SF Gate

Shiraz has been Australia's boon and bane. It has taken blame for the tanking of the market for high-end Australian wine - cursed as the grape that strove to be both fancy and populist at the same time.

There is, however, a quieter story in the Australian fold. The country's Grenache has been an untapped resource - not as part of ubiquitous if sometimes underwhelming GSM (Grenache-Syrah-Mourvedre) blends, but as its own beast.

First, though, you must believe that everything we think we know about Grenache is wrong. It is not a prissy grape. Nor is it a low-acid bumbler that delivers a simple wall of berry fruit.

Not just like Pinot Noir

A frequent analogy to Pinot Noir is flawed, but in a warm-climate way Grenache can deliver the same transparency and perfume as Pinot. Yet if Pinot withers with heat and alcohol, Grenache thrives; a 15 percent Pinot Noir is a monstrosity, while a 15 percent Grenache can beam with aromatic finesse. Pinot runs from warmth; Grenache craves it.

There are caveats.

One: Grenache requires a delicate hand, as with Pinot, in part because it's so prone to being spoiled by oxygen and in part because it's easy to turn a subtle grape into a stupefied one.

Two: It needs to find its way without much new oak. Just as oak dulls all but the most powerful Pinot, ditto Grenache.

And, finally: Grenache is often best left to speak on its own. This is a point for debate, but finely tended old-vine Grenache has the ability to make complete, compelling wine.
Century-old vines

Shiraz - or Syrah - thrives in the same cool as Pinot. So if the common gripe about Australian Shiraz is its heft and the hot climes from which it hails, these same things should make Grenache a superstar. Ding the Barossa for its heat if you like, but that same heat has been a happy home for old bush vines of Grenache, sometimes dating a century or so back to the region's days as a source of fortified wines.

Amazing, nuanced wines are coming from vines lucky enough to have endured the country's succession of vine-pull schemes; farmers were paid to yank out elderly specimens in favor of the new and trendy, a move that some plant lovers might view as a vine equivalent of the Cultural Revolution.
Australian ambivalence

None of this has helped Grenache stake its claim. As Gavin Speight of Old Bridge Cellars, a leading importer of Australian wine, puts it, "Australia has never really fully been behind Grenache."

Add to that a certain style of overheated, overblown Grenache with nearly offensive alcohol levels - beyond 17 percent - and there's a belief that Australian Grenache tastes like strawberry cough drops soaked in grain alcohol.

Yet true believers are out there. Roman Bratasiuk of Clarendon Hills expresses his Grenache in six different bottlings, each from rare McLaren Vale vines dating to the 1920s near Blewitt Springs, aged in mostly older wood. They are as expressive and perfumed (and as expensive) as many subtle iterations of Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

An example like the 2007 Romas Vineyard ($110) is sleek and tightly wound, hinting of iris and berries. These wines, admittedly, may take a while before hitting shelves; many of the 2005s are still around. Bratasiuk's ambitiously priced wines seem to arrive at a langorous pace.

To the east in Heathcote, Ron Laughton of Jasper Hill uses younger plantings on their own native roots and fiercely rigorous organic farming to produce a Grenache that, even in a blazing hot year like 2008, shows an aromatic complexity that exceeds what most Shiraz can offer.
Ambitious efforts

In the Barossa, Ross Estate uses 90-plus-year-old vines and older oak for its elegant effort, while the negociant label Betts & Scholl manages something similar for its O.G. Grenache; both could reasonably telegraph Pinot, yet they come with the ebullience that Grenache brings.

Nearby, Dave Powell of Torbreck is so ambitiously committed to Grenache that his Les Amis, grown on 1901 vines in the Seppeltsfield area of Barossa, boasts a $180 price tag. He also makes a "Natural" old-vine Grenache using indigenous yeast and virtually no sulfur dioxide that, frustratingly, won't be sent to these shores.

If California's unheralded treasures are century-old Zinfandel vines, offering beauty when touched with a delicate hand, I'd argue that Australia's equivalent is its Grenache. Perhaps only Spain provides equal access to such untrammeled vines, protected from the overweaning ways of eager vineyard planners.
Grenache sales

All that said, the Australian Grenache on shelves here, if you can find it, isn't necessarily so fresh - 2006 is a common vintage. If Shiraz sales have been sluggish, Grenache has been downright stagnant.

With its industry on the skids, Australia is looking for a path back to respectability. I'd humbly submit that the best of its Grenache - those that bring forward its gorgeous dried-herbal aromas and delicate structure - are a worthy route. It's probably time for a worldwide reconsideration of Grenache anyway, so there's no reason Australia can't lead us away from brawn and toward beauty.

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