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How
export approval can hinder the sales of natural wines
In Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, some natural wine
growers have been prevented from exporting their wines, even though
they have buyers waiting: but this could be about to change
Imagine the situation. You’ve made a
wine. Because you work more naturally, the wine is a little
unconventional, but you have a loyal customer list who love your
style. And you’ve just landed an export order. But there’s a
problem: in order to sell your wines abroad, you need export
approval. And that’s contingent on the wine passing a tasting
panel. They don’t 'get' your wine, and they refuse export
permission.
This is just what happened to Jamsheed, a
small (2500 case) producer in Australia’s Yarra Valley, last year,
with their single-vineyard Cabernet Franc, called ‘Mon Petite
Francine’. Weighing in at just 12% alcohol, this is ever so
slightly cloudy, but has lovely fresh, sappy cherry fruit with
lovely perfume and a textured palate with a bit of spicy bite.
It’s deliciously drinkable, and full of interest. But while this
wine had been selling well locally, it was refused an export licence
by Wine Australia, and so couldn’t leave the country.
It turns out that Jamsheed’s Cabernet
Franc is just one of a number of interesting wines in Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa that have been refused export permission,
even though there are customers waiting.
Gary Mills, who owns Jamsheed, recounted
this experience. ‘The 2011 Mon Petite Francine is a new label,
born from a love of Loire-style reds. The wine is presented as a nouveau-style
red for early consumption and has been selling very well in
Melbourne.’ Mills has recently started exporting to Japan, and has
an agent in Tokyo called Jeroboam. He sent samples to Tokyo which
were tasted by the Jeroboam crew, Ned Goodwin MW and Kenichi Ohashi
of the Somersault group. ‘They requested a five dozen allocation
of the franc to be added to the larger shipment,’ reports Mills.
‘Export laws state that any shipment over 100 litres and or $2000
value must attain export approval. So my five dozen $11.50 AUS$ FOB
wine—total value $690—was sent for export analysis. This cost
$200, was couriered to the AWBC (Australian Wine and Brandy
Corporation) for $67, and was tasted and rejected, and therefore
pulled from the pallet at the docks at my expense and shipped back
to me at my expense—yet to be determined.’
But the wine was rejected by the AWBC on
the grounds that is was cloudy/turbid and mouldy. ‘Yes, the wine
is unfiltered and unfined,’ says Mills, ‘but it is not mouldy.
There is a mushroom/forest floor tone that would not be out of place
in a Yarra Pinot Noir. It is not a perfect wine by any means—that
being half the point—I'm not interested in producing technically
correct wines but rather a unique site/terrior-driven tasting
experience. The wine shows freshness, vitality and has piqued the
interest of everyone who has tasted it.’
But all has not turned out badly for
Mills, at least this time. The story of this export approval has led
to a lot of discussion on social media. ‘The unexpected bonanza
for me was the outpouring of support, both on social media and local
physical purchases, from that moment,’ he says. ‘In the
proceeding days I sold almost 20 dozen of the wine alone on
sympathetic purchases and a further large amount to existing
customers. As a result the wine will sell out before the end of
September!’
James Erskine is another Australian
winegrower who has hit a roadblock trying to gain Wine Australia
export approval. Like Mills, he has made wines that have export
orders, but isn’t allowed to ship them. His project, Natural
Selection Theory, is a group of four winegrowers looking to make
natural wines produced with a minimal level of electricity and no
additions bar sulfur dioxide at bottling.
One of the wines they have made is called
the ‘egg’ project, which is a full skin-fermented white from
Semillon grown in the famous Hunter Valley Brokeback vineyard.
‘Since Hunter Semillon is the only true wine style Australia can
call its own, we thought this the best place to start on our anti-terroir
project,’ says Erskine. He explains that this project allows the
group to experiment with the effect that fermentation vessels, skin
contact and external energies (such as poetry and sound!) can have
on a wine. Each wine comes ‘bottled’ in a one litre egg-shaped
clay vessel (a smaller scale version of the clay vessel used to
ferment the wine).
