Australian winemakers are caught between nature and China

It’s been a yr since I devoted an article to Australia, which is unusual because it’s the nation that sends more wine to the UK than some other.

Adelaide to Southampton and Bristol are the dominant delivery routes, Flexitank (a collapsible bag for liquid cargo) the dominant delivery container. Accolade, the corporate that exports essentially the most Australian wine to Britain, sends 93 per cent of it in bulk. This makes nice sense when it comes to carbon footprint, but it surely additionally suggests, accurately, that the British like their Australian wine low-cost. (Thoughts you, they like wine usually to be budget-priced: the common retail value of a bottle bought within the UK is simply £6.16, with responsibility and VAT accounting for £3.26 of that.)

Within the US, nevertheless, after an all-too-brief love affair with costlier Australian wine within the early years of this century, consumers are nonetheless lower than rapturous in regards to the nation, regardless that a 3rd of the Australian authorities’s A$50m (£27.5m) wine export assist programme has been focused on the American market.

The commerce physique Wine Australia has pulled out all of the stops to show influential North Individuals to the most effective wine the nation can provide. Between 2016 and the onset of the pandemic, a couple of hundred of them have been flown Down Below and handled to tailored wine excursions. In each 2018 and 2019, key sommeliers, members of the media and wine commerce have been invited to lavish, four-day Oz-wine bootcamps within the Californian resort Lake Tahoe.

Karen MacNeil, creator of The Wine Bible, a preferred world information, describes the occasion she attended as “fairly emotional and really particular”, gathering so many individuals collectively and offering entry to a bunch of main wine personalities and their tales.

Regardless of all this, the US nonetheless imports far much less Australian wine than the UK by quantity. Final yr, the quantity of Australian wine exported to the US fell by 3 per cent.

Why are Individuals resistant to the charms of Aussie wine? Is it as a result of it’s too just like California wine? (Although the identical could possibly be mentioned of Argentina, which has loved appreciable recognition.) Has the runaway success of the candy, mass-market Australian model Yellow Tail soured perceptions for ever? Is it right down to a scarcity of Australian eating places within the US that may act as helpful discovery factors?

So comparatively small is their home market that Australian wine producers must export to outlive and their nice saviour lately has been the success of extremely priced Australian reds in China. Final yr, mainland China accounted for 31 per cent of the worth of Australian wine exports, practically twice as a lot as the worth of exports to the UK (17 per cent) and the US (16 per cent). Hong Kong added one other 5 per cent.

But the Chinese language dream — closely influenced by Treasury Wine Estates’ key model Penfolds, so robust in China that knock-off manufacturers comparable to Benfolds and Panfaids have proliferated, all utilizing the identical distinctive font as Penfolds — is effectively and actually over. Sino-Australian relations have soured and such punitive import duties have been imposed by the Chinese language on Australian wine final November that exports to China fell by 98 per cent in December.

As an admirer of Australia’s finest wines for 40 years, I’ve been involved about what is going to occur to all of the wine that may have been despatched to China. The 2020 harvest in California was severely affected by final October’s wildfires, so I assumed that California’s loss is perhaps Australia’s acquire to an extent — although till the fires, California had a substantial surplus of wine anyway.

Listening to in regards to the terrible frosts in France and Italy final month, that are prone to shrink the European 2021 harvest, I puzzled if Australian wine would possibly profit. Likewise, it’d revenue from the unprecedentedly small 2021 crop in New Zealand (additionally due to frost, in addition to unsettled climate throughout flowering).

That mentioned, identical to nearly all over the place on the planet, Australia has been beset by meteorological hazards too (notably fires and floods, with each the 2020 and 2019 crops being unusually small), so the China-related surplus is much less of a blow than it may need been — no less than when it comes to quantity. The 120 million litres of predominantly purple wine that have been destined for China this yr would have been value A$1.1bn, and it appears unlikely some other nation can pay that a lot for it. Extravagantly packaged, full-bodied purple is hardly going to fill the hole left by a scarcity of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, for instance.

On the similar time, the 2021 Australian wine harvest simply gathered was almost perfect in South Australia, the important thing wine state, so this could possibly be a superb time to revise perceptions of Australian wine usually. The issue is that Australia has been so profitable at filling decrease grocery store cabinets with cheap, dependable wine that many non-Australian wine drinkers have problem acknowledging that the nation produces superb wine in any respect.

The screwcaps which are nearly necessary inside Australia could also be a deterrent in some markets. (After exports to China began to take off about 10 years in the past, many Australian producers deserted their devotion to the technical perfection of a screwcap and switched back to natural corks for wines destined for that market.) And the truth that Australian wine barely options within the superb wine commerce (with the notable exception of Penfolds Grange) might not be useful for the picture of Australian wine both.

Australian auctioneers Langton’s have created a vigorous marketplace for the nation’s most collectable wines, however that’s strictly a phenomenon inside Australia. The worldwide buying and selling change Liv-ex studies that, even together with Penfolds Grange, Australia accounts for effectively below 2 per cent of its trades.

I used to be lately despatched a dozen samples of 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines, seven of them Australian and the remainder from elsewhere around the globe. No less than six of the Australians have been excellent by any measure and I believe many a fan of purple bordeaux could be stunned and delighted by them. They jogged my memory slightly of Napa Cabs from the Nineteen Seventies — excessive reward.

Shiraz dominates Australian wine exports by a rustic mile and, whereas historically Australian Shiraz has been large — maybe too large and beefy for the present pattern in the direction of freshness — there are a bunch of latest wave producers in Australia who, like their counterparts in California, see alcohol, oak and focus as enemies.

As for Chardonnay, the nation’s third most exported varietal after Shiraz and Cabernet, I’d exit on a limb and say the higher ones have reached a uniquely excellent steadiness between accessibility and class. And I wasn’t even invited to Lake Tahoe.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Extra stockists from Wine-searcher.com

Observe Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

Observe @FTMag on Twitter to search out out about our newest tales first.