The longevity of Peter Lehmann’s “everyday drinking” Shiraz
By John Schreiner
October 24, 2007
Australian winemaker Peter Lehmann has been making Shiraz in the Barossa Valley for the best part of three decades.
Recently, the winery has been celebrating its history by hosting massive vertical tastings in cities around the world – tastings that go back to the 1980 vintage. The winery has just about exhausted its library of back vintages and will do only one more such tasting (and that one is in New Zealand).
The penultimate tasting, however, was recently staged in Vancouver, perhaps because Peter Lehmann has many wines in this market and a long relationship with British Columbia consumers.
Surprisingly, the wine in the spotlight is not Lehmann’s outstanding Stonewell Shiraz ($82 a bottle), not its Eight Songs Shiraz ($49) or its Black Queen Shiraz ($37.50).
The wine in question is simply Barossa Shiraz ($25), the label that launched Peter Lehmann almost three decades ago. “This is our everyday drinking wine,” said Ian Hongell, one of Lehmann’s senior winemakers.
Today, Peter Lehmann Shiraz is a 150,000-case brand. Wineries usually do not do vertical tastings of large brands because most people don’t cellar such wines for any length of time. The lesson of this tasting is that wines as soundly made as the Peter Lehmann Shiraz can be cellared to good effect. Ian Hongell, Senior Winemaker
James Halliday has described Peter Lehmann as “the personification of the Barossa Valley.” He was born there in 1930 and his German forebears had arrived there a century earlier. After starting his career with Yalumba, he spent 19 years with a winery called Saltram.
In 1979, Seagrams bought Saltram – with exquisite timing. There was a grape surplus in the Barossa and Seagrams was about to dump many of the Saltram growers. It would have been Peter Lehmann’s job to do the dirty work. Instead, he resigned. Determined not to let the growers down, he formed what would ultimately become Peter Lehmann Winery, which had its first vintage in 1980.
Against the odds of a difficult wine market (the surplus lasted much of the decade), the venture succeeded. Lehmann, who also survived colon cancer during this time, became a Barossa legend, beloved by the growers. The winery still relies on 185 growers for about 98% of the grapes it needs.
The 1982 vintage explains why Lehmann became a beloved icon in the Barossa. He would not turn away growers. The Tuesday after Easter that year is still recalled at the winery as Black Tuesday. The growers had picked all weekend. On Tuesday morning Lehmann and his staff “were greeted with a line up of trucks, tractors and utes” more than two km long. By the time the winery finished crushing at three the next morning, about 900 tonnes of grapes had been processed, a lot of which was made into fortified wine because it had a longer shelf life.
Peter Lehmann’s experience with Seagrams seems to have made him wary of big conglomerates. His winery listed on the stock exchange in 1993. In 2002, he discovered that Allied Domecq, the European giant, was accumulating Lehmann shares. So he went shopping for more congenial owners, settling for The Hess Group from Switzerland, who finally ended up with 86% of the company. Peter Lehmann and a few other shareholders own the rest. Hess has not messed with the unique personality of Lehmann’s Barossa winery.
In general, the vintages of the 1980s are past their prime but still drinking well. They have become delicate and light, with ephemeral aromas.
In that decade, Peter Lehmann made do with limited resources. He had no barrels at all for the 1980 vintage (which was sold for $25 a case in 1982 and one had to buy a minimum of five cases). Starting in 1981, Lehmann began aging the wine in large, used American oak puncheons. The winery could afford some new oak barrels by the late 1980s – and those barrels were first used to age Stonewell.
Even today, when French oak has come into the mix, the Barossa Shiraz is never heavily oaked. Maximum time in barrel is 12 months because, as Hongell explained, the winery needs to empty the barrels for the succeeding vintage.
You gotta love Barossa Shiraz
The 1990s for Lehmann began with winning the Jimmy Watson Trophy in 1990. The trophy is awarded to Australia’s best year-old red wine. This helped put the winery on the map.
The Shiraz wines from the 1990s, when French oak was introduced, show significantly more life and flavour, because they are younger and because the winery had begun to work more closely with growers, ensuring that grapes were picked when ripe, not just when the growers were ready to pick. Average alcohol levels, which had been 12% to 13%, now moved up until reaching 14.5% in recent vintages.
The standout wines from that decade, in my judgment, are 1992, 1996 and 1998. Lehmann’s notes refer to 1998 as the best vintage of Shiraz since the winery was founded.
The Shiraz wines from the current decade are being made in a slightly more generous style, with riper fruit flavours and softer tannins. Currently, there may be some of the excellent 2004 Peter Lehmann Shiraz in liquor stores, gradually being supplanted by the 2005 vintage, another good vintage.
Buy either wine. These wines are remarkably consistent across the vintages, which explains why the winery has had the confidence to show off with its everyday Shiraz, not its icons.
John Schreiner is author of British Columbia Wine Country
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