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Yearning For A Faulty Wine
Friday, 31st August, 2007
- Richard Warland
I was making wine for Hardys during the "red boom" of the early seventies and I clearly remember the pressure then to get red into bottle. For bottled wine, time in oak (a ritual for even "commercial" wines in those days), was increasingly squeezed and by '74 "the punter's wine", flagons, was virtually straight from fermentation.
...what happened? Red died and white took over - and it took around seven years (the classic wine industry cycle) for vino rosso to re-establish its rightful place in sales volume.
To quote McLaren Vale's Wayne Thomas - "a white would be a red if it could".
I think we real wine lovers know what he meant, but is the industry forgetting the underlying message?
In international markets, Australia has been accused of making "boring wines" - technical, clean and lacking any influence of terroir.
To be honest, in two years of living in Hong Kong I have drunk few Aussie wines other than those from my own Australian cellar. I drink wine with every evening meal and I am not rich. Accordingly I have a "week day quaffer and weekend lash-out" wine budget. As an addicted oenophile I also delight in new tasting experiences so I rarely drink the same wine twice - and the Hong Kong retail scene caters for this admirably.
So to cut to the chase... I think the world has decided to copy us in making boring wines!
In my "everyday" budget category, under HKD100 - (say sub $15 Aussie), at least 75% of the reds I have tried are "technical", clean and boring. France, Italy, Chile, USA, all guilty! The only bright lights appear to be Spain, Portugal, Argentina and South Africa - the latter more often due to cellar "peculiarities" - the sort of thing we rarely see in Aus. these days!
Maybe I am old and out of touch but if I want to drink fruit juice and alcohol I can mix the two myself!
I recently bought a dozen reds from Marks & Spencer and the tasting experience really tipped me over the edge, prompting this prose. M&S are no slouches in the UK wine scene and I assume these wines are freely available in the UK. I defer to the greater wisdom of the wine buyers involved, but...
Across a wonderful variety of grape varieties, regions and packaging all of the wines were, to me, alcoholic fruit juice. White wines with colour!
...and it probably says a lot about my jaded old palate, but a Vin Rouge de France bought from a stall in my local "wet market" for HKD30, while thin as expected, had some interesting technical flaws that made it a good drink with food.
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