WS 2005: Exploring Australia

An in-depth look at this southern giant's unique geography and diverse wine styles

Harvey Steiman
Issue: October 15, 2005

Out on the western edge of Australia, the Margaret River wine district juts out into the ocean. Although this is not a cool climate by world standards, the chilly winds off the Southern Ocean make it possible to grow great Chardonnay. The grape bunches look distinctive here. The Mendoza clone, known here as Jin Jin, features big berries and tiny berries in the same cluster.

Leeuwin Estate, a family-owned estate in Margaret River founded in 1974, uses this clone to make its Artist Series Chardonnay. It is one of the world's great white wines and an Australian icon. The 2001 vintage (98 points on the Wine Spectator 100-point scale) is utterly seamless and tremendously seductive, with a finish that sails on and on. Other Australian wineries are following Leeuwin's path. And why not? Leeuwin demonstrates just how great Australian fine wine can be.

From Margaret River it is approximately 9,000 miles to either California or France, which aptly symbolizes where Australian wines fit. They're often bold, generous and seductive in flavor, like California wines, with the best ones achieving an Old World—style balance and refinement.

Like Margaret River, Australia's best winegrowing regions are strung along the southern edge of the continent, poised between hot, arid central Australia and the frigid Southern Ocean (next stop, Antarctica). The climate is sunny and the soils are diverse enough to create noticeable distinctions from one vineyard to the next and from region to region. The winemaking is a fascinating mix of practical and quirky.

Australia ranks sixth among the world's winegrowing nations in terms of volume produced. Some 398,000 acres of vineyards produced 370 million gallons of wine in 2004 (the most recent year for which official figures are available). If California (529,000 acres and 444 million gallons in 2004) were a country, Australia would rank just behind it, but the productions of both are dwarfed by those of Italy and France. Australia lists 1,899 wineries. California's Wine Institute counts 1,294 for the Golden State.

The country has been producing wine for nearly two centuries, but it has been a presence on the world wine scene only in the last decade or so. Shiraz, by far the most widely planted wine grape at 91,500 acres, has been its calling card. Like Cabernet Sauvignon from California, the super Tuscans of Italy, Spain's Priorats, Pinot Noir from Oregon and Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, Shiraz (the variety most of the rest of the world call Syrah) from Australia has entered the global wine drinker's consciousness at the top level.

It's not just Shiraz, as the success of Leeuwin Chardonnay demonstrates. In an increasingly complicated wine world, an easy way to keep all the options straight is to focus on what each country is famous for. But limiting a survey of Australia to big Shiraz neglects a lot of great alternatives, just as thinking of California only as Cabernet and Chardonnay territory misses the state's big strides with Pinot Noir, Syrah and Sauvignon Blanc.

"There's a global [trend], trying to pigeonhole countries," notes Brian Croser, who has been making Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, sparkling wine and Riesling in Australia for more than 30 years, only recently adding Shiraz to his quiver. "But so many things are happening that confound these ideas. What people think they know can blind them to sometimes better things that are happening."

The Shiraz category itself has more diversity than might be realized at first glance. Warm regions such as Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale in the state of South Australia make a mouthfilling style. Hotter regions with high-yielding vineyards make oceans of low-priced, easy-drinking, fruit-forward wines. Cooler regions at higher elevations, such as Heathcote in Victoria, get more crispness. Very cool areas such as Yarra Valley and Adelaide Hills can achieve a sort of Northern Rhône pepperiness in their Shiraz, even if their vineyards generally do better with Chardonnay.

Several other red grapes excel in Australia. Grenache (6,250 acres) is coming on strong, both by itself and in blends with Shiraz and often Mourvèdre. Cabernet Sauvignon (73,000 acres) does well in some regions, but some of the best wines from Cabernet are blends with Shiraz.

In whites, the list of outstanding Australian Chardonnays is growing fast. The country's most widely planted white variety (at 53,700 acres) gets better with every vintage as winegrowers pursue a more Burgundian style. Australia, especially its Clare and Eden valleys, also makes distinctive Riesling (9,800 acres) in a dry, aromatic style that is unique in the world.

Dessert wines, especially fortified wines made from aged Muscat and Muscadelle, can be extraordinary. Australia has other quirky wines with more limited appeal, such as sparkling reds. Sémillon is actually the second most widely planted white wine grape at 16,300 acres; dry Sémillons from Hunter Valley need cellaring to develop richness, albeit as an acquired taste.

"You can put most of Australia's wines into two baskets," says Michael Hill-Smith, Australia's first Master of Wine, who owned the popular restaurant Universal Wine Bar in Adelaide before selling it in 2002 to devote full time to his Shaw & Smith winery. "There are the traditional wines, such as Barossa Shiraz, Clare Riesling and Coonawarra Cabernet and all the easy-drinking value wines that are blends from various regions. The other basket has a more contemporary style, looking for more elegance, more refinement. This is the real movement in Australia wine, and that's happening in some of the lesser-known places."

