Wolf Blass: looking back on 40 years of Black Label

Wolf Blass has celebrated 40 years of its top-level Black Label wine with a one-off tasting of standout vintages from each of the last four decades.

Veteran Wolf Blass winemaker Chris Hatcher presents rare back vintages of Wolf Blass Black Label at a tasting at 67 Pall Mall in London

In a year that also marks the 50th anniversary of Wolf Blass producing his first wine since emigrating to Australia from Germany, chief winemaker Chris Hatcher used the back-vintage tasting to explain something of the stylistic evolution of Black Label since its first vintage in 1973.

The key difference between then and now was the focus, or lack of it, on viticulture, Hatcher explained.

“That’s probably been the biggest change I’ve seen since I’ve been in the industry,” he told journalists at the tasting, held at 67 Pall Mall.

“When I started, everyone was doing winemaking and we thought we could fix everything in the winery, which was great in one sense in that we brought good hygiene, we brought good microbiological controls and those sorts of things, but we probably didn’t spend enough time in the vineyards.

“Today it’s flipped over – so now during vintage our young winemakers will be out in the vineyards probably 70-80% of the time; when I started it was the complete reverse, like 80% in the winery, 20% in the vineyard.

“The younger guys are out there with the viticulture during the pruning time, right through the whole process to make sure we get want we want as far as fruit.”

A blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz from three principle vineyard sites, Wolf Blass Black Label is made from the estate’s best barrels each the year.

The blend is almost always Cabernet-dominant; only two vintages have had more Shiraz than Cabernet – 2001 and 2002 – though the percentages vary dramatically from year to year.

The principal source areas for the grapes are Barossa, McLaren Vale and Langhorne Creek. Since 2002 most vintages have also had a small proportion of old-vine Malbec from Langhorne Creek.

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The first vintage of Black Label was from the 1973 vintage. From the off, the wine made a huge impact in Australia, winning the highly coveted Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy in its first year, then again in 1974 and 1975.

To this day it remains the only wine ever to win the Jimmy Watson Trophy three times in succession, and the only wine ever to win the trophy four times in total.

“In that era, the Jimmy Watson was for the best one-year-old red and was the trophy everyone wanted to win in Australia,” explained Hatcher, who joined Wolf Blass in 1987 as senior winemaker for white and sparkling wines following stints at Kaiser Stuhl in Barossa and Simi Winery in California..

“Cape Mentelle [from Margaret River] have won it two years in a row since but to win it three times, it’s something that I don’t think will ever happen again.

“To win three in a row has got to be a fluke, to be honest.  There are just so many entries in it, that the chances of that happening are very, very low.”

The back-vintage tasting

The back-vintage tasting at 67 Pall Mall saw two wines from each of the past four decades presented to selected press. They included the 1974 (of which Wolf Blass now has just two bottles left in its possession) and the 1979 (of which only seven remain in the Wolf Blass cellar); the 1982 and 1984; the 1992 and the 1998 (which won Wolf Blass its fourth Jimmy Watson trophy); the 2002 and 2004; the 2010 and the current vintage of 2012.

“The interesting thing for me when we were putting it together, I went back through our show records and… I think this is the most-awarded red wine in Australia,” Hatcher explained.

“[There have been] 40 vintages [and] just over 300 gold medals now, so it works out to over seven gold medals a vintage,” he went on, adding that just one vintage had failed to win a gold medal in competitions in Australia – the 1994.

“There are very few wines in Australia that have lasted as premium wine for a 40-year period. Quite often companies would get success with the wine and commercialise it, so a lot of the really famous wines in Australia became quite large, commercial wines, and luckily [with] Black it was never done.

Explaining the stylistic changes, Hatcher explained that, though the Black Label had always been characterised by a plush mid-palate and soft tannins – “Wolf has always believed that wine should be ready to drink when it’s sold” – over the decades he and Blass had reduced the used of American oak and sought to promote fruit expression – a shift made possible by the company’s viticultural focus.

“I came to the industry in 1974 and we didn’t know anything about viticulture, to be honest,” he said. “Viticulture was a hobby for farmers in essence. There were some professional viticulturists but most of it was reasonably amateur – and they grew everything everywhere.

Wolf Blass Black Label 2012 with its special ’40th Vintage’ label (Photo: Wolf Blass)

“Back in the early 70s, Wolf used a lot of American oak to get the sweetness on the palate… where today we’re getting it from the fruit, so we don’t need all that oak.

So [we use] less oak today, [and] a much higher percentage of French oak – in the high 70s to 90%, where it used to all be American oak; and quite a high percentage of second-use barrels now compared to back in the early days, [when we used] all new barrels.

From vini to viti

Hatcher told how the transition from a cellar-focused to a viticultural approach was made possible by an explosion in the popularity of wine in Australia during the 1970s. This, he said, was a period in which the Australian wine industry began a period of maturation as investment money rolled in it sought to cater for a rapidly growing market.

“Roughly [in] ’69, I think in Australia [wine consumption] was around 9l per head – and in a 10-year period it went to 20l per head, so you had this huge explosion in wine consumption in Australia,” he said.

“A lot of it was because we had a lot of Italians and Greeks that came to Australia after the Second World War – most people don’t know that Melbourne is the second biggest Greek community outside Athens – and so those people got money and then they were buying restaurants and businesses and things, and there was that huge change in food culture in the 70s, and wine was part of that.

“So you had this huge change and the industry changed, and they planted a lot of grapes from probably the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and actually Australian went into surplus then, and that’s when we started exporting – that was the primary driver of export was our over-supply from planting in the late 70s and early 80s.

“That’s when we started really getting much more professional about viticulture, because people were investing large amounts of money in vineyards so they wanted to make sure they got it right.

Now, people are planting whole vineyards of Pinot Noir or Chardonnay in cool climates or Shiraz, whereas when I first came to the industry they planted everything everywhere – so they’d have Riesling and Shiraz and Cabernet all in the same vineyard. So it’s been a huge change.”

The 40th vintage of Wolf Blass Black Label, the 2012, is available now.