Red Wine Grapes
 The most important of the black grapes grown in Australia for the
making of red wines is the shiraz, often misnamed hermitage. It is
important because it is a prolific bearer in comparison with some
others, because it makes a wine that will mature relatively quickly and
to which smaller amounts of other varieties may be added to give the
wine a different character. It is common practice in Australia to blend
small amounts of the cabernet sauvignon grape with the shiraz, for one
of the qualities of wine made from the shiraz grape is that it will
readily allow the flavor and bouquet of the wine with which it is
blended "to come through". Thus, as little as 20 percent of cabernet
sauvignon, added to shiraz, will make a wine with a distinctive
"cabernet nose" -and flavor.
The winemaker is able, by blending his red wines, and his whites, too,
to produce a range of wines with infinite and distinct variation.
Blending also tends to produce more mature wines, for some of the
smaller additions mature much slower than the basic shiraz, thus
allowing the blend to gain "bottle age" and quality.
One of the problems in identifying a wine on the merchant's shelf is in
recognizing the varietal names and of knowing what to expect from the
wine in the bottle, for sometimes a variety of wine grape grown in one
district may be called by a different name from the same variety grown
in another. To add further to the difficulty, the wine of one variety of
grape may be, and often is, quite different in flavor from the wine made
of the same variety in another district. Perhaps the best example of
this is the Hunter River Red Hermitages, made of the same grape variety
as the South Australian shiraz reds, but distinctly different in bouquet
and flavor.
A later secion deals in some detail with the varieties of grapes and the
wines they produce. In this section we will limit ourselves to listing
the varietal names of the grapes used to make each type of wine and
identifying those which are synonyms for another.
Red wine grapes:
Shiraz: Red Hermitage, Black Shiraz, Petite Syrah
Mataro: Esparto
Blue Imperial: Cinsaut, Oeillade
Red wine grapes which have no other names are:
Cabernet sauvignon, grenache, malbec, pivot meuniere, pivot noir.
The wines made from these grape varieties, or from blends of them, vary
in color from quite pale red (but not the pink of the rose wines) to
light red-brown, ruby, very dark red and sometimes to a red with a
distinct purplish tinge. The palate differences are more difficult to
describe. The pale reds usually are delicate in flavor, sometimes
slightly acid. The red-brown wines, a characteristic of many of the
mature Hunter River reds, usually are fuller in flavor and if they are
Hunter wines, have an earthiness that is distinctive. The ruby and very
dark red wines of northern and western Victoria and the southern part of
South Australia, are very -big" in flavor and because of their bigness,
often a little "out of balance"—that is, having a little too much of one
element, usually an acid, or too little of it, giving an impression of
sweetness.
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