‘The long and the short of it is that
we sold most of these eggs in Australia,’ says Erskine, ‘but we
saved some for Caves de Pyrene [UK importer of natural wines] as
Eric Nairoo had expressed interest after trying an egg with us last
year.’ Erskine’s egg wine was rejected by Wine Australia’s
tasting expert panel and deemed ‘out of condition’.
‘It was not fined or filtered and as you know many
full-skin white ferments precipitate a haze,’ says Erskine. ‘The
wine was also said to be oxidised even though it has a brilliant
electric green hue (with golden mid-centre) and has 20 parts free
sulfur on its export analysis.’
The export approval process has caused
these natural winemakers problems, but the good news is that Wine
Australia seems to be listening. As of today (31 Jan 2012), the
tasting panel has been disbanded. Previously, all wines had to pass
a panel of qualified wine inspectors who worked in pairs on a roster
basis. Their brief was to be sure that a wine was ‘sound and
merchantable’ in order for it to be exported. If a wine failed
this test, it was tasted the next day by new inspectors who don’t
know that the wine failed the day before. If the wine was rejected a
second time, the winery had the option to have the wine reviewed
independently. Approval lasts for 18 months, after which the wine
had to be resubmitted. In 2010/11, just 43 out of 14 569 wines were
refused export approval, which implies that lots of poor commercial
wines got through and some of these interesting, unconventional
natural wines didn’t.
‘The standards required for Australian
wines have not changed, nor have the laws and regulations
underpinning the quality and integrity of Australian wine, but our
approach to administering these standards will move from reliance on
pre-export product inspections to a risk-based approach,’ says
Wine Australia’s Chief Executive, Andrew Cheesman. ‘When the
current export controls were first introduced four decades ago,
Australian table wine was hardly known overseas and there was a risk
that even one faulty wine could hurt our reputation. Today we are an
established and respected global producer and the market leader in
some countries. We have a strong culture of compliance and our risk
profile has changed considerably.’
This is a welcome change, but in other
countries export panels continue to cause problems for
unconventional winemakers.
Problems
in New Zealand
New Zealand also has a similar system,
and one high-end producer who has fallen foul of the system is
Pyramid Valley Vineyards, in the north Canterbury Hills. Winegrower
Mike Weersing explains how one of his wines, the 2009 Earth Smoke
Pinot Noir, failed to get export permission because it has a very
low titratable acidity (TA) level of <3.5g/l. ‘The acidities
were low this year and pHs high,’ says Weersing. ‘In a season
which combined a cool summer with a warm fall, in order to achieve
full physiological maturity and greater hang time, higher than
typical sugars and lower TAs were inevitable; our inclusion of 15%
whole cluster, for aromatic interest, also of course pushed the pH.
Finally, and most tellingly, we never make any tartaric acidic
additions.’ He adds that, ‘I'm told that the original reason for
the minimum TA stipulation was to prevent the importation of wines
that had been watered down. A brief glance at the other figures on
the wine—e.g. dry extract, yield and overall production—makes
very clear that no water could have been added. What burns my ass is
that if I were to open all bottles, and to add acid, then reclose
and ship, the bureaucrats would be appeased.’
[Note added later: it turns out that the minimum TA is an EU
requirement for importing wines into Europe, not something imposed
by New Zealand.]
The
South African perspective
Craig Hawkins, winemaker at Lammershoek
in South Africa’s Swartland region, also explains some of the
problems he has encountered. ‘Pretty much every wine that you make
needs to be exported at some time or another and for this to happen
it needs to be certified,’ says Hawkins. ‘The process of
certification is a maximum three-strike step procedure. The wines
are tasted blind before separate panels, and three strikes and
you’re out, and then it is your choice to go before the Wine and
Spirit Board (WSB) and pledge your case as to why the wine should be
certified/ultimately exported overseas.’
Hawkins has consistently run into
problems, both with the Lammershoek wines, and his own wines,
Testalonga, which push the boundaries of naturalness a bit further.
‘My wines for Lammershoek always get a few strikes before
eventually being pushed through, but my Testalonga wines have so far
both gone the full three strikes, and this is where it gets quite
frustrating, because you already have an export order in place, and
the people overseas love the wine and want it, and the only thing
holding it back is the individual tasters from South Africa.’
