There’s nothing on the nose about wine-tasting — not any more, anyway

The wine world is replete with stories about supertasters who can identify, with one sniff of a glass of wine, the vineyard, variety, vintage and name of the winemaker. Mostly this is the stuff of legend. There was a time when such performances were possible, but this was ages ago and mainly in the UK, where the focus of the carriage trade was fewer than 70 different wines from France’s Médoc region.

The challenge for competitors in blind-tasting competitions is now vastly more complex. There are many hundreds of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Rhone wines worthy of consideration, and thousands of wines of comparable stature from Australia, New Zealand, SA, Argentina, Chile, the US and Canada. Then add to these numbers the Super-Tuscans, wines made by bordeaux producers in China and burgundy producers in Oregon.

To make things even tougher for contestants, the taste of a grape variety is never a constant. It’s easier to talk about the flavour profile of a cultivar in the context of a region. It’s certainly possible to talk about how a particular winemaker handles a variety.

In the era of big, bold Australian reds it was sometimes impossible to say with any certainty whether a wine was made with shiraz or cabernet sauvignon. What was evident was super-ripe red fruit and dollops of oak, usually expressed as a marzipan-coconut note, an aromatic derived from American barrels. Even sauvignon blanc, which often presents itself as “grassy” and “herbaceous”, can be rendered in many different ways, depending on the climatic conditions around the vineyard, how early the fruit was harvested and whether the wine was finished in oak.

Some factors determining the taste of the varietal are regional, others are seasonal and some are the result of strategies employed by the winemaker. If the grapes ripen in a period of intense heat, there’s little the cellarmaster can do to recover the nuances that have been scorched from the skins of the grapes. If he anticipated the heatwave, he would have made decisions about the leaf canopy to minimise sunburn. However, he cannot hope to achieve the same result as a producer in a cooler site, perhaps one in higher latitudes — with longer summer daylight hours.

Even in a single country, sometimes in a single region, there can be a vast difference in the styles of wine made from a single variety. Wade Metzer’s two different chenins, both sourced from old vineyards on granitic soils (one site more maritime, the other on steeper slopes) reflect his style of winemaking: they are tightly structured, quite zesty, showing more of the pear-drop and honeysuckle notes. Compare them with Bellingham’s The Bernard Old Vine Chenin from the same vintage. The Bellingham is made in a richer, fuller style, presenting fruit compote notes, greater viscosity, more opulence. All three wines are made from the fruit of ancient chenin vineyards. Metzer seeks leanness and precision, Richard Duckitt has opted for greater fullness, the richness held in check with concentrated freshness.

You could undertake the same exercise with cabernet. Here Metzer, with his 2018, has chosen the richer, riper route, consciously ensuring that none of the greener notes associated with the variety appear in his finished wine.

The Waterkloof Circumstance, also Stellenbosch cabernet, also from the same vintage, retains a delicate herbal freshness. Winemaker Nadia Langenegger has chosen savouriness over plushness, just as Metzer has opted for density over spice.

It used to be fashionable for winemakers to say, with false modesty" “I don’t make the wine — good wine is grown in the vineyard.” There’s obviously some truth to that: you can’t make fine wine from compromised fruit. But to state the obvious, the role of winemakers is key. They are like an obstetrician attending a difficult birth — there’s no changing the DNA, but much can go wrong en route to a satisfactory outcome.