Hill-Smith has no illusions that Australia's classic robust style will go away, but he thinks of his Adelaide Hills winery in the latter basket, specializing in Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and cool-climate Shiraz in a fresh, lively, peppery style. These and similar products from Adelaide Hills, Western Australia and Victoria are the "better things" Croser alludes to.

What makes Australian wine taste, well, Australian, just as French wine tastes French and Italian wine tastes Italian, is geography. The broad strokes are pretty simple. There's a big, cold ocean to the south. There's a big, hot desert in the middle of the continent, often called the Red Center because of its rust-colored, iron-rich soils. The closer you get to the ocean, the cooler the climate. The closer you get to the Red Center, the warmer. (See "Red Center, Cold Ocean," page 61.)

Most of Australia's wine comes from the bulge in the southeastern corner of the continent. Generally, the prime winegrowing regions are scattered just inland from the coastline. Farther inland, but before you get to the hot Red Center, are warmer regions where vineyard dimensions are measured in kilometers. They produce enormous quantities of fruity, quaffable stuff.

"Australia is a diverse geographical entity," says Croser, slipping into his professorial voice. He founded the wine science and viticulture department at what is now Charles Sturt University and serves as deputy chancellor of the University of Adelaide. "We happen to have the oldest continent on the Earth's surface, next to the coldest ocean on the Earth's surface and the biggest desert."

Although wines from regions across Australia share certain characteristics, ripe fruit flavor in particular, specific grape varieties do better in certain regions, as is so anywhere else in the world. Croser was the first prominent winemaker to take advantage of this. Petaluma Ltd., the wine company he founded in 1976, planted Riesling in Clare, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in Coonawarra and Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in its home vineyard in Piccadilly in the Adelaide Hills, where Croser made sparkling wine and varietal Chardonnay.

In the 1970s and 1980s, this idea was revolutionary. Today, it has trickled down to the everyday wine level. Hugh Cuthbertson once worked for the giant Beringer Blass (now Foster's Wine Estates) and now has his own wine company, bottling a series of region-specific varietals under the Long Flat label, all priced at $11. The wines include Yarra Valley Chardonnay, Eden Valley Riesling, Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc, Coonawarra Cabernet and Barossa Shiraz. He calls it "an education in Australian wine," adding, "The idea was to identify the vineyards that could produce the region's signature variety and sell the wine at a decent enough price."

Marquee, an American-owned négociant company, is doing something similar at a slightly higher price, $19. So are the big companies. Wolf Blass has a new "gold label" line that matches each variety to a specific region. The wines range from $14 to $21.

And, in his own way, Croser himself is back into it, having identified another region that he thinks will be a major player. His new enterprise in Wrattonbully, adjacent to Coonawarra, is called Tapanappa. This year it releases a 2003 blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc made from the oldest vineyard in the region, planted in 1975.

Beyond geographical considerations, Australia's approach to winemaking has of necessity been a practical one. The standard process is very much like California's, except that with no ready source of cheap labor, mechanization is widely used in Australian vineyards for everything from pruning to harvesting. Australian wineries tend to be simple affairs, putting their money into equipment rather than beautiful buildings.

Aussie winemakers think nothing of adding acidity or tannin to balance wines out, although that's less of an issue in cooler climates. Finishing red wine fermentations in barrel is a common practice, producing a creamier texture and better oak/fruit integration. Generally, winemakers use more American oak than French, an artifact of Australia's traditional practice of importing oak staves and curing them an extra year or two before making them into barrels.

The Australian wine business operates in a top-heavy environment. A few gigantic companies dominate the industry. Five companies sell 75 percent of the wine. Most of it is easy-drinking, everyday wine, but they also bottle some of the country's greats. (See the chart on page 65.)

The biggest selling Australian label in the United States doesn't come from one of the big multinational companies, however. It's Yellow Tail, a brand that didn't exist until 2001, when the little-known Casella Winery made a fruity, frankly sweet Shiraz, packaged it with a drawing of a kangaroo on the label and priced it at $7 to $8. The brand, which exported an astounding 6.5 million cases to the United States in 2004, is a marketing phenomenon and is already the subject of a book, Blue Ocean Strategy (Harvard Business Press), that is required reading at Harvard Business School.

Yellow Tail rides the crest of a huge wave of Australian exports that has the country challenging Italy for the position of No. 1 exporter to the United States. Parlaying its experience and a favorable exchange rate, Australia found a way to deliver better wines than you might expect in most categories and at virtually every price point. It wasn't a fluke. They planned it that way.

In 1993, the Australian wine industry agreed on a plan to boost wine production and worldwide sales 128 percent by the year 2010. They met that goal before 2000. There was so much new planting that it created a grape surplus, much of which found its way into the current flood of "critter" wines, which imitate Yellow Tail with cute labels depicting emus, wombats, wallabies, penguins, lizards and other Australian creatures. A few make good sipping, many are forgettable, and a disconcertingly large number should simply be avoided. But the grape glut also meant that quality-oriented wineries could be pickier and that the better wineries could continue to get better.

