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The
Landmark Australia Tutorial
Part 2: The AWRI
Website: www.landmark-wineaustralia.com; www.awri.com.au
It was smart of the
organizers of the Landmark Tutorial to begin the week with a visit
to the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI), because this is
one of the jewels of the country’s wine industry. The AWRI rightly
considers itself to be a provider of resources to the Australian
Wine industry. Every grape grower and winemaker pays a levy, and the
Federal Government then doubles this. The budget works out at about
A$60 m for wine research, which is slightly less than what Bordeaux
spends on research and marketing. As a private company, though, the
AWRI has to compete for this pot.
There are four streams of
activity. Research accounts for some 70% of the AWRI’s activity,
and it is headed up by Marcus Herderich. Then there’s development
work, which is run by Peter Godden. An example of this would be the
development of Near Infra Red (NIR) spectroscopy for non destructive
testing of wine. The third area is extension work – taking
research and disseminating it to the growers and winemakers. This
area is looked after by Con Simos, and it includes AWACs (advanced
wine assessment courses), publications, and the Australian Wine
Industry Technical Conference. Getting research outcomes out to
industry is seen as a high priority. Finally, there is the
commercial service, run by Vince
O’Brien, which is in effect a ‘pay per view’ set-up. Samples
are submitted for analysis – as many as 100 000 in a year. This
gives the AWRI a valuable snapshot of what is going on in the
Australian wine industry. For example, data now exist on trends in
alcohol levels, volatile acidity and Brettanomyces.
We were given some examples
of the sorts of projects the AWRI has been involved with. One
recent, newsworthy project has been the identification of a compound
responsible for pepperiness in Australian Shiraz. Called rotundone,
it is found in lots of herbs and vegetables, and it’s incredibly
potent. For example, just 5 mls of rotundone would be enough to make
all wine in Australia taste spicy. Finding it in wine is tricky,
though, because of this potency: it’s like trying to identify one
person out of six billion. Technically speaking, rotundone is a
sesquiterpene. The aim of this research? It’s to provide
Australian winemakers or viticulturalists with the management
techniques to be able to moderate spiciness in their wines. However,
it’s also of interest that a proportion of people – as many as a
fifth – simply can’t smell rotundone.
The research publication
states: “Whereas most of the sensory panelists were sensitive to
rotundone, approximately 20% could not detect this compound, even in
water, at the highest concentration tested (4000 ng/L). Thus, the
sensory experience of two consumers enjoying the same glass of
Shiraz wine or sharing the same meal seasoned with pepper might be
very different. The variation in individual sensitivity to rotundone
suggests that the way wines containing this compound are assessed by
consumers or wine judges could vary substantially from one person to
another.”
Another important project
looks at developing low alcohol-producing yeast – in effect,
trying to turn back more than 2000 years of evolution. It isn’t
simply a question of developing a yeast that is capable of producing
less alcohol from the same amount of sugar, because this is already
possible through using specific yeast strains to the measure of 3 or
4%. There has to be somewhere suitable for these compounds to go: it
is necessary for the sugar to go to an alternative metabolite that
is something the consumer wants to see in wine.
The AWRI has also been an
important player in the closures debate. Since 1999 it has been
running a study that has really turned the wine world on its head in
terms of identifying cork related problems. Currently, around 85% of
all wines are under screwcap in Australia.
The AWRI has also done work
on the identification of taints found by Australian winemakers in
their wines. ‘Every year, we seem to have an emergency,’ says
Simos. ‘We offer a free service for winemakers and growers who
have problems, for example in analysing or tasting samples.’ This
is a great initiative that allows people to use the information
received to change their winemaking practices.
Last year, the AWRI did a
major sensory trial in China, putting Australian and foreign wines
in front of consumers in three Chinese cities. If the Chinese
consumers show a preference for certain styles of wine, this kind of
information can be fed back to winemakers and researchers. The
question then becomes one of how winemakers can we manage these
styles in winemaking.
The AWRI extension service
gets some 6000 enquiries a year, across all these areas. The AWRI
also has a team of viticulturalists and an extensive library which
are provided as resources for growers and winemakers. In addition,
the AWRI works on wine and health, offering lots of advice and
getting involved in the regulatory issues.
One of the most well known
aspects of the AWRI’s activity is its advanced wine assessment
course (AWAC). We were given a brief introduction to the AWAC by
means of a tasting of two flights of ten wines. ‘Since 1992 we
have trained 800 specialists as wine show judges, by means of 27
different AWACs,’ says Simos. The emphasis behind the AWAC is in
training and assessing judges for the wine show system, which is an
important part of the Australian wine industry. Each AWAC is a
four-day course looking at 320 different wines from around the world
with the involvement of 16 wine show judges.
What are they looking for on
the part of a taster? Speed, accuracy and reliability are the core
skills. In the blind AWAC tastings it is common to mix up the wines,
with many duplicates. After four days, the scores for each
participant are collected and people are given statistics on their
reliability.Australia has 9 national and 52 regional shows each
year. Here, we were shown wines from two flights of the Sydney Royal
Show: 10 Rieslings and 10 Shiraz wines.
Decisions made in blind
tasting settings can be influenced by many factors, including
emotion, physiology, the preceding wines and the environment. ‘We
want to make a rational decision taking these factors into
account,’ says Simos. The most important theme is that judges
assess one wine at a time. In addition, on the first day of each
AWAC, wines are spiked with different fault compounds as an
educational exercise.
On a 20 point scale, the top
judges show variation of 0.5 points or less when assessing the same
wines in different contexts at different times. That’s an
impressive achievement. But, of course, there is another element to
tasting beyond simply the physical discriminatory power and
reliability that these statistics demonstrate. This is the issue of
judgement of style. There has been some criticism that the
Australian wine show system has fossilized styles and stifled
innovation: essentially, that there has merely been approval of the
status quo. Perhaps this is a little unfair, because many credit the
rigorous show system with improving the average quality of
Australian wines a great deal.
In this session we tasted
the 20 wines blind and then all shared our results. There was quite
a bit of discrepancy among the verdicts, both among the tutorial
participants and also among the AWRI staff who were taking part.
Also, I don’t think any of us realized how many duplicates were
included, but this made it a good exercise to see how consistent our
scoring was.
Here’s how I did with the
dupes (scores out of 20). Bear in mind I was jet-lagged, before you
judge too harshly! Also, apparently you get better through the
course of an AWAC as you tune into the wines and the tasting
protocol (or maybe that's what they told us to make us feel better
about our performance). The results here are the number of the wine
(= means that the two numbers represented duplicates of the same
wine), and then the scores given for each.
Shiraz
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5=7 – 18, 17.5
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3=6 – 16.5, 16.5
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2=8 – 15.5, 15.5
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1=9 – 18.5, 17.5
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4=10 – 17.5, 18
Riesling
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1=3=8 – 17, 15.5, 17
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2=4 – 17, 17
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5=10 – 15.5, 16.5
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6=9 – 17, 18.5
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7 - 15
Landmark
Australia Tutorial
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