WINE-COUNTRIES AUSTRALIA

1 - Australia meridionale
2 - Australia occidentale
3 - Nuovo Galles del Sud
4 - Tasmania
5 - Victoria Wineries


Vineyard area: 63 thousand hectares

Total production: 4 million hectolitres

Annual consumption
total: 3.23 million hectolitres
per capita: 18.6 litres

Exports: 1.385 million hectolitres

Imports: 86 thousand hectolitres

Principal grape varieties: shiraz (syrah), chardonnay, sémillon, malbec, muscat gordo blanco, verdelho, petit berdot, pinot nero, riesling, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon

Australia

Although it is the world's eleventh biggest producer, Australia makes only one-fifteenth as much wine as Italy. The country has grown wine grapes since the first settlement by Europeans in 1788, but the wine industry has only come of age in the last 30 years. The world has taken Australian wine to its heart in the last decade, with exports now accounting for 30 per cent of production, compared to 3 per cent as recently as 1986. Exports are growing in value at the phenomenal rate of 25 per cent a year. The main markets are the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, followed by Oceania and North America.

The winemaking industry is suffering from growing pains, with stagnant domestic sales but booming export demand which the industry hopes to take to 1 billion Australian dollars by the year 2000.

To achieve this, enormous capital expenditure in vineyards and winery capacity is required. Raising the money is the main obstacle. To that end, there has been a spate of public floats and share capital raisings. At least seven wine companies have gone public in the last few years. Ironically, export success is putting pressure on grape supplies and threatening the viability of those exports by pushing up grape prices. For a change, the larger companies are among the biggest planters of new vineyards. Mildara Blass, for instance, plans to be 60 per cent self-sufficient by 2001.

Although the 1993-94 figures are up 2 per cent, domestic wine consumption is declining gently. However, Australians are drinking better than ever, and the average quality of wine has never been better. Winemakers are now highly trained and Australia is at the forefront of technical innovation in viticulture and winemaking. Its early development of mechanical harvesting, mechanical pruning and controlled irrigation have given it a competitive edge overseas. Freighting wine from the bottom of the world is no obstacle in a country that is used to long-haul transportation: it costs no more to ship a case of wine to England than it does to send it across Australia.

Since the 1970s, the emphasis has been on fine table and sparkling wines and to this end, cooler climatic regions have been preferred. These vary from small plantings in places like Mount Barker, the Adelaide Hills and Geelong to massive vineyards at Padthaway, where premium white wines are produced in large quantity. Coonawarra is Padthaway's red- wine alter-ego, and the steady increase in vineyards in both areas permits large quantities of fine wines at relatively low production costs. Now, new plantings are proliferating throughout the south-east of South Australia outside these two main regions.

There are over 730 wineries in Australia, more than 600 of them small. They have multiplied in the 1970s and 1980s especially in cooler regions such as southern Victoria, the south-west of Western Australia, the southern and higher areas of South Australia, and Tasmania. At the same time great changes have swept through the big wineries, with more emphasis on cooler, higher-altitude grapegrowing, and high- tech winemaking. Site-selection is now a fine art and vine canopy manipulation is an Australian specialty, spurred on by the globe-trotting viticultural guru Dr Richard Smart. While Australian wines have occasionally been accused of being too modern and lacking character, no-one has ever said they were badly made or poor value for money. Winemaking standards are second to none, backed by an active and skilled organisation, the Australian Wine Research Institute, and by two wine science colleges at Adelaide University (Roseworthy campus) and Charles Sturt University (Wagga campus). They have revolutionised winemaking to the extent that where once it was only Australians who went to France to train, now many Europeans come to work the vintage in Australian wineries. Because of the generally arid climate, irrigation is widespread, but for the highest quality wines it is usually used sparingly. Chaptalisation is banned by law but acidification is both legal and often essential in such a climate.

The wines' outstanding feature is their fruit character, thanks to a climate of abundant sunshine and warmth. This fruitiness may be excessive to some palates, but is proving immensely popular on export markets. The ubiquitous Chardonnay, the grape that seems to be taking over the world, is also dominating Australian plantings, with 10 per cent of the surface. It overtook Riesling, Muscat Gordo Blanco and Semillon a few years ago as the number one premium white grape. Semillon's reputation in Australia is higher than in any other country. The Portuguese Verdelho is another speciality, used increasingly to make light, fruity dry whites for early drinking. Sauvignon Blanc is also growing in popularity.

