July 9th, 2023Wine notes with Clive Hartley

Pepper in Shiraz
A cool climate is not the growing conditions you imagine suiting a grape like shiraz. It is more at home in hot regions like the Barossa or Hunter Valley. Classic Australian wines are full bodied, rich, alcoholic with ripe jammy, dark black fruit aromas. However, when it is grown in chilly regions it develops more of a savoury medium bodied palate with distinctive pepper aromas. Ask winemaker Llew Knight from Granite Hills about pepper – he’s an expert.

Llew has clocked up over 50 vintages and there are not many cooler places to grow shiraz in Australia than the Macedon Ranges. He has been studying the influence of rotundone, the compound responsible for the pepper aroma in shiraz. You might think that the smell of pepper comes from underripe grapes, but research has shown that rotundone increases as the grape ripens. Underripe grapes just smell of green stalks or green capsicum and winemakers try to avoid them at all costs.
Rotundone is a strong compound and extremely low concentrations (such as 16 ng/l) can be detected by the olfactory region of the brain, but only by some people. Research has found that roughly 20 per cent of the population are anosmic to the smell. It is also found in other varieties including gamay and grüner veltliner.
Wine companies are pretty liberal in using pepper in the descriptions of their wines. Probably this is because they want to associate their wine with the French ones from the northern Rhone Valley where you find the aroma occurring more often. They will often choose to call their wine syrah and not shiraz if they think it is more of a French style. The Grampians region is another area that extols the virtues of pepper in its reds and Mount Langi Ghiran has been at the centre of research with the Australian Wine Research Institute.
Coming back to Granite Hills. The vineyard is on granite-strewn pasture at 550 metres. The first vintage of shiraz was in 1978 and the current vintage for sale is the 2018. The wine is a classic with plenty of white pepper. You can also purchase a magnum of 2001 vintage to see how the wine ages.

Clive Hartley is an award-winning wine writer, educator and consultant. Want to learn more about wine? Try his Australian Wine Guide (7th ed) now available for purchase from Paradise Books in Daylesford or via his website – www.australianwineguide.com.au