Vintages - do they really matter?

Underneath it all, wine is just fermented grape juice. Once you put aside all the romantic notions of wine as a living, changing being, then all you are left with is an agricultural product – a product that is made in the vineyard, from the berries of a plant.

As any farmer will tell you, nature is entirely unpredictable; with one year producing scorching heat and droughts, the next hail and frost. This process is translated directly into the taste of our wines, with the searing heat perhaps producing ripe and full bodied wines, followed by a year of absolutely nothing (thanks to a devastating late afternoon hail storm). The flow on effect comes in the form of a year printed on every label, signifying the date when the grapes where picked and first turned into wine. The challenge with wine is thus that no two ‘vintages’ are ever the same, each year producing a wine that tastes totally unique (and may often taste completely different every year!).

To a marketing department, this is a major inconvenience: they would like wine to resemble other drinks, such as beer, vodka or scotch, where the agricultural product is just a rather anonymous starting point in the manufacturing process. For branded wines, the variation between vintages is a major hassle, affecting supply & consistency of style, flavour and character. To the wine nut, vintages are instead a source of variation that adds a delightful complexity to the passion of wine appreciation: after all, with each new vintage, everything is shaken up again, and there is yet more to learn.

It can all get a bit bewildering after a while as there are already enough elements of wine appreciation to get your head around - regions, grape varieties, producers…and now we have vintage variation as well. It’s tempting to just buy a few wine books and pull out the vintage chart – a list of regions, each given a quality score for wine in a certain year- and fully embrace this generalised chart as gospel.

While this works for a general overview, the truth is that vintage charts are purely a subjective opinion, ignoring the fact that wine can taste completely different when produced from different sides of the vineyard, let alone from many producers in a region over a year!

The truth is that there is much more to wine than just ‘good’ and ‘bad’ vintages, with the best wine producers able to produce great wine regardless of the vintage, with some of the ‘off’ vintages presenting themselves as better value and much more interesting in the long run.

So what makes a good vintage? Simply put, the best vintages are those that have the best weather to grow grapes. This translates to the years that have the perfect balance between rain, sunshine & temperature - the years that grow the healthiest, tastiest & most perfect grapes.

The other element to consider is that vintage variations, like temperature variations, are often much less pronounced in warmer regions – thus for regions like the Barossa Valley, Mclaren Vale or Griffith, vintage variations are much less important, because there is much more consistency from year to year in temperature, rainfall and sunshine, ultimately leading to wine that is less subject to massive vintage variations. Conversely, it is the cooler, wetter regions that suffer from the greatest vintage variation – with the cool Southern regions of Tasmania, the heights of Tumbarumba, or the wet areas of Mudgee and much of the Lower Hunter Valley quite significantly affected by changes in the weather.

Vintage variation goes much deeper than just weather though – with pests, soil and even humans able to drastically alter the changing taste of finished wines, as wine shows every nuance it is subject to, just like a blank canvas.

In the world of modern, branded product (particularly in Australia) winemakers are able to blend parcels of fruit from many different regions & effectively remove vintage inconsistency – but in the process essentially stripping all the regional & varietal character out of a wine at the same time.

The best answer to the vintage question is the same lexicon that all wine drinkers should live by- the best wine is the wine you like. Ultimately, unless you are stocking a cellar with the intention of maturing wines for decades, vintage recommendations should be an afterthought. Instead, find yourself a consistently great winery and stick to it- different vintages just make life more interesting.