Australia invented Tall Poppy Syndrome whereby the tallest poppy in the field is mercilessly cut down to size simply because of its height. Now, in the wine world at least, it seems to be well and truly the victim of the syndrome.
No country producing wine has come so far, so fast as Australia in the last decade or so, ever. Its impact both in terms of volumes of wine exported and technical influence of how wine is made around the world is unparalleled. (Has anyone ever heard of a flying winemaker from California, to choose an example of a wine producer with superficial similarities to Australia? OK there may be one or two – but set them against the hundreds of itinerant oenologists currently roaming the wine world who are either Australian or trained by Australians.)
But I would argue that Australia as a force in wine is at a particularly interesting point in its evolution.
When it set out to conquer the world in terms of wine exports, Australia's first focus was on Great Britain, a country with lots of cultural links, a tiny domestic wine industry and, unusually, a growing thirst for wine. Britain's imports of Australian wine grew from under nine million litres in 1990 to about 200 million in 2002, with their value even overtaking that of imports from number one supplier France in 2002.
At first, the British wine-drinking public, wine trade and wine media were united in their approbation of Australia. We were suffused in a warm glow of post-colonial admiration, topped up regularly by infusions of wonderfully approachable, reliable wines, the odd trip Down Under where the sun seemed always to shine and a hitherto-unknown mateyness, with male wine writers anyway, between those who were selling the stuff and those who were writing about it. Beer and bars played a part in this, I'm told.
Whereas the wine producers of Europe tended to stay home, spoke a different language and had a wine philosophy built on entirely foreign values such as terroir, typicité and tradition, the Aussies visited us flatteringly often. They not only spoke the same language (spiced with references to cricket and rugby), they increased our vocabulary, introducing us to all sorts of new techno-terms of which we had previously only the haziest knowledge. Gosh we felt clever thanks to those visiting Australians, their factsheets and their self-deprecatingly pragmatic accounts of their winemaking over a pint of lager.
But Australia's impressive growth was built on the efforts of firstly a human dynamo called Hazel Murphy, the hardworking Englishwoman who has just retired from the Australian Wine Bureau in London, and secondly a terribly small number of companies – the biggies.
Even before the 'amalgamation' of Southcorp and Rosemount, in 2001 the fickle tide of wine writer approbation had turned. Australian wine was now big and therefore, in the way of the world's biggest wine producer Gallo of California for example, had to be bad.
Before the dubious merger with Rosemount, Southcorp had already made the mistake of losing its extremely popular front man in Britain, an attractively philosophical Englishman who acted as a firewall between the Australian parent company's worst bureaucratic excesses and the cynical British wine press. Now all we had to communicate with was a row of suits and a sheaf of prospectuses. In fact, if I consult my own personal telephone records for the company, I see four people, all of whom have left. Facelessness does not help image.
The other big companies struggle on trying to court us wine hacks, but it does nothing for Australia that one of them incorporates an American name with its Blass and the leading brand Jacob's Creek is made by a French company most famous for pastis.
The image of Australian wine in Britain is nothing like as rosy as it was in the early 1990s. Consumers pride themselves on having 'grown out of' Australian wine, so long associated rightly or wrongly with oaky whites and alcoholic reds. And the mass of wine commentators have over the last year or two vied with each other for who can sling the most insults at the Australian wine establishment. The wines themselves are dismissed as technical constructs of big business, horrible things called brands, which lack the soul of 'real wine' made by Europeans in general and the French in particular.
(Meanwhile of course some of the French are busy emulating the Australians in every way they think possible. The big merchants of Bordeaux are all trying to develop their own brands modelled on Australian winemaking, packaging and marketing techniques.)
The American market for Australian wine meanwhile is at quite a different stage of its evolution. Australia has really only just started its assault on the US, which is now the country's second most important export market but still imports less than half as much Australian wine as the UK. The wines that are making an impact on wine insiders in the US are virtually unique to that market – tiny parcels of turbo-charged reds, often unknown in Australia itself and made expressly for a handful of American specialist wine importers who whisk them past guru Robert Parker and sell them for fabulous prices on the basis of his scores out of 100.
But, to be typically contrary, I would argue that the mainstream wine press in both Britain and America have got it wrong about Australian wine. Of course the big, bad brands exist – in quantity. The little US-bound parcels of souped-up Shiraz also exist, in tiny amounts, but need not really detain most of us; they are the Australian equivalent of Bordeaux's garage wines – short-term wonders of more interest to trophy hunters than serious palates.
But the really interesting wines of Australia fall into neither of these categories. They are valid expressions of the particular place they are grown, made by devoted craftspeople in just the same way as the finest wines of Europe are. Most of them are made by self-employed individuals but some of them are made by the most talented employees of much larger organisations. In very general terms you are more likely to find them in Australia's cooler wine regions because subtlety is more likely to result from a longer growing season but that is a horrible generalisation trounced by the unique magnificence of a Chambers Rutherglen Rare Muscat, the gentle subtlety of a Henschke Hill of Grace or a passionate innovation such as Primo Estate's Joseph Sparkling Red.
It is up to the importers of Australian wines around the world to get off their backsides and make sure their customers are exposed to the best that this extraordinary and varied country has to offer rather than sit back and take the easiest option, the suave blandishments of the big company representative.
See purple pages for specific recommendations of fine Australian wine.
