Wine is integral to Australia’s modern cultural, social and family life. For those who remember only thirty or so years ago when the wine drinker was regarded as a social outcast, the changes have been extreme. Australians now accept what most European populations have for centuries – that when consumed moderately, wine is a remarkable, fascinating and enjoyable drink that is the perfect complement to most of the food we eat. Australians are not large per capita consumers of wine, for we average only 18.3 litres per head per year. Some European nations, like France and Italy, drink three to four times that level. Twenty-one litres sounds a lot, but if you only enjoyed half a bottle of wine per day, a level believed to be perfectly safe by key world health experts, your own wine tally per year would be all of 137 litres! Wine is the product of a controlled fermentation of the sugars in grape-juice, in a completely natural process. Man’s role is simply to monitor and control this process. The good winemaker can be likened to a nursemaid who, ensures that nothing interferes with its production, storage and development. Table wines owe their alcoholic content entirely to the fermentation of the natural sugars present in the grapes at harvest. These are named according to the grape variety, like Chardonnay, or to the name of the style they are perceived to resemble, like White Burgundy. Other wines are made with the addition of extra grape spirit to the wine, during or after the fermentation. Called fortified wines, these are labelled as port, sherry, muscat or tokay, to name a few examples. The techniques today’s winemaker can choose from include many traditions which have evolved over the centuries plus the modern benefits of our greater understanding of the winemaking process. The huge diversity of grape varieties, soils, climates and winemaking practices found in Australia today – and to a greater extent across the rest of the wine world – continue to produce a comparable diversity of the finished products themselves, the wines. It is to help you understand and feel more comfortable with this seemingly impossible array of wine that this course is all about. For a commodity that constitutes a small, but significant proportion of Australia’s gross national product, wine is incredibly diverse. There would be around ten thousand different labels made in this country alone and countless more made elsewhere. No other commodity expects as much from its consumers and no other commodity has such a language or jargon of its own. Yet there is no doubt. The more most Australian consumers understand wine, the more they enjoy it. I hope you enjoy this introduction to wine.