The sweet spot for good value from Australia is in the $10 to $25 range. That's where you can find the largest number of wines that taste like they ought to cost a whole lot more than they do. Some of them are brands designed by the large companies. Some are from smart import/export companies that have either found good, small wineries that keep their prices reasonable or that make their own wines as négociants.

John Larchet, whose Australian Premium Wine Collection exports a range of wines, started up two of his own wine brands when he could not find wines already on the market in the styles he wanted. His $9 Wishing Tree Shiraz 2003 scored 89 points and his Hill of Content reds deliver classy flavors at $12 to $15, the result of blending crisp wines from Western Australia with fleshier material from South Australia.

"I wanted to meet the price point and still have lively, intense, characterful wines," he says. "The grapes are available now, because there has been so much overplanting. That's cyclical, so we have had to make long-term contracts to keep doing this."

At $25 and up (in some cases, way up), there are plenty of really good wines, including some rare, hard-to-find products made in small quantities. A growing number of these wines are available in the United States, although some of the very best, such as the wines of Clare Valley's iconoclastic Wendouree, are still sold only to avid collectors in Australia. A few intrepid Americans snap up the minuscule number of cases that arrive from the most in-demand wineries, just as they do California's Screaming Eagle and Marcassin.

These are often big, intense, highly extracted Shirazes, praised by some, decried as over-the-top by others. I rate them highly when they achieve some sort of elegance beyond raw power, as do, for example, Kaesler and Dutschke. Hill-Smith calls them "Australia's garagistes," borrowing a moniker applied to small, quirky Bordeaux producers who make similarly dense and atypical wines at high prices.

Historically, Australian wine was something very different. Through most of the 20th century, the country specialized in fortified wines, primarily Ports and Sherries shipped around the British Empire. The workhorse grapes were Shiraz and Grenache. As consumer tastes turned to dry table wines, those old vines, especially the ones planted in good locations and properly managed, produced the raw material for some stunning red table wines.

The vines were intact because South Australia never had phylloxera, the root louse that ate up vineyards around the rest of the world and forced growers to replant on resistant rootstock. (Victoria had phylloxera, so there are few venerable old vines there.)

The first dry red to take advantage of those old vines was Penfolds Grange. Australia's signature luxury wine, Grange has been made since 1951 from various vineyards around South Australia where vines planted in the 19th and early 20th centuries still produce great grapes. Penfolds bought material from several different regions, in some vintages blending in Cabernet Sauvignon to increase complexity and depth. At first, Australians rejected the wines as too ripe and intense, but it did not take long for the penny to drop. Grange is Australia's most famous high-end wine.

Another model for classic Australian Shiraz is Henschke Hill of Grace, made from a single vineyard in Eden Valley where some of the vines date to the 1850s. Both wines today fetch more than $200 a bottle on release and thousands at auction when aged. Most of the new cult wines focus on single vineyards, taking Hill of Grace (70 cases imported) as their model. Rockford Basket Press (100 cases) and Jasper Hill (150 cases) are among the better examples.

The wines that have been around awhile, such as Grange and Hill of Grace, prove that Australian reds can age beautifully. Among the whites, the dry-style Rieslings, especially those from Clare and Eden valleys, flesh out and gain more depth with 10 to 20 years of age. Leeuwin's Chardonnays are great at 10 to 20 years.

On visits to Australia, I have tasted Rieslings from the 1970s and reds from the 1950s and '60s that are not only alive and kicking, but have developed beautiful harmony in their maturity. Among reds, this is true of more than just Shiraz. Older Cabernet Sauvignons can do as well. The greatest Australian wine I have ever tasted is Penfolds Bin 60A, a 50-50 blend of Coonawarra Cabernet and Barossa Shiraz made in 1962. When I first had it in 1994, the wine had transcended pure fruit and become ethereal.

Winemaking has changed since that Bin 60A was made, with more ripeness in the fruit and more new-oak barrels in use, and it's anyone's guess how that will affect ageability. But if the site where the grapes were grown is what's key to longevity in wine, and most experts agree that it is, the vines and vineyards that produced the last century's ageable gems are good bets to make some of this century's.

There's no doubt that ancient vines make great wines, but there are only so many acres of them. "It's like mining," says Croser. "Eventually, you run out of resources."

Fortunately, really old vines aren't the only route to outstanding wine. I am convinced that the Heathcote region, for example, where Jasper Hill has established a beachhead in Central Victoria, will be the next great area to emerge for Shiraz. New wineries there, such as Whistling Eagle, Passing Clouds, Buckshot and Redbank, make complex reds that are less opulent than South Australia's. Tasmania shows hints of becoming Australia's Pinot Noir country, if the viticulture and winemaking can cope with the cold climate.

In the end, Australia's achievements may have as much to do with the country's character as with the nuts and bolts of winegrowing. "People all around the world love this country," says Chris Hatcher, the soft-spoken chief winemaker at Foster's Wine Estates. "We're neutral as people. We're not a big country, and for years, the rest of the world did not see us as competitors, which gave us a chance to catch up fast.

"There is not a lot of pretension in Aussie wine," he adds. "That's who we are. What you see is what you get."