Although Australians heartily embraced pizza, pasta, olive oil and coffee, Italian-style wines, with their signature bitterness, astringency, texture and savouriness, were originally less appealing to local palates. Australian consumers and wine show judges alike needed some convincing before accepting these styles.
Pizzini wines
Fred Pizzini, of Pizzini in the King Valley, was among the first, in the late ’90s, to enter his Italian-speaking wines in the Australian wine show system. Initially, he submitted his sangiovese and nebbiolo to the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show, immediately receiving the judges’ approval. However, the story was different when entering the same wines into mainstream shows. He remembers comments such as ‘extractive’, ‘bitter’, and questions over ‘astringency’.
Fred’s winemaking style was quite deliberate. He would raise the fermentation temperature on his nebbiolo up to 31°C for a few hours and then drop it to around 25°C. “The hotter the ferment, you sort of cook away that tutti-frutti flavour and end up with more of a savoury note on the back of your palate,” he explains.
Fermenting at lower temperatures, he adds, often leads to – in his opinion – a one-dimensional palate, and doesn’t allow for savouriness, resulting in a fruit-forward wine. The early wines of Pizzini, closer in style to traditional, age-worthy Barolos, were not well understood by Australian consumers who were used to softer, fruitier reds. Fred Pizzini is not a trained winemaker. His family, like many other Italian immigrants in the King Valley during the ’60s and ’70s, were tobacco growers. When growing tobacco became financially unviable, many turned to what they had known for generations: grape growing.
The breakthrough moment for Pizzini was during a lunch with Walter Bourke of Melbourne’s legendary Walter’s Wine Bar in 1997. “I said, ‘I’ll bring down the sangiovese for you to taste'," Fred remembers. “Walter cooked lunch and he took out a sangiovese from Tuscany and we drank that, and then I dragged my unlabelled bottle of wine out, and he absolutely loved it.”
Since then, Pizzini sangiovese has graced the tables of the best restaurants in Melbourne and beyond. “That was pretty much a turning point that made us focus and stay focused on the wine styles and varieties of northern Italy,” he says. “If not for Walter and others, we would probably have made the wine for ourselves and still be making shiraz, cabernet and riesling.”
Gary Baldwin AM, a respected winemaker, wine consultant and wine judge, partly sees Fred’s point: “I have no doubt that the [early Italian-style wines] were not well understood, but when these wines first appeared in wine shows they were made from young vines, and they did tend to have winemaking issues.” Technical winemaking ruled at that time, notes Gary, and even minor faults were viewed as sacrilege.
But, just as the years can make a person wiser, so the vines of Italian grape varieties grew older and the quality of fruit improved, as did viticulture and winemaking practices. “I think the role of amaro-style bitterness in wines that were intended to go with food – a very Italian approach – stumped some judges and writers,” Gary adds.
Primo Estate wines
Australian makers traditionally celebrated bold, ripe, sunshine-or-meal-in-a-glass wines that could easily be enjoyed without food. Italian-Australian wine producers moved in the opposite direction. So, too, Italian grape varieties that lived life large and in technicolour. “Italian varieties have brought a whole new world of colours, aromas, flavours and textures to Australia,” notes Joe Grilli of Primo Estate, “and, most importantly, an even stronger connection between wine and food.
“Italian varieties, unheard of in Australia 20 years ago, now proliferate.” Sangiovese, nero d’Avola, barbera, montepulciano, fiano, glera (prosecco), and giant-killing pinot grigio, which is on track to replace sauvignon blanc as the nation’s second-most planted white grape, are now well entrenched in our wine vernacular. And while he agrees that the Australian wine industry remains French-centric in its choice of varieties, Joe sees a future for both the French and the Italians in our soil. “Viva la differenza! We need both in Australia.”
De Bortoli wines
Leanne de Bortoli of De Bortoli also credits the adventurous, ‘have a go’ spirit of Australian drinkers. “Look at how popular pinot grigio and sangiovese are,” she says. “Prosecco is now very mainstream.”
Sabella Vineyards wines
Michael Petrucci of Sabella Vineyards in McLaren Vale sees this Italian influence as both an enrichment and opportunity. “It has diversified our range as a country and opened the entire nation’s winemaking to a broad new scope of styles and types of wines.” Michael observes that while local producers may have learnt skills and techniques from Italian producers, they have adapted them to Australian conditions: terroir, climate, and consumer tastes.
“A nero d’Avola from McLaren Vale can differ greatly from those made in Sicily, although the grape is the same,” he stresses. And while he uses yeasts from Sicily and tries to emulate the country’s graphite-like style, his nero tends to be more medium-bodied and approachable in its youth. Michael, like so many Italian-Australian winemakers, is fond of savouriness in his wines for a very specific reason.
“Savouriness is length, it lasts longer on the palate, and if you are sitting down with food, it’s a match made in heaven.” While the Italian culture remains strong in second and third generation Italian-Australians, do they see it as the key to their winemaking success?
Zema Estate wines
Nick Zema of Zema Estate is a proud Coonawarra vigneron, first and foremost, but there was a time when he dreamt of producing a fine nebbiolo. Realisation hit him hard. The year was 1994 and an opportunity came up to work vintage at Elio Altare in Piemonte, a winery renowned for its long-lived Barolos. “During lunch, Elio Altare asked me what I hoped to learn from my rip. I told him I had planted nebbiolo and wanted to learn as much as I could to help me produce great nebbiolo wines in Coonawarra,” he remembers.
“He thought long and hard and said to me, ‘The best advice I can give you is to go back to Coonawarra and pull those vines out!’” Nick had to admit that Elio had a point. Why make nebbiolo, a finicky grape variety that grows successfully in Piemonte and selected parts of Lombardia and Valle d’Aosta, and not cabernet sauvignon? Coonawarra was already well-known for world-class cabernets, and Elio urged Nick to stay true to himself and his land.
Italian immigrants and generations of Italian-Australian winemakers have brought great change to the Australian wine industry; change for the better. Wines inspired with a love for their ancestral land and made with a passion and knowledge inherited from their nonni have, over the decades, been adapted to embrace some of the more technical aspects of winemaking here.
“It was a blend of Australian scientific expertise and traditional Italian styles and techniques that have actually changed the industry for the better,” adds Gary Baldwin. Italy’s loss has definitely been Australia’s gain.