However, Hawkins is sympathetic to the
tasters who refuse his wines export licences. ‘In all fairness,
they have not tasted many skin macerated/long lees contact/no added
sulfur dioxide white wines and thus anything different is
immediately put down as a fault, and failed.’ So he had to go
before the WSB and argue his case. ‘I have heard from numerous
wine growers who have had similar problems of how backward and
narrow minded the WSB were,’ says Hawkins, ‘but things are
changing and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the majority of
them were very open minded.’
‘I had to go in front of the Board with
letters from people like Doug Wregg (Les Caves de Pyrene), Dirk
Niepoort and my importer in Norway (Vinarius). This is your last
chance: if you are rejected here then that’s it, you cannot export
the wine in any way, and the wine is basically lost to anyone
outside of the country. The board consisted of mainly wine makers
themselves, my old university professor—pretty much "the old
guard"—and you have to sit down around a table and discuss
the wines, the winemaking method, and what you are trying to
achieve. No one has tried to export or make skin macerated white
wines commercially here, so it was something new for them. The panel
accepted the wine, and I was extremely impressed with the way they
were open to accept new things. I think this bodes well for the
future of the South African wine industry.’ But Hawkins is honest
enough to admit that if his wines had been rejected, he might be
‘singing a different tune now.’
Tom Lubbe, who makes the Observatory
wines, had a less pleasant experience at the hands of the WSB. ‘In
South Africa you have to get a wine passed by the WSB once a year,
so even if we did get a wine passed the first time it would usually
fail the second year (or vice versa),’ he explains. ‘The wines
were often failed for being "oxidised" and then at the
next tasting "reduced" (a month later). Lack of sulfur
dioxide was also a formidable danger to Brand South Africa I was
frequently told, as was a dangerous lack of filtration and fining.
One time an Observatory wine was turned down for the crushing reason
of not "tasting like a South African wine". In the end I
was submitting wines for full microbial analyses with 2 week and 4
week incubations before submitting to the WSB. No problem was ever
detected in these analyses and the wines were always pronounced
strangely stable but this did not seem to help.’
Lubbe adds, ‘As far as I could tell the
main goal of the WSB was to supply endless rivers of £4.99
"trouble-free" plonk to English supermarkets, or any other
supermarkets willing to go big,’ but he also admits that he might
be biased by his bad experiences.
Conclusions
It seems that while these export panels
are well intentioned, they can have the undesired effect of stifling
creativity, and something needs to be done about this. ‘Surely a
purchase from an importer is enough to satisfy that the wine is
“saleable”!’ says Gary Mills, and he has a good point. ‘My
beef is not with the process as a whole. The approval process is
quite streamlined and accessible as a procedure. The tasting panel
is where it gets a little murky.’ He thinks that the exclusive use
of winemakers with show judging experience might work against wines
that are a bit out of the ordinary. ‘What is their reference? Why
should an export sale be derailed by a single subjective opinion?’
James Erskine made two suggestions to
Wine Australia as to how they might improve their processes.
‘First, wines submitted to the expert tasting panel should be
offered the option of providing a written introduction so that the
tasters can be aware if the wine is produced in an unusual fashion
and what they might expect to see. Second, we would be happy to
organise a tasting together with ourselves and one of Australia's
top sommeliers to showcase some of the more unusual styles of wine
that are produced and revered today as Aussie winemakers are
travelling more and more and bringing home ideas and beliefs.’
Erskine thinks that with the natural wine
revolution gaining traction, that ‘there will be many more
challenges to come for the tasting panel of Wine Australia.’ He
also thinks that these new, interesting and diverse wine styles
could be good for Australia’s image abroad, if they can get past
the export panels. ‘As we all know, “Brand Australia” could
not be any more deflated right now and shutting down wines which
don't fit "the" mould will not allow Australia to move
forward as a great producer of unique wines which should sit
comfortably on the table against any great producer. We just have to
break away from the homogenous mentality and national cellar palate
for acidification and clean wines which we have.’
Fortunately, in Australia, people seemed
to have listened, and the demise of the tasting panel is unlikely to
unleash a tidal wave of bad Australian wine across the world.
Perhaps New Zealand and South Africa should follow suit?
Published
01/12
This is a modified version of an article that first appeared in
Meininger's Wine Business International
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