are searching for the highest possible quality. This is especially true if by “small” we mean having a finite area of vineyard, ideally in the one place, and ideally where your winery is, located. Of course this assumes that everything else is equal; that you have equally good vineyards (which ultimately define the possible quality), the same access to winemaking equipment, and that you have the same level of experience and talent when it comes to winegrowing and winemaking. If these factors are equal, then a small producer will have a major advantage over a larger one.

Some may disagree with this claim but to me it is self-evident. If you only have one small area of vineyard to manage you will be able to spend much more time amongst your vines treating them with the type of intimate care that is simply not possible for larger producers. If there is an issue in the vines you will pick it up earlier, you will be able to respond faster and more precisely. You will also learn directly and much more deeply about what works and what doesn’t in your terroir (because you’ll be doing it yourself). You will also be able to harvest more rapidly, exactly when you want to, and you will be able to typically handle your fruit more gently. The same goes in the winery, where you will have a finite number of barrels that you could theoretically taste in one day. In such a case you will be able to easily keep track of each tank and each barrel (yourself) and identify any problems earlier and deal with them faster. Ultimately you will not have to rely on anyone else to manage things properly which of course is one of the big challenges for large companies who, for a start, tend to source a lot of their fruit from other growers.

We (Bibendum Wine Co.) work predominantly with small producers but also a number of larger ones and we know from experience that large producers can achieve very high levels of quality. Yet when you look at what the finest, larger producers are doing across the globe, you find that they are in fact doing their best to mimic the practices of the best small guys. They are large but they are acting small. To this end, the best larger producers will often control a lot of their own vineyards. They will typically aim work as closely as possible with nature, use gentle fruit handling, and so on. They will often parcelate their vineyard sources and make these wines separately in order to deepen their understanding of their various terroirs and when these terroirs produce wines of a distinctive voice and of a high enough quality they will bottle these wines separately. Yet, it is self evident that the larger a company becomes, the more challenging it becomes to maintain the same attention to detail. No matter how many checks and balances are in place, nothing can replace time spent in the vines, yourself, and times spent with your wines. Nothing can replicate not having to compromise, having the time to do everything at the pace required. Then there are the bean counters and marketers that tend to have a major influence on what large companies do. But that's another story.

Ultimately it’s a question of time. Being smaller means having more time to spend on each individual vine, each individual barrel. You can spend more time with your land, your vines, your wines. Most small producers do not take advantage (or don't have the know-how to take advantage) of this reality. This is why the quality of wine produced by the vast majority of growers in Champagne is no better than the large negociants of the region (and sometimes markedly worse): because they follow the same practices as the negociants. They don't take advantage of their size. Yet those growers who do take advantage are able to get far closer to their land and their vines and are able to produce something that is unique. They have the time to do things more carefully, more precisely, by hand. As Michel Bettane has written of Egly-Ouriet, “… larger houses cannot hope to emulate the cultivation norms…” Being small doesn’t guarantee quality but it obviously is an advantage in the search for the pinnacle. 

A wine writer recently told me that much of the best wine in Australia is being produced by the large companies. He was trying to make the point that size did not matter when it came to quality. In fact what he was illuminating was the fact that many of Australia's smaller producers do not genuinely take advantage of their size. For a wide range of reasons that should be far more heavily scrutinised, they mimic the viticultural and vinicultural production norms as set out by the 'big boys'. Until more of our smaller players are able to mimic the structure and approach of France's best, artisanal growers, we are unlikely to see a great quality difference between the vast majority of smaller producer wines and those of the larger companies. 
 
As I posted on twitter, I think we can all agree that it’s the quality of the wine in the bottle that is paramount. If the wine is exceptional then the size of the producer does not matter. On the other hand we should also be able to agree that when it comes to striving for the highest possible quality, for the reasons I have touched on above and many more that are far too complex to outline in a short blog, being small is a major advantage.

Robert Walters.
 

A remarkable, mouth-watering Champagne tasting will be taking place on the 16th of April at Anselme Selosse's new hotel in Avize. A stellar lineup will include wines by Larmandier-Bernier, Jacques Selosse, Jérôme Prévost, Egly-Ouriet, Jacquesson and Roger Coulon. 

If any of our customers are in Champagne (or environs) at this time, please let us know and we'll try to get you a place at this exciting event.

Full details are available: here