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- What's wrong with Australian Wine?
Hi Everybody, this is my first post on here so go easy on me. Great forum BTW
I would like to know peoples reasons on why they dislike Australian wine.
At present I can see a collective conscience gathering rapidly where it has almost become trendy to bash Australian wine with the most common cliche being that they are "Alcoholic Fruit Bombs".
thanks for your responses
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1738 - Reply by Gregory Dal Piaz, Jul 27.
Charles,
Welcome to Snooth and the forums!
I would say that it is definitely en vogue to bash Australia these days. I've bashed a few Australian wines in my day and really dislike some of the thick, maximum fruitweight alcohol bombs that have been produced there.
Having said that I am also an unabashed fan and advocate of Australian Riesling, wish I had a chance to try more aged Semillion, and find many reds interesting and enjoyable.
beyond the generic bashing I think one of Australia's biggest issues is that their own success has bitten them in the ass. There are many great $20 wines from Australia that compete favorably with wines priced 2 or 3 times higher.
That definitely caused tremendous pressure on those more expensive wines. Then factor in inflated ( in my opinion) scores from Robert Parker and hid cohort Jay Miller and you have a fair number of people disappointed in pricey wines.
I think many opinion leaders have been turned off by these 2 issues and the affect cascaded down to more casual drinkers yet the message got distorted along the way.
I am curious as to what other folks are thinking about this topic.
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- Reply by Charles Emilio, Jul 27.
Hi Greg, its great to be on here and thanks for your response.
Do you think Australia leading the way with the introduction of the screw-cap has played a part?
I am a wine importer & distributor in Peru and when we introduce new Australian wines to Restaurants we often have a hard time convincing them because they are put off by the screw cap. Perhaps in my case, this is due to a wine drinking market in its infancy where ignorance plays a part
You also didnt mention anything about Yellow Tail and the new one on the market, Down Under as well as many other cheap animal labelled brands. It appears to me that a lot of consumers in the US now associate Australia with Cheapness.
I wonder if Chile and Argentina will have a similar experience in the next 3-5 years. It would be quite easy (and cheap) to purchase in bulk from Argentina and create a stereotypical brand (How about "Gaucho Tango Malbec" $2.99 per bottle) and bottle it in the US
cheers
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0390 - Reply by GregT, Jul 27.
Screwcaps aren't an issue so much. People are pretty amenable to better closures. Sometimes people still question them, but the more they're used, the more they're accepted. You might be right regarding the stage of your market.
I second Greg's comment regarding the riesling and also any number of whites. Australia is really an underappreciated source of great whites.
Yellow Tail was designed expressly for the US market as far as I know. Maybe a little chaptelized, I'm not certain, but fraternity houses and non-wine drinkers love it and its imitators. If they move up into other wines, they may or may not move away from Australia. I don't think it's a given that they will however.
In any case, I don't think that segment of the market is the same segment that pays $20 and up. The latter segment got a little burned and I think that's what hurt Australia more than anything.
Let's set aside the question of style for a minute. It's possible to get a really good bottle of wine for $20 from Australia. Or $40 or $80. So which do you choose? The people behind Two Hands for example, vinify the wine and then select which lots will be the more expensive blend and which will be the less expensive. Many many people do this to select reserve bottlings, etc. But in this case I don't see the doubling in price leading to a commensurate doubling in quality. To my knowledge, the grapes aren't differentiated earlier as being from particular vineyards or plots, they're selected after fermentation. I don't have a problem with the method, but on the other hand, I've almost never bought the more expensive bottles. I like the wine - that's not a knock, but they do a really excellent job at the lower end so why move up?
So some producers have those issues. Add to that the fact that the winemakers seem to have pushed to the max regarding ripeness. When a wine clocks in at 15.8% stated on the label and you know that's give or take a bit, you're into wine that's often in danger of seeming out of balance and hot. I had a grenache the other day that was 15% and it was just perfect. So it's possible to create balanced wine regardless of the alcohol levels. However, some of those wines start seeming hot and out of whack. And worse, a lot of them start seeming the same. They aren't when tasted side by side of course, but you know you're going to get big, jammy, and oaky juice. And in the latter case, I've finally found some Australian wines that I can't drink at all. Wines incidentally, that garner scores somewhere in the high nineties from some critics.
Australia is destined to produce ripe grapes. That's not a fault. And I don't believe in the received wisdom that wines that are high in acid and less ripe are "food wines", while riper wines don't go well with food. I think that's a load of crap. But if you spend $30, $40 or $50 for a wine and you're thinking to yourself that it's a little unbalanced and too woody, you stop buying it. Then you figure that the wood will integrate over a few years and you open one that you've kept for five or six years and it's fallen apart. So you don't buy any more.
If you pick carefully however, you can do quite well.
