Wine region: Australia

Father Ted (hunched over picnic basket to conceal what he is doing): Okay, Father, I’m just getting ready for the picnic.
Accidentally clinks two bottles of wine together as he puts them in the basket.
Father Jack: Drink!
Father Ted: Oh no, Father, it’s just sparkling lemonade.
Father Jack (with a triumphant leer): Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay 1991!
Father Ted: You can tell that just from the sound of the bottles?!
Father Jack: Drink! Drink!!

The 1990s witnessed the irresistible rise of Australian wines by means of a succession of vigorous and well mounted marketing campaigns.  Remember Oz-bins, Oz Clarke, Wizards from Oz? The main thrust of this agenda was the democratisation of wine. By actively engaging with the consumer, by helping them to identify with brands with strong images, by clever labelling and by exalting the varietal, Australians seemed to understand - better than most - that people who drank wine wanted information, simply conveyed. And they were appealing to a new generation of media-savvy, image-conscious drinkers.

Whilst promulgating the virtues of the easy-drinking varietal, Australia hadn’t neglected its own rich vinicultural heritage. Penfolds and Henschke, to name but two, were firm fixtures on fine wine lists and Australia was still producing highly individual ageworthy red wines, remarkable Semillons and amazing liqueur Muscats to dazzle the sommelier and connoisseur alike.

What was in the bottle furthermore tapped into a zeitgeist that desired undeviating reliability, richness and sweetness from its wines. Chardonnay was venerated, Shiraz became a kind of brand in itself… The greater the weight of flavour a wine could deliver at a price, the more people felt that they were getting a good deal.  (What might be described as the extra lashings of gravy principle). International wine competitions bestowed their golden approbation on the wines and Australian winemakers increasingly became media rentagobs, bluff and brash in their pronouncements, many openly deriding their French counterparts as being hopelessly mired in the past and out of touch with the contemporary consumers.

Australian wine? It is not poison…

Aimé Guibert of Mas de Daumas Gassac

O tempora, o mores. As its brands colonised supermarket shelves Australia began to be associated with crude homogenisation and product plugging. After various mergers and buy outs the Australian wine industry (the term is used advisedly) became dominated by a small handful of multinational conglomerates who used their clout to determine the marketing image of the whole country. When commercial success is predicated on brand recognition and price point it is difficult to reach the next level and persuade consumers that great quality can emerge from the selfsame country. The Australian wine industry had thus made it difficult for its quality producers to enter the market and pitch their wares accordingly. Success for Australia has been too much about satisfying the demands of the supermarkets and off-trade and as they have inevitably increased in price the image remains that they are essentially inexpensive, “manufactured” wines. In the current battle of bank for buck Australia has surrendered to Chile.

In a recent attempt to revitalise the image of Australia the debate about terroir was launched and how Australian wines might be marketed with a stronger regional identity.

You’ll have noticed an Australian-shaped aching emptiness in the heart of our list. This constitutes an ambivalence to one of the greatest wine-producing countries. On the one hand is an industry dominated by massive global corporations making perfectly acceptable bulk wine for the supermarkets. The provenance of these wines is irrelevant; the price point is king. Then there are the Braggadocio wines, swaggering with bold flavours, flaunting incendiary levels of alcohol. Finally, there are a number of growers who appreciate that the best way of expressing the regional identity of their wines is to work the vines with great understanding and to diminish the number of obtrusive interventions in the winery.

Terroir is not just about the soil but, philosophically speaking, the way the finished wine bears the imprint of the place it came from and the nature of the vintage. Barossa has indeed its individual sense of place and particular style of wine. In Australia, in particular, there is a kind of prevailing determinism whereby winemakers desire correctness and maximise interventions and so manipulate their wine towards a precise profile. Profiling is taking a product of nature and gearing it to what a group of critics thinks or a perception of what consumers might be comfortable drinking. What they call consistency, others might call homogeneity. Besides all sort of chemical interventions it is the use of oak as the final lacquering touch that often tips these wines into sweetened stupefaction. They become so big they are essentially flavour-inert.

Enjoying wine is about tasting the flavours behind the smoke and mirrors, or in this case, beyond the toasty oak and alcohol. It is not that these components are bad per se, just that they are overdone and throw the wine out of balance. The wines of Barossa have natural power and richness; to add more to them is to, in the words of Shakespeare “throw perfume on a violet”. Having said that I think there is generally a more judicious approach to oaking in the New World than previously. It’s also true to say that we have witnessed the emergence of wines from cooler climate regions in Oz (Mornington, Tasmania, Yarra, Eden and Clare Valley, Great Southern, Adelaide Hills etc, where the winemakers realise that aggressive oaking would mask, if not emasculate, the subtler aspects of the fruit in their wines. This is a positive trend. There is still, however, a tendency to look at super-ripeness as a license to layer on the flavours. A Napa Valley producer once told me proudly that his Chardonnay (14.5%) went through malolactic, lees-stirring and a high proportion of barrique. A transformation from nondescript duckling to ugly swan? The Syrah/Shiraz dichotomy has been mulled over by a few New Zealand growers who are trying to come to grips with the grape. They call their wines “Syrah” to (and I quote) “differentiate it from the typical porty Australian shiraz”.