Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Brown Brothers 2006 Tempranillo
I’ve been watching recent developments in the Australian wine industry with more than a little interest.
There’s little doubt the industry has found itself in the middle of a crisis, but an observer could have arrived at the same assessment at regular intervals over the past thirty years. I suspect the current state of affairs has more than a little to do with that old bugbear market forces and quite a bit to do with the equally topical subject of climate change.
Taking climate change first, it’s obvious that until there’s a serious reshuffle in the water allocation and environmental flows landscape much of the irrigated fruit that makes up such a substantial chunk of the wines that come labelled as ‘South-East Australia - the big-selling multi-region blends that take up much of the visible display space in your local chain liquor outlet - is likely to disappear.
A lot of that vineyard space has, from what I can gather, been planted by organisations more concerned with reducing someone’s tax bill than producing actual wine, though the result of vast areas of vineyard developments has been vast quantities of surplus production which producers are going to have great difficulty shifting.
Much of the justification for those plantings has been the Australian wine industry’s success in overseas markets, which brings us back to market forces.
There’s no doubt that over the past twenty years Australia has become very good at producing large quantities of reasonable quality wine at extremely attractive price points. Much of the problem at the moment seems to be that other countries have woken up to the possibilities and, as a result, there’s competition in the grog shops in the U.K. and North America that wasn’t there before.
There seems to be a parallel development in those parts where Australian wine has become boring and consumers are heading towards other sources at around the same (or preferably a cheaper) price point.
Hardly surprising, really.
If you’re going to treat something as a commodity and work on volume you’re not going to be looking too much at the quality side of the equation, though there are always going to be instances where quality wine will appear at extremely attractive price points.
You just don’t expect it to happen consistently.
For instance, back in 2004 and 2005 Angove’s Butterfly Ridge Riesling was exceptional value with genuine varietal character and the mineral/lime characters you’d expect in much more expensive Rieslings in a range that I was able to pick up for around $5 a bottle. I’d tried the same wine from later vintages and, frankly, it’s tasted more or less like what you’d expect from a good wine at that price point.
But the 2004 was an outstanding wine at that price point.
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