Campbells Bobbie Burns 'The humble vintage' by Jeni Port

Campbells' trusted Bobbie Burns can generate plenty of surprises, as Jeni Port discovers.

The week Campbells celebrated its 140th anniversary, one of its most enduring wines, Bobbie Burns shiraz, was mercilessly kneecapped in price by one of the big wine chains and made a star buy of the week.

Such is life: $23 a bottle one day, $17 the next.

Campbells would probably have preferred it otherwise but the star treatment did serve to highlight this most unassuming and well-loved wine and its association with the Rutherglen winery.

The connection is not always obvious. "People come here to the cellar door and are really surprised to see we have the wine," winemaker Colin Campbell says. "They say, 'Oh, do you make Bobbie Burns?' "

He does. In fact, he and his brother Malcolm, the company viticulturist, now have 40 vintages of Bobbie under their belt.

It's a milestone worth celebrating, so the brothers made Bobbie Burns the centrepiece tasting of their winery's 140th anniversary.

They opened six bottles from each decade the 1970s, '80s, '90s and the noughties including the first release from the '70 vintage. It was the family's last bottle. Still solid in colour and with a camphor and mushroomy pong, the '70 was in a gentle decline, losing fruit but nonetheless capable of charm.

The tasting offered some strange vinous flights of fancy. One of the most consistent performances came from Bobbie Burns shiraz grown and made in "even years" and, in particular, the role of the No.8 in some of its best years: '78, '88, '98 and '08. The Chinese might be able to explain it eight being an auspicious number in Chinese culture but it left the two Campbell boys scratching their heads.

If some drinkers sometimes fail to associate the wine with Campbells, it's a fair bet they're also a bit fuzzy on the fact it's from Rutherglen. It's not overly big in flavour muscles and is far from heroic the usual Rutherglen standard for reds so some brain fuzz is understandable.

Bobbie is medium in weight, rarely excessively tannic or alcoholic and is soft and drinkable when released. The aggressive pucker of Rutherglen tannins not such a bad thing in old Rutherglen durif, mind is mostly absent.

Colin knows when he has blended Bobbie Burns just right. "The wine that goes into Bobbie Burns has to have enough fruit lift to reach the top of the palate," he says. "It keeps filling up to the roof of the mouth."

With some Bobbies, the "lift" is a fine, aromatic feature reminiscent of a pinot noir.

And when it doesn't have the lift? The bottle has surely been compromised. Cork is usually the culprit. For the tranche of Bobbie Burns shirazes from the '70s, the Campbells had to cull about 50 per cent of their meagre museum stocks due to either cork taint or its close relative, oxidation a painful process.

Fortunately, Colin and Malcolm introduced the screw cap from the '07 vintage onwards. It was one of the best decisions the brothers made, up there with building a cellar door in the '70s ("people thought we were mad"), having all tanks refrigerated in '85 ("the quality and freshness of the wines was better straight away") and buying a grape harvester for picking in the cool of the night or early morning.

Has Bobbie Burns changed in 40 years? You could argue it changes every year with each new vintage but that might sound a tad prosaic. Certainly, there are some drinkers who believe the wine has undergone a big refurbishment in recent years.

"People come up and say, 'When did you change Bobbie Burns? It used to be a monster,"' Colin says. "It's not true."

No, it's never been an overextracted monster but it has seen change.

In the '70s, Bobbie's alcohol was about 12.5 per cent to 13 per cent. By the noughties, the average alcohol was 14.5 per cent. That brings a fair bit of additional body to a wine.

While he says he hasn't followed winemaking trends arising from the Australian wine-show system, especially the heavy-handed use of oak that was once de rigueur in the late 1980s and early '90s, Colin admits he did weaken but only once.

It was in the '80s. It was, in his words, "one of the most revolutionary periods of change" in wine in this country. A scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute advocated picking grapes at harvest at low sugar levels to retain good acid and low pH, a factor that influences how a wine ages. So, in '83, Colin picked his shiraz at 10.8 baume (a figure that corresponds to 10.8 per cent alcohol in the finished wine). It was a record low for Bobbie Burns.

"The '83 gives a clue as to how well it lived," he says after tasting it.

The wine now has acidity to burn, giving it permanent structure, but little fruit presence. After 28 years, all that is left is a hollowness where the fruit should be.

By '85, Colin had returned to his normal picking practices. At the tasting, the '85 was still very much alive. So much for wine scientists.

by Jeni Port, The Age Epicure, 19th April 2011, pg 20