The Auswine Forum

Hi All,
Being a relative novice in the field of wino’ing I am after some advice in broad generalization terms of best regions/years/style for particular wine varieties.
Eg – Barossa 06 shiraz seems to be very favourable, however Margaret river ’06 shiraz not so. Coonawarra ‘04/’05 Cab Sav seemed to produce a few high quality wines etc. Do you have any other regions that on a whole produced great wines of a particular style in a particular year?
Cheers
Paul

Hi,

The wine auction site Langton's has an Australian vintage chart here. It will give you a broad idea, but these ratings are simplifications and often it depends on your wine preference. You can see for instance that Barossa Shiraz 2006 has a relatively low mark of 7/10.

Langton's also has a Vintage Report that goes into more detail about what was wrong with a vintage, although it's a bit coy on Barossa 06. If I remember correctly, the quick ripening meant some fruit was picked too ripe. At any rate, for my palate a lot of the 06 wines are a bit sweet and simple, but if you like your wines a bit sweeter you may not mind that. Jay Miller of the Wine Advocate rated the 06 Amon Ra 100 points I think, while I thought it was clearly inferior to the 04 and 05 and not worth the asking price.

South Eastern Australia was quite good for whites in 2005.

Tassie Pinots in 2005

Coonawarra reds (particularly cabernets) 2004-2005

Central Victorian reds 2004-2005 (Grampians, Macedon, Pyrenees, Heathcote, Bendigo, etc)

GaryW will come and ace this soon ... but if we talk great vintages ...

04 - Cabernet (Barossa, Coonawarra, Margaret River)
02 - Reds (Clare Valley)
05 - Riesling (Clare Valley, Eden Valley, Henty) -- also 02
00 - Shiraz (Hunter Valley)
98/04 - Shiraz (Great Western - Victoria)

90, 96 - Great reds across all of SA ...

The problem with vintage ratings is that they are so general. 04-06 in the Barossa appears less consistent than say 1996 but the top wines may be as good or better.

Of course there are always exceptions, however Hunter Valley Shiraz 2005 is pretty hard to beat.

The '07 reds will be fantastic from the Margaret River region. I have tried some Cab's and Shiraz', which although very young were fruity,dense, inky wines and just screaming for some age.

Paulo wrote:The '07 reds will be fantastic from the Margaret River region. I have tried some Cab's and Shiraz', which although very young were fruity,dense, inky wines and just screaming for some age.

The most recent reds from MR that I've tried are Voyager cab/merl 04 and Capel Vale cab 05 but have a couple of Cullen DM 04s that stretched my affordability index to the max - they're for much later. MR premiums are generally quite expensive but then so too these days, are many SA and Vic reds.

2005 was a great year in France.

Shoot out and buy some 2005 Burgundy (VC's have Maison Champy Bourgogne on special at the moment, and it is good entry level), Bordeaux (Dan Murphy's has loads of this from $10 - more than I can afford, but the stuff around $16 is superb), and Cotes du Rhone, or Cotes du Ventoux (try the Paul Jaboulet Les Traverses).

You may have heard things about French wine (light, lacking flavour, tannic), well things are changing fast, and while they fortunately don't taste like a lot of Australian red wine (which I am struggling to find much excting about at the moment, with a few notable exceptions) they are quite generous in flavour.

Moreover they cellar well, so you can enjoy them for many years to come.