Andrew Jefford
‘The message was that tannins ooze like lava from Gimblett Gravels fruit’
Do we taste wines consistently? Not at all. Our own personal tasting capacities vary with mood, appetite, time of day and atmospheric pressure. Famously, too, individuals differ from one another in their appreciation of particular wines and their sensitivities to the aromas and flavours those wines offer.
Beyond that, though, I’d suggest there is another level of inconsistency that the wine world as a whole, the entire global cohort of tasters, exhibits. We tailor our expectations to origin. A wine feature which would be accepted without demur from one region may raise eyebrows in another. Here’s an example.
I had the chance recently to taste the mixed case of selected reds sent out annually by the Gimblett Gravels Winegrowers Association based in New Zealand’s Hawke’s Bay. The wines (independently chosen by Andrew Caillard MW) were from 2018, evidently a cracking vintage, and the release was accompanied by a useful online masterclass given by Rebecca Gibb MW and winemaker Warren Gibson of Trinity Hill – I caught up with this in recorded form.
Long-term readers of this column will know that I’m fascinated by tannins – which were a recurring theme of Gibb and Gibson’s chat. Gibb cited ‘robust tannins’ and ‘gravelly tannins’ and ‘savoury tannins’ amid at least eight mentions, and there were four or five from Gibson, too. The message was that tannins ooze like lava from Gimblett Gravels fruit.
But... that’s not what I taste. And certainly not by comparison with newly finished or still-ageing 2018 wines from Bordeaux, the Rhône, Piedmont or Tuscany (to cite four other regions). The tannins in Syrah and Cabernet from Gimblett Gravels appear relatively light and fine compared to those of ambitious Bordeaux, Barolo or Brunello wines of similar age, and these often excellent (if rather oaky) New Zealand wines strike me as fresh, pure-fruited and closegrained, but not notably robust or structured. This is just by way of example: non-European red wines are often described as tannic or structured when, by the standards of classic European cellaring reds, they seem barely tannic at all. (Napa is an exception: its wines are genuinely richly structured, but the tannins are often so soft that it’s the voluptuous fruit which gets noticed.)
The one wine in the Gimblett Gravels selection that came with an IPT measurement (total phenolics, indicating tannin levels) was the Mission Estate, Jewelstone Antoine. At 70, its measurement would indeed put it in the same zone as serious Bordeaux – though ‘no one tastes analyses’, as a consulting oenologist recently said to me. My suspicion is that the style and nature of tannins are of more consequence than analysable level, and their role within the overall balance of the wine counts for much, too. Gibb subsequently pointed out to me, when we discussed this topic, that ‘the bony nature of the Gimblett Gravels soil can lead to a lack of flesh, which emphasises structure, and that’s the challenge winemakers face. Building flesh for the frame is key’. The winemakers, in other words, remain chary of exploiting tannins... until they can find the flesh first.
This issue, by the way, doesn’t just affect tannins; much the same could be said about acidity, and here (counterintuitively) it always seems to me that non-European wines are required to be more acidic than those grown in Europe in equivalent climate regimes, as if to prove that the often sunny, dry conditions of southern-hemisphere vineyard regions need not result in low-acid wines.
These questions matter, in the end, because European classics suggest that full voice and a happy maturation cycle for red wines only come when the phenolic potential of ripe grapes has been embraced, and the conversation with the skins optimised. That’s where profundity lurks. Ambitious Gimblett Gravels reds are already very good – but I think they’d be better with more generously structured fruit, not less. D