21st Century Australian Fine Wine: The Landmark Tutorial
Introduction: The Landmark Tutorial v. the Australian Wine Boom
Edward Ragg
Landmark Tutorial participants [©Redfish Bluefish Creative]
In September of last year, fourteen wine professionals gathered in Australia’s Yarra Valley for, without exaggeration, the tasting experience of a lifetime.
Chosen as scholars for the Landmark Tutorial – in 2010 hosted by Yering Station in conjunction with the Yarra Valley Winegrowers’ Association – this lucky crowd was joined by leading figures from the Australian wine community, among them James Halliday, Andrew Caillard MW and Dr Tony Jordan. Led by other luminaries such as Michael Hill Smith and Jeffrey Grosset, the Tutorial comprised a series of seminars providing a cross-section of Australian fine wine organized by grape variety, style, contemporary relevance and historical importance.
Only in its second year, this week-long residential programme, organized by Wine Australia (and the brainchild of former GM Paul Henry), has the primary aim of broadening awareness of Australia’s fine wine offerings and fine wine heritage. Thus, participating scholars were drawn from various parts of the globe including the UK, the US, Denmark, Germany, mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and – unlike in the inaugural 2009 Tutorial – Australia: sommelier Kim Bickley and wine writer Tony Love adding context whilst re-assessing Australia’s fine wine capabilities for themselves (for a full list of participants click here).
Fongyee Walker and myself represented mainland China, a significant new market for Australia, where we have been involved in a range of on-going educational initiatives. But whilst the Tutorial enabled an unparalleled assessment of Australian fine wine both in contemporary terms and across the decades – as well as a unique opportunity to be exposed to some of its greatest winemakers – what overall messages did ‘The Landmark’ convey? This question can, perhaps, only be answered after considering the recent history of Australian wine as well as drawing on the highlights and debates the Tutorial offered.
Soul-searching and reassessment are currently at the centre of all things Australian wine. In 1996 Australia exported around 150 million litres of wine. In 2007 exports peaked at over 700 million litres. The Australian wine boom of the late 1980s, 1990s and thereafter led many first-time wine drinkers around the world to experience a glass of ‘sunshine in a bottle’, putting Australia firmly on the map in international wine circles. But in supplying volume ever more competitively (and with a growing surplus), there arose the danger that ‘Brand Australia’ would itself be compromised and its fine wines – often produced in quantities much smaller than the likes of Bordeaux’s top estates – would go unnoticed.
Australians, it could be argued, are tireless over-achievers and the wine boom seems indicative in this respect. However, it should be remembered that the success of Australian wine was, initially, a relative up-hill battle, at least in traditional markets, notwithstanding Aussie enthusiasm. A former Export Manager for Yalumba told me not so long ago about the response to ‘Australian wine’ from the more pin-striped element of the 1980s British wine trade, mimicking (in a suitably port-soaked voice): ‘But, my dear, Ya-Lum-Ba, how does one even say it?’
Conquering the UK market was, in fact, a challenge that went back to some of the earliest pioneers of Australian wine keen to capitalize on the 19th Century British penchant for fortified wines; which, to this day, Australia still produces at the highest level, even if the market for its sublime fortifieds, both domestically and internationally, is now minuscule. More discerning members of the 1980s UK trade, however, quickly realized how Australia, with its advances in wine technology and penchant for marketing would ultimately capture the UK and US markets with highly drinkable, affordable table wines with which the likes of France and the Old World could not compete. The Yellow Tail effect seemed, eventually, the epitome of everything Australia could do at its best (and, possibly, worst) in the eyes of wine consumers.
But in conquering significant international markets with volume, there was an obvious price to pay. When I left the UK in 2007, supermarkets had for some time been heavily discounting Australian wines. Whilst a discounting culture had existed before, it was not as marked in the late 1990s; and in the early-mid 1990s was unheard of (most discounted wine in the UK then hailing from Bulgaria or Romania). But by 2009 35% of Australian wine exported was valued at around $2.50 AUS per litre.
Back in 1996, the Australian Wine & Brandy Corporation (AWBC) aimed to reach $4.5 billion in exports by 2025 – the famous ‘Strategy 2025’ – a figure reached twenty years prematurely in 2005. This led to a reappraisal of the industry entitled Directions to 2025: An Industry Strategy for Sustainable Success (May 2007), sustainability being precisely the issue. Australia, it has to be said, still makes the most reliable entry-level commercial wines in the world, but, by 2007, if not before, expansion of the industry on the prior pattern was looking unsustainable for all sorts of reasons.
Before reviewing what the 2010 Landmark Tutorial offered, however, the issue of sustainability should be addressed for rather more pressing reasons. Max Allen, author of The Future Makers: Australian Wine for the 21st Century – who dropped in during the Tutorial for a fun dinner at Oakridge winery – begins his assessment of the current Australian wine industry on a cautionary note (not for nothing is the first section of the book called ‘The Big Picture’). For Allen, no one should forget that the two main issues really facing Australia are water availability and climate change; rather than the contingent concern that its production of bulk wine will obscure the Aussie fine wine message.
Drawing on the research and campaigning of viticultural experts such as Prof. Snow Barlow and Dr. Richard Smart, Allen ponders:
Can we reasonably expect this fragile, sunburnt country to keep on supporting an industry of 8,000 vineyards and 2,500-plus producers? Can the Australian wine industry continue to grow all the grapes it is growing now, in all the places it is growing them, using current viticultural and irrigation methods? The answer to both of these questions is no.
Those currently ‘making the future’ of Australian wine, at any level, are already facing these concerns, as Allen details. Fittingly, perhaps, the Landmark Tutorial began with a session by Dr Tony Jordan on climate and Australia’s viticultural areas.
This article was originally published on Enobytes.com
This is the beginning of a 14-part series in which Edward Ragg provides an in-depth review of last year’s Landmark Tutorial, a showcase of Australia’s finest wines. Co-founder, with Fongyee Walker, of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting based in Beijing, Ragg has also produced detailed tasting notes on all 185 of the wines tasted in the Landmark seminars on Adegga.
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