When Yarra Yering's Sarah Crowe was awarded the title of Gourmet Traveller Wine's 2021 Winemaker of the Year late in 2021 she was praised for her discerning palate and relentless pursuit of quality.
This week she is putting that palate to excellent use as a judge at the National Wine Show of Australia, helping to taste close to 890 wines across the week before award winners are announced on May 20.
Crowe came to winemaking mid-career. She studied horticulture, worked in garden centres and picked up some work in 2001 pruning vineyards at Brokenwood in the Hunter Valley. She was instantly hooked. She went on to study viticulture through Charles Sturt University and moved to Bimbadgen in 2010 as senior winemaker.
In 2013 she took over the reins at Yarra Yering, and her first vintage the year after was met with high acclaim.
"Getting into wine judging was a bit selfish for me in the beginning," she says.
"It was a way to help me develop my palate, taste more wines, expand my knowledge, learn the language.
"Now it's about giving back to the industry, being part of the greater community, it's great to finally be able to come together and talk about wine."
The wine show is back after a two-year, pandemic enforced hiatus and has undergone a few crucial changes. To enter this show, wines must have won either a gold or silver medal at a qualifying wine show. There has also been a change to the amount of stock held prior to the show; this has been reduced in acknowledgement of the testing conditions of the past two years, but it has also allowed smaller winemakers to enter.
Chair of judges David Bicknell, chief winemaker at Oakridge Wines, said the two-year break has given the show a chance to reassess where it sits on the national calendar.
"For as long as I can remember, there has been talk about the show sitting at the top of a notional wine show pyramid, it being the pinnacle show," he says.
"While there has been much endeavour to place it in that position, it has still largely been viewed as 'just another capital city wine show'. This was the opportune time to address this view and re-position the show away from other shows - time to turn it into the show with only the best wines."
Close to 890 wines across 42 classes are being judged. Wines from 2019, 2020 and 2021 were all eligible. Shiraz is the biggest class, with close to 160 wines entered. Chardonnay is the largest white variety. Grenache is its own class for the first time and sparkling reds return as their own class.
Bicknell said the testing conditions for winemakers over the past few years, given such things as the pandemic, bushfires and "climate change calamity", make the judging process even more interesting.
"We go into a show with the knowledge of what the last couple of vintages have been like, so we have an idea, with particular varieties, where there will be strengths and weaknesses," he said.
"Where one region, say, has been affected by bushfires, we don't expect there to be many entries coming in from those areas because it'll all have been filtered out in qualifying.
"But in other regions that have had good seasons, and there are lots of high quality wines from lots of producers, we expect to see a reasonable strength within those classes."
While it's early in the judging process, Bicknell said the chardonnay classes have impressed early.
"The panels all judged chardonnay on Wednesday morning and already they're saying the wines were superb. We'll have to see how that plays out over the week."
The trophies and winners will be presented at the awards dinner at the National Press Club on May 20.
