Advance Australia fair dinkum!

How I stopped being a snob and learned to love Australian wines.

It’s Australia day today so as a bonus I’m posting something I wrote in 2015 back that made the cover of the Weekend section of The Australian newspaper. I thought it was going to be a the start of a glittering career in Australian media. Perhaps I’d be invited on a lavish press trip to the country’s vineyards like used to happen in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It didn’t happen. Still it’s a fun piece and still holds up, I hope.

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I shudder when I look back at what a terrible snob I was. In the late ‘90s straight out of university and, without much reason, very sure of myself I started working for Oddbins. A once mighty and now rather reduced firm of British wine merchants, Oddbins had built their reputation in the 1980s as pioneers in Australian wine. For a time they were known as Ozbins. The wines that excited my colleagues were the classic red wines of Australia: D’Arenberg Dead Arm Shiraz, Bleasdale Frank Potts and, of course, Penfold’s Grange - which we sold for around £50 a bottle. The latest vintage is £400¹. I should have stocked up. 

I turned my nose up at them all.  I dismissed them as obvious and uncouth though I never actually tried Grange. I laughed at sparkling shiraz and oaky chardonnay. Instead I went for amontillado sherry, Mosel riesling and Loire reds - just the kind of things that are now madly fashionable. At the time I liked to think of myself as a prophet in the wilderness. I left the wine trade after two years but kept up an interest in wine. A little learning can be a dangerous thing: I read more than I actually tasted and further developed by anti-Australian prejudices. I read writers who said that Australian reds were too oaky, they didn’t reflect terroir, they were over-manipulated. If you’d asked me which country from the world of wine I could do without, I’d have said Australia.

In 2009 I visited Australia for my brother George’s wedding for the first and so far only time. He was marrying Carolyn, a doctor in the RAAF. Cue jokes about flying doctors - they never grow old. I was amazed by the quality of the food and how bloody nice everyone was. The reception was at a hotel in Port Douglas in Queensland. Typically George and Carolyn had massively over-catered for the party and so we were exhorted to go to the bar and drink expensively. I was with a friend of the family from New Zealand who knows a bit about wine. He seemed very excited at what was on offer. I can’t now remember everything he ordered that night but there was some some Bin 389, something from Brokenwood and a Petaluma Shiraz. We might even had had some St Henri Claret. It all went a bit blurry. I wasn’t really aware of it at the time but a little seed had been planted in my mind. 

Soon after managed to land myself a job as wine writer on a small but prestigious women’s magazine called The Lady. The editor, Rachel Johnson, sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, had a horror of wine jargon. She wanted someone who didn’t know too much about wine. I was perfect. I began to attend tastings and I found much to my surprise that it was often the Australian wines that impressed me most. At first it was the whites that drew me in: Hunter semillons, rieslings from Pewsey Vale and especially Tahbilk marsanne with a good bit of age on it. Then it was the lighter reds such Mornington Peninsula pinots. But soon I found myself falling for the classic reds from South Australia. Sturdy wines that I’d previously dismiss as dry ports I now embraced porty notes and all. Wines like the Rockford Sparkling Black Shiraz and Yalumba Tricentenary Grenache. It was wonderful too discovering how well some Australian wines aged such as a 1984 Wolf Blass Black Label which tasted like a Rioja gran reserva crossed with a Medoc. 

Last year I attended a lavish Penfolds tasting. Their wines were everything I used to avoid when buying wine: they were polished mostly multi region blends, there was lots of new oak, they didn’t use wild yeasts, and some of them have their acidity and tannin ‘adjusted.’ And have you read their marketing bumf? It feels as if some deranged marketing consultants have been let loose on this proud old company. This is the tasting note for the 2011 Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz: 

“A sensory stratification of layers of taste – separate via time-of-detection and unravelling of flavours. At first, Christmas pudding with roasted nuts, then rare lamb and olives, then sarsaparilla spice. Tannins awashed, oak absorbed, fruit awakened.”

The last phrase sounds like a corporate Haiku. The old me would have pre-judged the wines based on this nonsense. Yet I approached them with an open mind and loved almost everything. The final wine was the Grange 2010 and it was already wonderful, easily one of the finest wines I’ve ever tasted. 

So what had changed? Well Australian wines have changed in the last fifteen years. The chardonnays especially are much fresher and less oaky but the big change is that I’ve learnt to appreciate wine from what’s in the glass. I now ask myself: is it well-balanced? do I like this? rather than looking for reasons not to like it. In my twenties I thought I was discerning but actually I was basing my judgements on other people’s opinions. I was treating wine like I approached music as a teenager where the music you didn’t like said as much about you as the music you did. Or at least I thought it did. When you’re young, it’s important to have strong opinions about things you don’t really understand. 

I now drink more Australian wine² than any other country except France and Spain, more than Italy and vastly more than any New World country including that great favourite of the British, New Zealand. Which is why I looked with great interest at the furore sparked off by Huon Hooke’s article³. Very briefly he was complaining that many fashionable restaurant wine lists ignore classic Australian wines in favour of imports and obscurities. No other wine producing country would be do diffident about their riches. If you go to a restaurant in Western Sicily they don’t have any wines from the other side of the island. If you go to a restaurant in the Languedoc, they don’t sell Bordeaux. 

But the former snob in me can understand the other point of view. It’s natural to want to try something different. Wine is as much governed by fashion as anywhere else and at the moment the traditional Australian wines that I have come to love aren’t in. It’s inevitable that the new generation of sommeliers who are now so influential are seeking to make their mark by breaking with tradition. It’s a way of rebelling against their parents. We have a similar thing in Britain where it’s fashionable to be rude about Bordeaux. But I think in ten years time the Australian classics will be rediscovered by a new generation just as traditional rioja has become a cult item in Europe. You have your own unique styles: Barossa shiraz, Hunter semillon, Victoria marsanne, sparkling reds and fortified wines; plus you have cabernets to rival the Medoc, and chardonnays and pinots to rival the best of Burgundy and rieslings to compare with Alsace and Germany. The sheer variety produced in Australia is rivalled only by France. It’s great that you are so un-chauvinistic but if I opened a restaurant in Australia I wouldn’t stock a single foreign wine. Why look elsewhere? 

1. Now closer to £600.

2. Australia has now slipped to fifth place behind Italy and England.

3. You would not believe the furore this caused at the time.