So much for good intentions. Having held myself back for several weeks before penning another piece because I felt it high time I wrote a good news article about Australian wine, here I go. Trouble is, here I am, Jeremy Oliver, feeling about as grumpy as Jeremy Clarkson with a pearly white Vauxhall Astra sitting in his driveway.
Is this grumpiness a function of advancing age? Or due to the news it was just over-rates that kept Australia from the Test Cricket final in England this week? Perhaps I opened one bottle of corked wine too many? Or has the Victorian Government and its fondness for locking down its perfectly healthy population finally gotten to me?
Well do I remember the 1980s. Rather, to be more accurate, I remember well the mornings of the 1980s; it was that kind of a decade. All the riotous, indulgent and excessive behaviour associated with these glorious years actually did happen. A typical day would see friends and colleagues gather at a favoured bistro for a business lunch. Followed of course, by a complimentary port. Then we would drive to a pub to be freshened with a cleansing ale. Or two. Then, while figuring where to go for dinner, it was off for a couple of thought-provoking martinis, before of course we would drive to the restaurant…
There was however a fly in this otherwise perfect ointment: the wine we guzzled from noon till night. While there were stunning exceptions – John Wade’s incomparable 1982 John Riddoch being one that leaps to mind – much Australian wine from the 1980s had stuck itself so far up an evolutionary cul-de-sac it took a decade to reverse out.
Our most famous critics, our wine shows and anyone else that seemed to matter made it abundantly clear to anyone prepared to listen that Australian wine should consist of skinny, vegetal cabernet you could run a lawn-mover over, chardonnay so fat and splintery you could build a beach shack out of it, riesling that tasted of sauvignon blanc and sauvignon blanc that tasted like tropical fruit punch.
Exactly the same kind of thing is happening right now, and has been for several years. In case you haven’t experienced it – which I find impossible to imagine – there has been a massive push towards high-acid and underweighted, under-fruited and under-structured wines in this country that by their very manipulated nature find it impossible to reflect their place or terroir. Winemakers then attempt to redress these deficiencies with discordant and often excessively charry oak plus an emphasis on 100% whole bunch fermentation in reds, regardless of the ripeness of the stalks involved.
It’s the 1980s repeating themselves, for the same kinds of reason. Those calling the shots simply don’t understand the harm they are doing.
The Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula and Geelong, long touted by the Melbourne trend set as our European equivalent, have trended so far from quality European wine that their chardonnays rival Coke for acidity and their pinots, shirazes and even cabernets (thinking just Yarra here) could be turned into a salad.
Margaret River – for years the engine room of classic Australian cabernet and chardonnay – has largely fallen asleep at the wheel, forgetting the very things that made its wine so spectacular. And Great Southern, once home to some of the finest of contemporary Australian cabernet, is believed to have entered hibernation.
Coonawarra, a once-great wine region, has become a one-horse town. Thank God for Wynns. McLaren Vale is being measured up by property developers. Staring down the twin barrels of the China market loss and the dawning reality that there is no longer a demand for much of what it has been making, the Barossa Valley has lost its mojo so fast it is now pinning its hopes on skinny, weedy grenache.
Of course, there are exceptions to these generalisations; terrific wines conceived and made by individuals who draw their inspiration more from the world’s classics than the misdirected musings of a new generation of writer, wine judge and wine waiter who have collectively never bothered to understand them. Sadly, though, these exceptions are a dwindling lot. The number of high-profile Australian wineries whose quality is plunging off a clifftop is nothing short of alarming. Sadly, commercial reality dictates that their makers pay heed to the wall of poorly informed but in all likelihood well-meaning noise coming from those who think they get it, but frankly do not. At all.
The other day, after watching his country’s Test cricket side fall to a largely second-string New Zealand outfit after just three days and one hour on a home ground, former English skipper Nasser Hussein took aim at the bizarre techniques of several key English batsmen. Purposefully, he said that if how they were playing was actually acceptable and correct at the highest level, then everyone else who had ever played the game before – with significantly more success and using more conventional, time-proven techniques – must have been empirically wrong. Including Sir Viv Richards. English batsmen, he said, were trying to reinvent the wheel.
Similarly, if what passes for high-quality Australian wine in this current environment is actually correct and worthy of the praise being lavished upon it by local opinion leaders, then Australia’s proud history of quality wine growing and making – as identified over the years by dozens of prestigious international palates – must be a factual anomaly at best and at worst a fraud.
Somehow, I just don’t think so. Our chattering wine classes are indeed trying to reinvent the wheel.
Which brings me neatly to where I began – seeking as you may recall a good news story for Australian wine. And what might that be, you might be wondering?
There is nothing so wrong with Australian wine today that is not within our ability to repair. And quickly. Once we break out of the mentality that there’s one scale of quality for the rest of the world and another – and a rather different one – for us, it will be obvious just much ground we have conceded to Europe and the Americas.
Sure, some of us might delight in the spiritual joys of buying wine from those more windswept and interesting winemakers who ferment in bathtubs which they then bury beneath their vines. That might be fun for some, but it’s a tiny percentile of what drives the quality wine market.
For most of us, it’s about what’s in the bottle. Can we finish the glass? Would we like another of the same? Once Australian makers start focusing more on what people actually want to drink and sidestep the black hole of opinion leaders whose sole intent is just to please other opinion leaders, they are in for a moment of truth.
Technically, it’s an easy fix. Intellectually, it might be harder.
