Leeuwin, which is in the Margaret River district of Western Australia and also produces well-regarded chardonnays, cabernets, and shirazes, is represented in the United States by Old Bridge Cellars, one of several importers putting an accent on regional diversity and finesse-driven winemaking. Look for examples from Grosset, Frankland Estate, and Kilikanoon as well as the Penfolds Bin 51 Riesling ($17) and a favorite of mine, the Leeuwin Estate Art Series Riesling ($21). Not every Australian wine is big and red: The country also produces excellent dry rieslings. Although both were now a little creaky, they were still superb, with as much complexity and nuance as you could hope to find in a wine. They also served the Penfolds 1962 Bin 60A Cabernet-Shiraz and the 1967 Bin 7 Cabernet-Shiraz, two celebrated rarities. The lunch included the 2002, 1991, and 1990 Grange, all of which were terrific, as well as the 1990 vintage of the Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon, another benchmark Australian wine. Penfolds is Australia’s best-known winery and makes its most famous wine, Penfolds Grange, a shiraz that has long been considered among the pre-eminent liquid collectibles. It is certainly an unfortunate one, because Australia is capable of producing sensational wines, a point convincingly demonstrated at a Penfolds tasting I attended in New York last fall. “It is a nightmarish situation,” says Posner. Whatever the case, pricey Australian wines are now the lepers of the fine-wine market, and many oenophiles appear to have written off Australia entirely. It has also been suggested that many of the hulking shirazes were simply overrated. It didn’t help that a lot of these wines seemed to share the same basic profile-sweet, jammy fruit, strong oak influences-and were more or less indistinguishable from one another. Hayward thinks it is a case of fruit-bomb fatigue-that people ultimately found the wines to be overbearing and tiresome. The hope is that this will help persuade them to pony up for pricier wines.īut consumers have now soured on this genre. The consensus is that Australia needs to reintroduce itself to consumers-to acquaint them with the quality of Australian terroir and with the country’s enormous viticultural diversity. Paul Henry of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corp., a government-sponsored marketing organization, recently told Reuters that the days in which Australia led the world in its “ability to produce large volumes of compellingly branded easy-drinking wine” were over. Among industry insiders, it is widely agreed that Australia no longer has a competitive advantage in this segment of the market and that the emphasis on value wines has been a colossal blunder. Sales of inexpensive Australian wines ($12 and under) are still fairly robust, but Australia’s dominance in the bargain bins is being challenged now by low-cost producers in countries like Argentina (whose exports to the United States jumped 31 percent last year), Chile, and South Africa. As a result, consumers came to equate Australia with wines that were flavorful but also cheap and frivolous, a perception that became a major liability when those same consumers got interested in more serious stuff rather than looking to Oz, they turned to Spain, Italy, and France. At the same time, Yellow Tail’s success prompted rival Australian brands to focus even more of their efforts on the budget category. For one thing, Yellow Tail spawned a legion of imitators, and retail shelves were soon crawling with “critter” labels featuring penguins, crocodiles, and other regional fauna. However, what was good for Yellow Tail wasn’t so great for the Australian wines as a whole. (Sales have nearly doubled since, and according to industry analyst Eileen Fredrikson, Yellow Tail today accounts for almost half the Australian wine purchased here.) The appealing packaging, combined with the decent quality of the wines and the low price ($7), proved to be a masterstroke: In just three years, Yellow Tail became the most popular imported wine in the United States, with sales of around 4 million cases annually. In 2001, Filippo Casella and his son John launched a line of wines called Yellow Tail, whose colorful label featured that iconic Australian, the wallaby. Much of the credit, or blame, for this can be pinned not on a conglomerate but on a family of Sicilian immigrants in New South Wales. In recent years, however, it has flooded the planet with discount juice. Thanks to industrial giants like Jacob’s Creek and Rosemount, Australia has long been a prime source of mass-market chardonnays and shirazes. The biggest problem is that Australia has made itself synonymous in the minds of many drinkers with cut-rate, generic wines.
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