Why the rise of the micro-cuvee is a serious misstep in the onwards march of Margaret River Cabernet

Peaking perhaps in the mid 90’s on the Right Bank a movement took place termed the ‘garagistes’. The proprietors fashioned extreme styled cuvees based on new oak and ripe fruit, in small volumes aimed at high prices and backed by favourable reviews (generally from a certain American critic). Most eventually went by the wayside into oblivion, or back to more reasonable prices though a few notable exceptions including Le Pin and arguably Valandraud held onto their cult status. A decade later the trend hit the Barossa Valley, with the backing of the same critic & based on very old vines and a similar extremity of style. Some of these continue to attract big prices though most now sit in the market at a price relative to the inherent quality of the wine.

The Cloudburst Effect

Twenty years on from its Right Bank peak, the Garagiste movement finally reached Western Australia. We didn’t have Robert Parker but we did have another American man, one by the name of Will Berliner. He moved to the area and planted a small vineyard on land possibly (by his admission) better suited to avocados. The detail and attention in the vineyard was second to none, and the resulting wine, a 2010 cabernet was (all things considered) nothing short of spectacular. Almost as spectacular was the price, launched at $150 US dollars, whilst nowadays a current release will set you back around $350. Before long, those who had first looked on with curiosity were now looking on with jealousy, both at the exquisite juice he had created and also the jaw-dropping prices he could sell it for. It was, incredibly, all created by a man with no experience in the industry & from infant vines. And just like that, the first Margaret River micro-cuvee had been born.

The first dominoes began to fall and they fell rather quickly indeed. Vineyards that had been planted in the same year, on the same soil suddenly found a miraculous ‘special site’ within them, or if not there, they found that their special element was located in the winery instead and a few barrels just had(!) to be bottled separately. Emerging from the shadows of the reserve wines came the ‘reserve reserves’. Before you could say ‘Willyabrup with two L’s’, our producers had taken note of Cloudburts aspirational prices, but more doubtful perhaps was how closely they were looking at his hard work in the vineyard and what methods they could slowly adapt given that from a quality perspective, many of them had been convincingly leapfrogged. [EDIT] In my mind, and I can’t overstate this enough, what Will did was absolutely brilliant & showed the way for the incredible potential of the region. His vision, hard work and networking should have been admired then as it should be now, but I nevertheless doubt that some looking on took the right message from it – not something I pin on Will at all.

All that said, some of the wines were of course, completely justifiable. The flag bearer for this new wave was perhaps the Vasse Felix ‘Tom Cullity’, first released in 2013 at more than double the price of their previous reserve wine the ‘Heytesbury’: a more than reasonable development given the historical importance and quality of the old vines on the property. The treasure that is Cullen went a year earlier with ‘the Vanya’ (these days at $400+), and variations have been spawned that align to the biodynamic calendar. It’s a curiosity only and I make no point from it, but throw in the Diana Madeline and Kevin John and from what I can deduce, they now have more different wines at over $120 than the entirety of the St Julien appellation. Further inland and things arguably made less sense. Heading a long list, the likes of Thompson, Ashbrook, Cape Grace, Fraser Gallop & recently even Rosily have jumped on board to craft a wine in smaller volumes at roughly double (and sometimes much more) the price of their previous top Cabernet. In an appellation (forgive me, GI) that stretches for 100 km North to South, encompassing over 400, 000 hectares, of which a large deal of it is very suitable for the vine, it seemed every producer became suddenly and thoroughly convinced that they were in possession of the Southern Hemispheres equivalent of the last six rows of Malconsorts. And just like that, the regions greatest strength: it’s ability to create great wines on a reasonable scale had all of a sudden became a self inflicted weakness.

This one is for the fans

Sometimes the best thing you can do in business is put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re trying to sell to which is of course the end consumer. As a general rule, this person is looking for value, reliability and quality: if you steadily increase a wines price over a long period you can gauge how the market is receiving it & there is some order to it all. Yet the prices for these new wines seemed opportunistic and random. By pricing them at double or triple the price of the previous top cabernet, the customer had no idea if what they were buying represented value or not. For the most part the trade gleefully jumped on board of course, eager to rise to the challenge & convince us these wines were worth it. Sure, a price rise was due: as consumers we’d had it pretty good for a long time but for every vineyard that took a steady and sensible approach there were five who jumped into a questionable shortcut. The result of course was not many were able to drink to their price point even if they were inherently good wines. Subsequently it became a dangerous game for consumers to play, and I guarantee you disenchantment & disappointment has often been the result. Consider those who have bought these small production wines, out of loyalty or perhaps as a ‘late in the day’ cellar door purchase only to find it at half the price six months later dumped in anonymity somewhere on the web (where so many have ended up – trust me). What a way to do business(!), reward your enthusiastic customer who has come in to visit you by charging them full tote odds, whilst the anonymous person on the other end of an email gets a bargain just because he or she happens to be on the right mailing list. Are those consumers, the loyal ones who were dealt with face to face entitled to feel a little cheated, or is that just how the industry works sometimes?

