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Australian Wine

Do Australian winemakers make wines that are fresh, vibrant and fruity or dull, boring plonk that is a triumph of marketing? It's time to make up your mind in the great Australian wine debate.

Let's start with the nub of the debate, which can be summarised as follows.

THE CASE FOR AUSTRALIA

Big, consistent, fruit-driven wines.
Labels that are easy to understand.

AND THE CASE AGAINST

Australia produces dull, predictable, fruit-driven wines.
The wines are overpriced -in comparison with other countries in the southern hemisphere where costs are cheaper and also with most European wine regions.

For the free-thinking drinker, the answer should be to keep an open mind and remember that the most convincing orators in a debate such as this are the wines themselves. Wine buffs are prone to making sweeping generalisations about wine, but inevitably their arguments are riddled with exceptions - particularly in relation to Australia. Yes, it's easy to become bored by the rather homogeneous style of some Australian wines (as it is by some of the thin, mean wines produced in France, Spain and Italy), but there will also be times when that type of wine is precisely what you want. There is also a sense in which Australian winemakers are victims of their own success; the country's wines have come to dominate the market so rapidly that many people treat them with the same suspicious approach they took to Japanese cars in the 1970s.

But there is also no doubt that the pioneering spirit of Australian winemakers has made them masters of innovation who have recently achieved great things with obscure, offbeat grape varieties such Verdelho and Gewürztraminer that have been unloved and overlooked by others. Indirectly, they have also improved the general standard of European wines.

A POTTED HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN WINE

Palatable wine has been made in Australia since the early nineteenth century, but Australian wine as we know it has its roots in the 50s. Although many Australians at that time had a taste for sweet, heavily fortified wine (and beer) the emergence over the next two decades of good-quality dry styles of table wine slowly transformed tastes. In addition, the arrival of classic European grape varieties created wines with international appeal. The rest, as they say, is history.

TASTE TEST

This test assumes that you are by now pretty familiar with everyday Australian Chardonnays and Cabernets. It makes sense to explore the best quality examples you can afford as well as those that Australia has almost made its own, such as Semillon and Shiraz.

THE REDS

These are wines that you probably already know but for the purpose of this idea it makes sense to taste them alongside certain European wines. Try: good-quality Coonawarra Cabernet, Barossa Shiraz, red Bordeaux and Rhône red. The following combinations will be particularly instructive:

good-quality Coonawarra Cabernet + good-quality red Bordeaux
good-quality Barossa Shiraz + good-quality Rhône red

THE WHITES

Try the following combinations:

Hunter Valley Chardonnay + good white Burgundy
Clare Valley Riesling + German Riesling
good-quality Semillon + Semillon-based white Bordeaux
Western Australian Sauvignon + Loire Sauvignon

You will have noticed the Taste Test includes wines that come from specific areas such as the Hunter Valley, the Barossa, Coonawarra and Western Australia. As the Australian wine industry has grown ever more sophisticated, winemakers are learning more about which grapes respond best to which areas. The result is that there is a new emphasis on regionality, that mirrors the French obsession with terroir. The more you explore Australian wines, the more you'll discover these regional differences. The more you learn, the more you'll realise that anyone who makes generalisations about Australian wines is sure to be a bluffer.


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