At the risk of being labelled an optimist, I want to declare that there has never been a more exciting time to be a winemaker in Australia than right now.
I know there is much gloom around slowing growth in wine drinking but allow me to explain my contrary view.
Wine educators talk about the journey that we wine lovers go on. This journey involves discovering and understanding different wine styles. It also becomes about integrating these wines into the food scene.
A few decades ago, this was a far simpler proposition; steak with Shiraz, roasts with Cabernet and Pinot Noir, and fish with Chardonnay. Simple. But the modern world has provided us with an escalating array of food and wine options thanks to farmers, chefs and winemakers being prepared to experiment with flavours and pioneer new approaches.
The backdrop has been Australia’s multi-cultural revolution since the 1980s, providing a new audience, and culinary palate, that often had little history in wine paired to their food. Indeed, it could be argued that this revolution has contributed to the drop in wine consumption of the more immediate past. But I digress.
Even the most hardened anti-immigration campaigners can agree the wide selection of food styles now being grown and consumed has been a wonderful thing. Winemakers love making wine that goes with food, so it’s an obvious reaction to double down on our own journey of how we make our wines in the vineyard and winery.
Over the past decade new grape varieties being planted have exploded, and the way they are turned into wine has been explored as never before. No orthodoxy has been left untouched. How do we match wines, for example, with zingy Thai and super-hot Indian? What about Turkish meze, Chinese Szechuan peppers?
Vignerons have all been forced to refocus our creative brains like never before and it is the small winemakers who have led the revolution. Large commercial wineries, as always, have responded sluggishly and continue to produce commercial styles to a homogenised market that has been rapidly devolving. Their initial response has been to stick with existing wines but put a new, funky label on it. But again, I digress!
Small winemakers will continue to focus on quality, creativity and adaptation. This means finding the right vineyard sites for the right varieties and then reimagining our winery crafting to match the food and occasion. Like I said at the start, it’s an exciting time to make wine.
Let me give you a couple of quick examples, based on our own adaptations. We have started making a sparkling Grenache Rosé wine, whose creamy light bodied texture and honeyed floral aromas perfectly match Thai green curries.
Three years ago, we created a wine that blends together custom-grown traditional and new varieties, from our own vineyard, to make a red wine that is soft but chewy, medium-bodied but complex, and lower in alcohol. This produces a wine that can be drunk a little chilled with tapas and charred spicy meat dishes. It’s also our go-to wine for pizza! We call it ‘Nouveau’ because it is modern and made to drink young.
This vintage, my Chinese assistant winemaker Derek Pei made a trial batch using lighter chardonnay grapes infused with traditional floral Chinese botanicals and tea. It’s an emerging style among Chinese youth and it may or may not amount to anything, but we have at least begun that journey.
Of course, we still mostly produce our traditional wines, but our new experiences have shown us ways to make them even more food-adaptable, while retaining their classic identities, in the strong belief that a truly great wine inevitably has a great match with food.