Even when these wines have lived up to their price, I believe the consumer can and has become sick & tired of the hype train of yet another premium bottling. A 98/100 from a certain critic who tends to be generous & a price to go with it might (reasonably of course) induce feelings of pride for the vineyard responsible who have worked tirelessly for decades to produce such a wine, but to the consumer it means little: it’s just another exclusive wine in a crowded ocean of them. Indeed for every person that thinks ‘I must have this’, there are many, many more who are worried that they will no longer be able to afford their favourite wines, or indeed the best wines from their favourite producers. These are people who have been a vineyard’s loyal customer & they should matter because when times are tough they will stick by you. Lets take Juniper for example, a fantastic little vineyard on Tom Cullity drive. The Estate cabernet is a reliably good wine & has (not unreasonably) steadily doubled in price over the last five to ten years. Like I say, a price was no doubt due. But those who have been loyally buying for years now, happy to absorb that price increase are now faced with a cellar full of wines that once were the vineyards top bottling yet now sit on the third tier of the Juniper hierarchy. The reality is that you cannot add without taking, even if it’s just perception. And of course what is in the bottles already purchased hasn’t changed, but it’s worth understanding that wine buyers are a shallow bunch & can be fickle with buying habits over silly things like this. Loyalty is hard to build yet oh-so-easy to lose. 

Speaking of loyalty, I wonder if most people who buy Moss Wood do so because the new vintage is supposedly the best ever (possibly for the fifth time this decade according to our much respected local critic – but who’s counting…). People may have short attention spans but they also have long memories. Is it time to give the audience some credit, if not some respite? The vines go deeper into the sub soil each year, the vignerons knowledge of their terroir & skills in the winery theoretically improve each year. And inevitably of course the prices go up almost every year: so forgive me here but …. shouldn’t the damn wines be improving? Seriously. The press from Moss Wood themselves is always sensible, informative and reserved, but the circus that surrounds it is nauseating. I understand it’s an industry wide thing and nothing to do with Margaret River specifically but as naive as this sounds, as West Australians can’t we be better than that? Without question the reason Moss Wood has little trouble selling its wine because every time you pull an old bottle from the cellar it is sublime, reinforcing a reputation that has been built over such a long time period that even those who haven’t experienced older vintages know they are buying a great wine that they can cellar with confidence. Yet this consistency of branding is, sadly, completely undervalued & it is getting interrupted far too often in the post-Cloudburst era. Personally I am extremely disenchanted with how infrequently these small production wines have been called out by the Australian wine media, either for being opportunistic or simply just poor value and sometimes I wonder if writers who should be on the consumers team are actually more comfortable playing on the other side of the fence? I make this point gently, at no-one specifically & with respect but still, it is a point that needed to be made.

Perhaps instead of all the hype can we please have more reliability and more information about wines already in our cellars? Or are we just pawns lining up to be hoodwinked into buying as much of the next vintage as humanly possible? The wines are getting very expensive now and as much as we expect them to perform in the cellar to our own drinking window preferences, we would occasionally like some guidance every now and then. Where is that person, that vineyard, that source of information to tell us (for example) that 07’s are maturing quicker than expected, or that the 11’s are shut down at present. This information is so readily available on Bordeaux wines, and whilst I understand that it’s a massive machine over there I still don’t think it’s too much to ask. To the trade: we get that you’re excited about the new vintage or the fancy new wine but you hold so much knowledge that you can share to keep us coming back and strengthen our rapport.

Recognition, recognition.

If the rapid emergence of the micro-cuvee in the post-Cloudburst era had been nothing more than a slight nuisance for the local consumer, then you could argue the greater damage has been its slowing of the onwards march into international markets. Personal bias perhaps, but I honestly doubt theres a single region / varietal match up in the world as underrated as Margaret River cabernet. These wines should be slotting seamlessly into the cellars of every claret lover around the globe. I don’t know why as it’s absolutely nothing to do with me, but it upsets me: I’d just love to see the kind of people who would love these wines drinking them. I want to fly over and literally put these bottles in peoples hands, in their glasses and say ‘drink this wonderful liquid work of art – you’ll love it’.

Yet it’s 2021 now, the region has had a sensational decade quality wise (my minor nitpicking aside), yet still the wines aren’t penetrating. It’s anecdotal, and granted a small sample size but if you follow hundreds of Bordeaux and Napa lovers like I do on Instagram and cellar tracker you’ll discover that they seldom drink Margaret River wines. And when they do occasionally drink an Australian wine, it’s a South Australian Shiraz. Search ‘Margaret River’ in the numerous wine forums for Bordeaux and cabernet lovers and you’ll find there are more mentions for an obscure, misfiring fifth growth than of anything happening over here. Again it only forms a small part of the picture, but my favourite wine writer is a Londoner called Joss Fowler. He has the most eloquent way of describing wine, is insightful on the industry and writes (less frequently nowadays unfortunately) with beautifully phrased philosophical passages woven in. I’d love to hear his thoughts on some of my favourite local wines, yet type ‘Margaret River’ into the search bar and you’ll receive no results. Not one.

