Balance is the secret of a good wine

Achieving balance in a wine is the secret to its drinkability. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe Source: National Features

GRAPE growers and winemakers spend a lot of time between their vineyards and barrel rooms working slavishly on every aspect of their final drops.

On wordy labels you'll read about tending vines to the last leaf, oak barrel selection from ancient French forests, a list of fruit salad flavours you might detect in a tropical rainforest cocktail, and whether or not the winemaker suggests hiding the bottle away in an underground tunnel for a decade before offering it to the gods.

You might also come across the term ``balance''. Winemakers work hard to achieve balance in their wines. Judges are besotted by it. Wine scribes spot it from a thousand paces. It's just simply one of the vinous holy grails.

But the great irony of a wine with balance is you shouldn't be able to taste any evidence of the winemaker's passion and perseverance to nail it. Such a cruel joke.

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Coonawarra-based Penley Estate winemaker Kym Tolley understands the conundrum to a tee. He talks about balance being a key feature in all Penley's wines, red and white, and brings into play as many winemaking and grape-tending techniques as he can to achieve it. With his Aradia Chardonnay it's all about finding the natural balance between fruit flavours and fresh and appealing acidity natural acidity, he emphasises.

But he understands people want to taste ripe rather than unripe, tart acidity in fruit flavours. Wild yeast fermentation and leaving the wine to sit on the solids that fall to the bottom of barrels after fermentation, known in the business as lees contact, adds both richness and depth as well, so it's not simply creating a fresh white wine without complexities.

"What we are trying to do with the chardonnay is have our cake and eat it too,'' Kym says. "We want a complex wine but we also want people to drink it too and not think about the complexity. ''

There you have the invisibility of that word "balance''. If something sticks out in a wine's taste and texture, it might just be tottering a bit, with a key component out of kilter.

A powerful, grippy red with a punch-in-the-face whack of tannins that feels like you've poured concrete into your mouth is, well, out of balance. You can barely taste the primary fruit and hardly want to drink another glass.

Some super fresh and hyper-active white wines taste a bit like drinking just-squeezed lemon juice and nothing else no fruit sweetness, no teeth enamel and plenty of reflux. Mmm, that doesn't sound like a wine in balance, either. Unfortunately it seems much easier to recognise such out-of-balance sensations than it is to simply see "smoothness''.

Too much oak makes a wine taste more woody than fruity. A bit of each singing in tune is a far better experience, but often harder to pick apart and see the separate voices on their own.

In short, James Halliday describes the meaning of balance perfectly in his Australian Wine Encyclopedia as "the harmony between the different components of wine including alcohol, acidity, sweetness, tannins, oak (where used) and fruit flavour''.

Fair and squarely in the home territory of Australia's renowned Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon, Kym Tolley also knows he has to keep an eye on taming the way that variety can at times deliver a huge, grabby mouthful of black tea-like tannins.

It's a natural characteristic of the cabernet grape, but can be overwhelmingly grainy and tough on the tastebuds if not treated with respect.

Penley's engine room cabernet is known as Phoenix and offers great value at around $18. It has beautiful perfume, almost with lifts of musk and licks of blackcurrant syrup flavours; oak is well and truly in the background.

The tannins you expect to be there come to life in the middle of the palate and are delicate enough to hold the wine in your mouth for quite some time while the rest show their colours as well.

"That's exactly what we want to do,'' Kym says. "The length that you get in any good wine starts there and just keeps on going.''

The same goes with Penley's Gryphon Merlot, where the winemaking starts in the vineyard, cutting back the volume of grapes per vine so flavour intensity concentrates in fewer bunches.

The result is vibrant, dark plum fruit, followed by a fancy textural minerality in the mouth, again achieved by a delicate touch in pressing and handling the wine as it's made.

Kym admits too there is a lot of new oak in this $18 wine as well, but you just don't see that much when you taste it.

The result: there's that word again. Balance. If you pull it apart, go through it with a fine-tooth comb, you might detect some youthful acidity. You might see a faint touch of wood. And there's a finesse to the tannins that don't dry out your sensory organs.

But you'll also see bright, cheerful fruit and all the bits and pieces in play together underneath. Put it in your mouth and drink it and the balance comes into play.

"We've all been led down the track of huge, ripe red wines, but we are very mindful of something more important," Kym says. "Drinkability is the key. We want people to put these wines in their mouth and just drink.''