For example, last night I had Clancy's Red by Peter Lehmann. It's a blend of shiraz, cab, and merlot that goes for around $14. Really nice wine, has a lot of really ripe fruit like blackberries but also a slight herbal note on the nose that follows through on the palate and gives it a little more complexity, as well as fairly fine tannins that give it some structure. It's hard to find fault with it. Not an alcoholic fruit bomb at all. The stated alcohol level was 14%, which is pretty much average these days.
People who dismiss entire regions usually just don't know all that much about wine.
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11 - Reply by Cheese and Grapes, Jul 27.
I just don't care for a lot of their wines. To me, a lot of them they share a taste (not sure what it is) that just doesn't belong in wine. It's kind of like they put big tannic grapes in a barrell and then watered it down. It is my understanding that they focus more on quantity vs. quality. Sorry I can't be more specific. Although I drank "Boarding Pass" http://www.snooth.com/wine/r-wines-boarding-pass-shiraz-2006-23/ and really enjoyed it.
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1135 - Reply by dmcker, Jul 28.
A timely article from the Wall Street Journal (now under Aussie ownership, of course):
http://www.wineindustryinsight.com/RSS//index.php/hop/latest/australian-chardonnay-not-back-yet-wall-street-journal/7727
Also looks like YellowTail is working to expand its US business, now going after the sauvignon blanc segment:
http://www.wineindustryinsight.com/RSS//index.php/hop/latest/yellow-tail-wine-uncorks-their-first-sauvignon-blanc-new-pr-web-press-release/7634
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0390 - Reply by GregT, Jul 28.
Boarding Pass is a brand that sources wines from many countries - Argentina, France, Australia, etc. It's an example of a manufactured wine. They buy grapes from whomever and strive for a consistent product. There are other winemakers who have their own vineyards and make wine in the same way that small winemakers do in other countries. I'm not knocking Boarding Pass, but that's not necessarily something that need typify Australian wine.
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40 - Reply by VegasOenophile, Jul 28.
We have to keep in mind the predominant wines are shiraz, which can at times very very overripe, fruity and powerfully alcoholic. That doesn't mean they're all that way. I have had some truly spectacular shiraz and other varietals and blends from Australia. Everyone's tastes differ as well. To some, those alcoholic fruit bombs might be just the right thing! The Octavius I just reviewed was stellar!!
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92 - Reply by penguinoid, Jul 28.
My experience has always been that there's a very wide range of wines available from Australia. Some of them are good, some not so good. There are quite a lot of wines which personally I find to be overly fruit-dominated, I tend to just try and avoid these. Some people do like them though, clearly.
I've had very little luck with Australian white wines though -- I tend to favour white wines which are minerally or herbal, and these characters don't often seem to be present in Australian white wines.
With reds - yes, shiraz is still the dominant grape. What sort of characters you get depends a lot on the region - the Barossa Valley tends to have the very over-ripe, rich shirazes, for example, whilst those from even the McLaren Vale (which is fairly near the Barossa) are more restrained. Cool climate regions such as the Adelaide Hills and Tasmania are also well worth checking out. There are also a lot of nice Cabernet sauvignons that are worth checking out, as well as blends and an increasing number of other varities (sangiovese anyone?)
I get the impression that Australian wineries are starting to take things such as terroir into account more, but they probably still have a little way to go there...
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- Reply by GregT, Jul 28.
penguinoid - they make outstanding semillon and riesling, and are working with many other grapes. If you get a chance, try some from Colonial Estate for example, from Barossa, or Vasse Felix from Margaret River. The wines from Hunter Valley specifically are known to age nicely and many should fit your preference profile. Until probably the mid 1980s, the Australians were as known for those wines as for the reds, but the developing love for chardonnay in the US pushed a lot of that out of the market. Matter of fact, they make some pretty decent chardonnay too.
But the prices for their whites make them really competitive vis a vis some equivalent wines from say, Bordeaux.
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24 - Reply by blog4wine, Jul 28.
Ok, I'm chimen'in now.
I recently came off a tasting of some McLaren Vale wines produced by a group of small artisan wine makers. Let me say that like anything else, the more we taste, the more our opinions are swayed. especially when there are artisan garagistes involved. Greg has it right, in my opinion, that Aussie wines imported to the U.S. have had a similar, dare I say, homogenized cookie cutter, make-up about them. Big, fat, high alch. low acid fruit bombs. (& some people like that). Then one gets an opportunity to taste small batch production items and the opinion changes. I had three Sauv Blancs that had Bordeaux profiles in the nose & mouth. & a Sangiovese that tasted like a Chianti Classico, One Cabernet blend that was very elegant and not over the top, and a syrah that was like something from northern Rhone.
One must seek out these things, and be prepared for a drastic style difference than what you may be used to tasting in Aussie wines. I disagree with bashing anything based on previous tastings as seasons & styles change, especially in wine & the effort to produce wine, is worth an applause. (ever work a crush pad?) Not that I am a wine whore, ok maybe I am, but I have had wines I didn't care for from Australia and as momma used to say, "if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all".
Drink On Ladds, yo ho!