For the most part the local market snaps them up keenly I hear you say. Perhaps for now, and Covid has helped no doubt, but I believe a crisis or at least a squeeze is coming. The demand for premium and ultra-premium wine in Australia has a limit on it & given the quality coming out of the region at all levels its hard to see how we can absorb it all at the prices these wines deserve or aspire to. If prices do continue to rise at what point does the local market simply say ‘sorry old chap, we’ve maxed out our collective credit card’? Naturally a stronger focus could then shift overseas, with many of these potential new customers likely to want the best wines, only to find that many of them now are (self inflicted of course) made in such tiny quantities and potentially representing questionable value: setting quite a task for the whole operation. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the type of person who buys a case of Lynch Bages each year (rathen than Echo) will take a lot of convincing that they should also put a case of third tier Juniper (and I’m not picking on them – I love them) along side it, even if the reality is that they should.

I’ve heard it said (and I vehemently disagree now more than ever) that our wines must be expensive to be taken seriously. This is the information era and the opposite is surely true. The wines must compete toe to toe with their peers, they simply have(!) to be good value and not a victim of this random ‘pick a price roughly double or triple what we sell the other cabernet for and see how it sells’ attitude. The toxic arrogance I hear from producers and people in the industry who are dismissive of Bordeaux is so misguided. Whatever you may think of the wines, the Bordelaise aren’t stupid and have been adjusting to the global market conditions for centuries. To take any further market share off them will be a challenge in itself. It will be up to the palates of international wines lovers if they are perceived to be value: in the information age it’s still hard to be found, but there’s also nowhere to hide.

One weapon in this that is chronically under utilised is the message about how well our wines age. I stopped buying decanter magazine not long after an issue four or five years ago, where a big Margaret River tasting took place, with most of the wines given a bizarrely short cellaring life of 3-5 years: about a full decade before I’d be opening the best of them.[Edit] Since publishing this article an individual sent me a story of their recent experience with a bottle of 1977 Margaret River Cabernet, one they themselves had made. Recently he served it blind to friends who guessed it to be from the mid 2000’s and thought it to be particularly wonderful indeed. Back to decanter, and the following issue featured not one single letter from an angry Australian pointing out this stupidity. I’m not even in the industry yet it made my blood boil: what did our producers think I wonder, or were they simply out for a surf?

It seems to me that efforts to spread this message & get these wines into peoples cellars overseas seem scant on the ground. I’m not important, nor wealthy enough to attend the Cape Mentelle tasting but like a few no doubt I follow intently and with fascination. I’m sure someone can explain it but as an outsider it baffles me that the event doesn’t find a way to showcase more older wines. Jancis Robinson coming out and mistaking Cape Mentelle itself for Mouton was on the surface remarkable & exciting for our wines until you consider the frequency that this kind of thing happens under blind conditions. I read extensively and would point out that even wines from less propitiously situated appellations such as Roc de Cambes, Sociando Mallet and even Clos Manou(!) occasionally outscore or are mistaken for First Growths or their right bank equivalents in blind tastings. It happens with young wines: the real test comes later. What would have been more exciting would be to read from her how incredible multiple fifteen or twenty year old wines were in comparison to their Bordeaux or otherwise equivalents. Except that half the wines would probably called be something else now. And where on Earth(!) seriously (!?) is our own equivalent of the Southwold ten years on tasting: Australian wine media please tell me why aren’t we reading more about these wines as they blossom wonderfully with age? If they really do ‘compete effortlessly with Bordeaux’ and we want claret lovers world wide to put these wines in their cellar it seems to be there needs to be some kind of strategy, a message of confidence & reassurance that these wines develop soundly from people who know what they’re talking about.

The other thing I think would help, and again the micro-cuvees are in my opinion a hindrance to this, is to simplify the needlessly complicated cabernet hierarchies that exist in even our smallest vineyards. Too many small producers make an incredibly vast array of wines, often competently, but rarely do they reach great heights: the whole focus of the operation is spread too thin. I understand the logic in that cellar door focussed vineyards need to offer different types of wines at varying price points, but sometimes you have to consider taking one step back to take two forward. One vineyard that makes incredible wines across the board is Woodlands. It’s a big call/throwaway line but personally I consider the Woodlands top cabernet to be of roughly Second Growth quality. But my suspicion is that their whole set up is just far too complicated to ever penetrate international markets when competing against the simplicity and history of (just for example) a Leoville-Poyferre. And what a silly thing it is to hold you back. Yet by the time you’ve explained to a friend, or an enthusiast online, or a customer in your wine shop in London that the ‘Margaret’ is not specifically named because of Margaret River, that the Clementine and Clementine-Eloise are two different wines but both cabernet based, that the Clementine-Eloise and the Chloe Anne though are believe-it-or-not the same wine, but from different years and the Chloe-Anne and the Chloe are different again and one is actually a Chardonnay which also grows well in Margaret River (it’s ok to take a breath now), everyone has well and truly given up and that person has already paid for and most likely drunk their Poyferre (and maybe even blogged about it).

Simplicity is just so underrated. Can someone please bring it back to Margaret River before it implodes into (yet another) 10 000 pieces?