VINTAGE DROPS
Vintage Drops - Luxury Travel Magazine
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Vintage Drops | |||||
| By: Kate De Brito, Issue 15 – Winter 2003 | |||||
| (Australian Wine Review) | |||||
| FROM LONDON TO LOS ANGELES, AUSTRALIA’S CULT AND ICON WINES ARE FINDING THEIR WAY ONTO THE VERY BEST DINNER TABLES. | |||||
| On one typical assignment, sommelier-to-the-stars Andrew Roper sourced five bottles of Penfolds’ iconic Grange Hermitage from the 1961 to the 1965 vintages worth about $30,000 and then flew to the United States to deliver them in time for a client’s dinner party .He fondly remembers the time he tracked down 10 cases of 1990 Grange for the Vatican at $700 a bottle and can lay claim to having cradled what is believed to be the world’s oldest wine, dating back to 1327. His most formidable challenge of late is to purchase one of six bottles of champagne recently raised from the wreck of the Titanic. Still believed to be eminently drinkable after decades in its watery cellar, the wine will cost Roper’s client about US$45,000 for a single bottle. The buyer, says Roper, will probably drink this timeless champagne over dinner. In the past eight years, Australian-born Roper, 39, has built an international reputation as a ‘wine detective’ who locates and acquires the world’s rarest, finest and most obscure wines. His work takes him to the four corners of the globe, from glitzy casinos to private cellars, and his clients include the world’s best restaurants, private collectors, investors and international celebrities and rock stars. He regularly supplies luxury cruise ships, and Las Vegas casinos use him to find wines to give to their high-rollers. To talk to Roper – who runs his business Wineflyers from Kew, Victoria – is to take a rare peek into the world of Australia’s cult and icon wines, the winemakers who create them, and the collectors who will do almost anything to get their hands on them. While ordinary wine lovers will instantly recognise the names of iconic Australian wines such as Penfolds Grange Hermitage or Henschke’s Hill of Grace, fewer are aware of the small cache of lesser-known Australian cult wines that fetch equally dizzying prices. While an iconic wine is usually produced in large volumes, cult wines are often produced in small runs of between 500 to 1,000 bottles a year. Richard Saleeba, director of the Victorian Wine Centre, says a cult wine has a certain premium quality – a point of difference – as well as a scarcity factor. “But it has to be of exceptional quality, not just rare,” he says. “A wine becomes extremely sought-after when it turns from being a beverage to being an art form. And like any great art it can also become a good investment.” Each wine-producing country has its share of cult and icon wines and Australia is no exception (see list). Take Chris Ringland’s Three Rivers Shiraz from the Barossa Valley. You won’t find it in your average bottle shop yet it’s one of the world’s most coveted Australian wines. A bottle of the latest vintage can fetch $1,400 on the auction market just weeks after release and older vintages fetch even higher prices. While some wines become cult wines by accident, Ringland purposely set about making a wine that would produce a decent return for a small yield. Which is not to say that the effort associated with producing a cult wine is less than producing a large volume. Cult wine producers are often part-master winemaker, part-magician and part-artist – and they labour unrelentingly over each drop. “I started with an idea of the style I wanted to produce – a rich, ripe, opulent wine that would mature for a long time and I decided to make it an extremely limited production which would add a degree of exclusivity, ”says Ringland. Three Rivers was then catapulted into the wine world’s stratosphere thanks to rave reviews by the influential US wine writer and critic Robert Parker Jr. The 1997 vintage, from a run of just 700 bottles, went on sale last month for $530 a bottle. Within weeks, restaurants in the US will on-sell his wine to dining customers for about $US1,000 a bottle. While Ringland planned his fame, Saleeba says many cult wines become that way by accident. “The wine may come from a single patch of dust, and that together with the climate and skill of the winemaker pulls together to create a truly great wine. Of course, there are also many people who set out to make a cult wine and don’t achieve it. Some carefully engineer their bottles and labels to stand out yet they still come up with just a very good wine, not a great one.” Part of Andrew Roper’s passion arises from knowing the best wines are ending up in loving homes. Most of his clients are wine experts, although some still grapple with the finer points of wine appreciation. Others are simply canny businesspeople who see cult and icon wines as sound investments, like property or art. “Cult wine is being driven out of America,” says Saleeba. “They are the biggest collectors in the world and wine is no exception. People get very passionate about it. They like to search out new wines, the way people seek out young artists and support them in their early days. ”World champion Formula 1 racing car driver Michael Schumacher is one of Roper’s regular clients, as is Maynard Keenan, lead singer of US band Tool, who recently bought an imperial of 1998 Grange Hermitage at auction for $64,000.“We source only the best wines for people who haven’t got time to look but have a lot of money,” says Roper. “We find wines for people to enjoy or to invest. We’re not a wine shop. I find the wines through my network of contacts and then buy them for the client.” It doesn’t always go quite as expected. Roper recalls a client who asked him to source a vintage bottle of $3,000 Chateau Petrus, widely regarded to be the world’s best merlot. When he delivered it to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, he watched as his client poured it into a Scotch glass and added Coca-Cola before drinking. “It was gut-wrenching but in a way it’s quite funny,” he says. Incidents like these are not so funny to the winemakers, many of whom become fiercely obsessive about their wines and resent the intrusion into their craft of people such as Roper. The man himself maintains it is all part of the wine business “even if they do see us as opportunists”. If Roper is an opportunist, then he’s a respectful one who loves, adores and even covets the wines he sells. The son of a wine auctioneer, he grew up around good wines and still drinks plenty of them with family and friends. A note of caution, however, is sounded by the Melbourne-based Langtons Fine Wine Auctions, which says investors should be careful investing in cult wines as their market record is erratic. “From an investor’s point of view,” it reports on its website www.langtons.com.au “the only certainty is change. The best advice is to learn from the most recent wave and invest in wines that could attract enthusiasm in the future. This means vintage year, size of wine production, regional provenance – and a certain amount of luck.” We’ll drink to that. | |||||
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