Big Wine Country

The wine in glass No. 2 was a deep-golden bronze with a tired nose absent any trace of freshness. To me, it looked too old to drink. Yet the judges at the 1992 Australian Wine Show in Canberra didn’t blink twice as they awarded the old Johannisberg Riesling, from 1977, a gold medal.

That tired-looking white taught me a lesson about Australian wine. Australians love older white wines--which seems strange in the United States, where “fresh and fruity” is the phrase most often associated with good white wine.

After covering roughly 3,000 miles and seeing six major wine-growing regions, I learned many things about this vast country, most importantly that there are some superb wines at extraordinarily reasonable prices. And they are made in a style that should appeal to Americans, with generous fruit and soft textures.

Moreover, because of slow sales within Australia and the weakness of the Australian dollar, a number of wineries are now planning to ship wines to the United States, hoping to create a new market. Already, within the last four years, Australian wine has become a sensation in England.

Australians are proud of their wine. It’s an industry that started in the 1820s, 50 years before California’s, and one that wasn’t stymied by Prohibition.

Still, it seems to be California that most Australian winemakers point to as an example. Bouncing along a two-lane country road in the Yarra Valley, an emerging region filled with small wineries, winemaker Steve Weber of De Bortoli Winery said he thought the Yarra would soon be seen as a counterpart to the Napa Valley: “We’re just an hour from Melbourne, like Napa is an hour from San Francisco.”

A major difference is that the distance between wineries is immense. The Yarra has 35 wineries, but unlike Napa, where it only takes a minute or two to get from one winery to the next, in Australia, few are even visible from their neighbor. Virtually all regions of Australia require you to have a detailed map. Often the roads are the type that sprang up a century ago at the convenience of sheep ranchers, not winery tour guides.

On a dreary rainy spring afternoon in an area known as Lenswood in the Adelaide Hills, winemaker Tim Knappstein drove his four-wheel drive down a steep embankment covered with weeds higher than the vehicle. In the lowest swale, the four-wheel drive bucked and leaned as we bounced into a vineyard of Chardonnay.

“Where’s the winery?” I asked.

“Just a bit north,” said Knappstein. What “a bit” means here is more than 100 miles on a two-lane road, with only a few half-block towns breaking the monotony of endless sheep ranches.

As we drove to Knappstein’s winery and home in the Clare Valley, I asked him how it felt to live in such a remote area. Adelaide was the closest major city, 120 miles south.

“This isn’t remote. Alice Springs is remote,” he said, referring to the central Australian outback city that is 1,000 miles from its nearest neighbor. Australia is a country so vast that a large percentage of its medical care is provided by doctors who fly to remote locations in small planes. In fact, Knappstein owns a single-engine, open-cockpit, twin-seat, 1930s-era biplane that he flies to regions where it is impractical to drive.

If there is an area in Australia comparable in appearance and wine history to the Napa Valley it is the large Barossa Valley, home to the two largest wine producers in the country, Penfolds (and its affiliated brands Lindemans, Seppelts and Seaview) and Orlando (with a half-dozen brands including its newly acquired Wyndham).

Though it is home to three dozen wineries and still makes some great wines, the Barossa has steadily declined in acreage in the last two decades and now accounts for just 13,000 acres of grapes, less than 40% the size of the Napa Valley. Much of the wine made here, clearly, is from grapes grown elsewhere.

One of the few urban wine-growing regions in Australia is McLaren Vale, a superb area for a wide variety of grapes just southeast of Adelaide. It is here that BRL Hardy, Geoff Merrill, Andrew Garrett, Chateau Raynella and two dozen other wineries still make top-rate wines.

But encroaching development has doomed many of the best vineyards. As we headed for his winery, Merrill drove me through a tract of crisp new, modest homes. At one spot he winced and said: “See, here? A couple years ago I got sensational Shiraz out of this vineyard.”

“What vineyard?” I asked, looking at a pale-green house.

“This was all vineyard until the owners decided to sell out,” he said. “Made more money in houses than grapes.”

Merrill’s winery and three-acre vineyard, sitting atop the only hillock left in the neighborhood, has a view beyond his gate of a block of private homes. A stand of newly planted cypress trees will soon give the place an enclave feeling.

Australia is an interesting wine area in part because of the good humor of the people. Crocodile Dundee may have been an exaggeration, but the sense of fun that pervades the wine business here was seen best in a gathering of a dozen Barossa winemakers at a local cafe.

At one point I remarked to Robin Day, president of Orlando, that I had met few Australian winemakers who had big egos.

“Oh, we have a couple,” said Day. “But you don’t find many. I know of one guy with an ego so big that he’s like a guy with his hand in a bucket of water, and when he pulls it out, he expects to see a hole.”