OUR love affair with Australian wine continues. We drink lots of it. The bare facts are that although Australia makes less than 4% of the world’s wine, it has held pole position in the UK for ten years, with over 20% of sales by volume and by value. The UK remains Australia’s biggest export market.
But despite this success, Australian wine is changing. The days of powerful, oaky wines packed with jammy fruit seem to be numbered. Delicacy is now the order of the day, allied to freshness, refinement and significantly lower alcohol.
When I met Adam Eggins of Wakefield Wines, one of Australia’s leading wine-makers, during the Annual Australian Trade Tasting in London a fortnight ago, the first wine he poured for me to try was an 8% alcohol, medium sweet, very grapey Muscat. It’s not on sale in the UK yet, but it probably will be very soon.
“Muscat like this has just gone crazy in Australia,” Adam said, and it’s already selling well in the United States. Jacob’s Creek Moscato, white or Rosé (£7.49 at Tesco), also 8%, is already proof of the popularity of this style of wine here.
Pinot Grigio is another runaway success. “In Australia, there’s massive enthusiasm for it,” Adam told me. “It’s all about food. The wine is just background noise.”
Pinot Grigio, or Pinot Gris as it’s sometimes labelled, offers a light, refreshing alternative to Sauvignon Blanc. “It’s been a matter of SOS,” Adam went on. “We’ve been So Over Sauvignoned.”
I’m no fan of flavourless Pinot Grigio, but I do like the Wakefield Estate Pinot Gris 2011 (£10.99 www.slurp.co.uk); it has far too much spicy fruit to be dismissed as just ‘background noise’. Another new wine, a Vermentino, a dry white as crisply fruity as it is light, at just 10% alcohol, is still at the experimental stage, but is also set to join the Wakefield range soon, and will do a similar job to the Pinot Gris.
Although the new lighter wines are winning friends in the UK, every market doesn’t want the same thing.
Chardonnay is a prime example. Adam let me taste three. We began, not unnaturally with the cheapest. Wakefield Estate Chardonnay 2009 (£10.99, £10.50 at Majestic or £9.99 if you buy two). It’s rich and round and buttery, with lots of spicy oak. “It keeps winning gold medals in the US, so much so that it makes me think Americans just love oak,” said Adam with his tongue only slightly in cheek. He much prefers the more subtle, lingering savoury style of Wakefield Jaraman Chardonnay 2010 (£17.99 www.slurp.co.uk). “A wine like this is all about finding minerality,” he enthused.
This is slightly contentious territory, because some wine scientists pooh-pooh the idea that a wine can taste of mineral salts. They say they don’t turn up in chemical analysis, but I know what Adam means. I often find wine salty. Finer still, Wakefield St Andrews Chardonnay, 2008, from a single vineyard in South Australia’s Clare Valley (£18.50 www.slurp.co.uk ) has an even better balance between mouth-watering lemony acidity and elegant, rather savoury fruit. It’s delicious proof of Australia’s ability to make wines of subtlety and real finesse.
The taste for lighter, more elegant styles embraces red wines too. “Pinot Noir has gone mad in Australia,” Adam said. “It’s the hottest selling red category.
Wakefield’s reputation was largely built on Cabernet Sauvignon, but Shiraz is out-selling it now. This might seem like an exception to the lighter, fresher, trend; but the top of the range Wakefield St Andrews Shiraz 2006 (£25.75 for the 2004 www.slurp.co.uk) is anything but a big, jammy, fruit bomb. Unusually for a big red wine it was fermented as well as aged in small oak barrels. This seems to have given it an all together different tannic structure.
“When it was a baby, we thought it was awful,” Adam admitted. If you want Shiraz with melting soft tannins, forget it, but if you enjoy wines with a bit more backbone and elegant, savoury fruit, snap it up, if you can afford it, and then try to summon up enough iron will to leave it alone for another five to ten years. It will only get better.
The Australian spirit of adventure was most strongly shown at another stand. A friend who imports wine from Australia’s more northerly region, Queensland’s Granite Belt, where the vines are grown at 800 metres above sea-level, poured me a glass of sparkling Petit Verdot.
Most sparkling wine is made from grapes with delicate, subtle flavours. The deeply coloured, massively tannic Petit Verdot, often used to beef up a big red wine would be the last choice in most people’s minds as the base for fizz. Sirromet, Signature Collection, Sparkling Red (£23.99 from www.harlingtonwine.com) has a meaty smell, and its tannins taste even more bitter when chilled. And yet, I have a sneaking feeling it might just be wonderful with spicy Sichuan beef. The key to Australia’s success is its winemakers take care to know what their markets want.
In Australia, there’s massive enthusiasm for it. It’s all about food. The wine is just background noise
WINE OF THE WEEK
Château David, Bordeaux Supérieur, 2010 £6.49 Sainsbury’s
Young red wine full of character, with its slightly stalky smell of spicy berry fruit and soft, fruity flavour, rounded off by firm, dry tannins. It shows that good red Bordeaux needn’t cost the earth. Enjoy it with the Sunday roast.
WINE EXTRAS
Dry white Bordeaux is a rarely as good as Roquefortissime Sauvignon 2008 (£12.99 at Waitrose).
Aged in oak barrels, it has a wonderfully complex smell of peach, tangerine and gooseberry jam and then a creamy texture lifted by citrus acidity, tailing off into a lingering, toasty finish.
Red Bordeaux is usually a blend of Merlot and one or both of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Château Pey la Tour, Bordeaux Supérieur, 2008 (£9.75, The Wine Society) is 95% Merlot and is a huge success and a hot bargain: perfumed (typical of 2008) and brambly, with layers of rich, ripe fruit, soft tannins and just enough acidity to keep it fresh. Vieux Remparts Lussac Saint Emilion 2009 (£9.99 at Majestic) is also dominated by Merlot and is again plummy, brambly and spicy. It’s very good, but lacks the extra concentration of the Pey la Tour.
If you have a passion for claret, the biggest and best selection of red Bordeaux locally is at Richard Granger Fine Wines in Jesmond.