For red wines, Shiraz has always been the major grape, employed for everything from rose' and bag-in-box reds to premium varietals and tawny port. Its reputation suffered during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but Shiraz is now having a renaissance, sparked by the spicy hand-made wines of the small wineries in cooler regions. In the Barossa Valley, the home of Shiraz, super-ripe concentrated wines from low- yielding, dry-grown, often century-old vines is becoming almost a cult item. Penfolds Grange has always been there, rising above fashion, but now it has dozens of imitators. Partly responsible for the temporary eclipse of Shiraz was the Cabernet Sauvignon craze. There was very little Cabernet Sauvignon before the 1970s wine boom, just as there was virtually no Chardonnay, so these varieties inevitably stole the limelight from Shiraz and its white counterparts, Semillon and Riesling. Whereas in the past the classic Australian red blend was a Cabernet/Shiraz, it is now more likely to be Cabernet/Merlot, or occasionally Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc/Merlot. Some even go the full Bordeaux caper and include Petit Verdot and Malbec.

Australian winemakers have as much trouble with Pinot Noir as anybody, and it has taken 20 years of experimentation to reach the point where a substantial number are now having regular success. They are invariably in the cooler regions: especially the Yarra Valley, Geelong, Tasmania and south-west Western Australia. Some sensible producers have cut their losses and channelled their Pinot into sparkling wines, while others persist in making pale-coloured rose' styles or tough, over-extracted wines, both of which miss the target. Alongside the rise of Pinot Noir is a marked improvement in premium bottle-fermented sparkling wine. Led by two smaller producers, Domaine Chandon and Petaluma, and the giant Southcorp Wines with its many brands including Seppelt and Seaview, sparkling wine is more refined than ever. It reflects increasing use of cool-grown Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes, but the style is strongly fruit-driven as opposed to heavily bottle-aged or yeast-influenced.

Australian wines today are generally more polished, fresher, fruitier and the reds have less tannin astringency than during the 1970s. They are lighter, with less need for cellaring, mostly approachable in their youth, which is how the public seems to want them. Each state produces wine: South Australia (45 per cent of the nation's total output), New South Wales (37 per cent) and Victoria (17 per cent), with small areas in Western Australia and Tasmania producing up-market wine. Queensland's tiny industry struggles along, concentrated in the Granite Belt, just north of the New South Wales border. Australia has 33 distinct wine regions and about 7,000 vineyards for a total of 63,000 hectares concentrated on the southern and eastern coasts, since most of Australia's inland is desert. The range of soils and climates is vast.

While many smaller producers use only grapes from their own vineyards, Australians have always blended vineyards and grape varieties. Many companies, especially the larger ones, blend grapes from several regions to achieve consistency of style and quality. Thanks to modern transportation it is not unusual to see blends of Hunter and Coonawarra, or even Hunter Valley, Goulburn Valley and Mount Barker, involving three states and thousands of kilometres by truck. In South Australia there is much blending between Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, Clare, Langhorne Creek and the Barossa Valley, a permitted practice as there is no denomination of origin. There is however a newly-developed Label Integrity Program (LIP) which, through control and inspection, requires producers to substantiate any claims made on labels, such as vintage, grape variety, region and vineyard. Any statement claimed on a wine bottle must be able to be proven by the vigneron's records. LIP is designed to protect the integrity of Australian wines and safeguard their export future. Tasmania, Mudgee and Margaret River have small local authentication schemes, but they have only a scattered following. Nobody in Australia wants French-style appellation control, but with the growing necessity of drawing boundaries around regions, some sort of appellation may not be far away, especially as the proposed Coonawarra boundary is being hotly debated.

A new agreement struck between Australia and the European Union requires Australian wines to be at least 85 per cent of the stated grape variety, 85 per cent of the stated vintage year, and 85 per cent from the stated region. This is a minor modification of the status quo. There is also agreement to eventually phase out the use of European generic names, such as Chablis, Champagne and Port. When these descriptions disappear, Australia's wine industry will truly have grown up. Vintage evaluation is often a complicated issue, given the great distances and major climate variations between the wine producing regions. 1991 had the impossible task of following what was widely held to be the vintage of the decade, if not the century. But in many areas, such as Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, the Yarra Valley and the Hunter, it has equalled or surpassed 1990. Both were textbook seasons (except 1990 in the Hunter, which was wet) with mild but sunny summers, full ripeness and elegant, balanced wines. 1992 is universally less good: another cool summer with a late harvest, but the wines are not quite as generous, rich or ripe. In the Hunter it was very wet pre-harvest. 1993 was yet another cool season with one of the latest harvests on record. After a disastrous summer throughout southern Australia, drenchingly wet and with moulds running rampant, the sun came out and ripened the grapes, resulting in an excellent vintage. Throughout South Australia and southern Victoria the reds are superb, the Rieslings refined, the Chardonnays elegant and intense. Coonawarra's 1993 may even surpass 1990 and 1991. In the south of Western Australia, 1993 was the third wet season in a row, although wine quality rose above natural setbacks. In Margaret River and Mount Barker it is a top vintage. In the Hunter Valley 1993 was also cool and late, but a high-quality harvest for red and white.