Just 4%? The 2020 vintage that won’t be

According to an odd article out this week in Drinks Business, just 4% of this year’s Australian winegrape crop has been lost to smoke taint and bushfire.

While I’m still not sure where that low figure comes from (looks like it was backgrounded by Wine Australia back in January), it does draw attention to one thing – 2020 will be the smallest and most unusual Australian vintage in years.

What makes this weird, hobbled harvest such an outlier is that the losses aren’t just due to the usual winemaking yield killers – like frosts, disease, hail, etc. Instead, this will be a crop in the eastern states clipped by an unusual combination of drought, poor flowering and the complexities of smoke taint.

Unlike an accursed vintage like 2011, however, what’s most frustrating is that the theoretical underlying quality of SE Australia’s 2020 vintage isn’t necessarily in doubt. It was more about the broader externalities that caught up instead.

What does that mean? At a vineyard level, for example, I’ve heard multiple reports of growers faced with the ultimate tease – a tiny crop in good health but unusable due to smoke taint. And it’s not like you can see smoke taint, or even taste it in the grapes (to a point). Instead, the insidious phenolic compounds involved pop up during ferment (or sometime after) like a nefarious wine cancer.

Further, it is also maddening with the lack of uniformity, so there will be fortunate escapees. Lucky vignerons who missed the smoke and will make high-quality wine. It also further challenges the ‘everything is fucked’ vintage generalisation narrative (that I touched on here) because it wasn’t fucked in many places.

Still, it blows my mind that we’re seeing that ‘just 4% losses from bushfires’ figure being bandied about when the reality is distinctly different. Especially now that we’re well into what would be ‘normal’ vintage in SE Australia, and the sheer volume of winemakers who won’t be crushing many grapes this year due to some taint is now significant.

In the Hunter, estimates are as high as 80% losses due to smoke taint, to the point where vignerons are now indirectly asking for help to survive. For Canberra, it’s a similar story, with the likes of Clonakilla, Ravensworth etc. not making wine this year amongst many. In Tumbarumba, the losses are unusually high as bushfires destroyed vineyards throughout the region. And it’s a similar story in the Adelaide Hills, with bushfires cooking 30% of the region’s vineyards. These facts are all well established (and well covered in article’s like this one).

From what I can see, the effects are now being be felt up much further out now too. In Orange, Printhie and De Salis are amongst many not making wine this year. In Mudgee, Huntington Estate too and Grove Estate in the Hilltops.

That’s just NSW. Over the border, in NE Victoria the vintage is already over before it began for many. And we haven’t even touched on the rumoured reports that smoke tainted fruit from peripheral areas in other regions – like the southern end of the Barossa – is being rejected for smoke taint after AWRI testing.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Sm-VYFE8H/?igshid=p30xr0pizbof

In other words, the impact on crops will be widespread beyond just 1% of vineyards directly affected by bushfires.

Do you want more evidence that 2020 will be a reduced vintage beyond smoke taint? Let’s cross to Eldridge Estate on the Mornington Peninsula, for example. David Lloyd is looking at a crop less than 25% of 2019 due to poor flowering, with suggestions that low yields will be felt across the whole Peninsula this year.

Or maybe further afield in McLaren Vale, where viti guru James Hook predicts that tonnages will be down, primarily due to drought restricting vigour, with smaller berries the norm. Across South Oz yields look low, though not to the same extent as 2019.

Again, it’s essential to understand that, outside of smoke taint affected areas, 2020 will likely be a broadly ‘good’ vintage, if a small one. And for some makers, it will be great, even in regions like the Hunter where smoke taint is a challenge. 2020 really is that variable!

Over in the west, for instance, Julian Langworthy of Deep Woods spoke to a colleague of mine recently with unadulterated excitement about the ’20 vintage (and crops look ok in Margs too), just to hammer home the inconsistencies. And despite the low yields, I’ve now heard from 3 Yarra producers pumped about 2020 quality too.

So where does that leave us? As I mentioned, vintage generalisations are lazy, and I shouldn’t be doing them. But at the same time, you should mark 2020 down with a vintage asterisk, as the variation from region to region is more profound than ever. And for a load of NSW producers in particular, 2020 won’t happen at all.

There is one broad statement I can make – there will be delicious wines. But finding them might not be as easy as normal…