Unfashionable Bargains

Which country produces the best wine values today?

Certainly not Australia. In fact, Australia wins the prize for fastest price rise in the world of wine. Some of the better Australian reds fetch twice as much as they did three years ago.

This is not the place to go into all the reasons for skyrocketing Australian wine prices--chiefly grape shortages and robust marketing--but suffice it to say that in Australia, even Riesling grapes are sought after.

Which takes me to my point. If I had to nominate a grape that is underpriced throughout the world, it would be poor old Riesling, that most noble and misunderstood of grapes. It’s white, not red, of course, which puts it at a disadvantage nowadays. It’s also low in alcohol and therefore lacks clobbering power in big tasting line-ups; you have to appreciate elegance and acidity to enjoy Riesling. Furthermore, it is virtually never “enhanced” (and I use that word with tongue firmly in cheek) with oak. No wonder Riesling is so often ignored, even though it suits a much wider range of foods than most Chardonnays.

The consequence is that not only are Rieslings generally the best-value wine in a given producer’s range (and this can even sometimes apply to the wizards of Alsace, whose various Pinots seem to be increasingly sought after at Riesling’s expense) but that wines from Germany, Riesling’s birthplace, can be some of the world’s best buys. This applies particularly to older vintages from classic producers with a long history of painstaking care in the vineyard and winery.

It is surprising and, to a Riesling fan like me, rather shocking how many parcels of mature German wine, with that marvelous combination of steely backbone and haunting mineral-scented bouquet, languish in cellars on the Rhine and Mosel rivers.

The other wine style that is ridiculously cheap simply because it is so unfashionable is Sherry, which as any Andalusian knows, can come only from the arid vineyards in the hinterland of Jerez and Sanlucar in southern Spain. Some of the prices for tinglingly wonderful, appetizing Sherry blends that have been matured in cask for 10 or sometimes many more years make me weep. I know I should be on the side of the consumer and simply point these bargains out. But can the Sherry industry really survive selling its finest produce for just a few dollars a bottle?

It is notable that both these pariahs of the otherwise vibrant international wine trade, Sherry and German wines, reached this sorry state because their image has been so tarnished by the cynical, sweetened-up imitations that were once so popular: cream Sherry and Liebfraumilch.)

In my opinion, Spain and Portugal together are the source of many great values in red wine (in whites, look to eastern Europe, where wines are underpriced because their makers need hard currency). This is partly because the world is looking for assertive reds made from fully ripe grapes, and Spanish and Portuguese vineyards typically suffer from no lack of sunshine. (Neither do many California grapes, but winemaking costs are much higher here and prices reflect that.)

In addition, the modern winemaker revolution has at last swept through a decent proportion of wineries in both areas, so they are now able to offer not just alcohol but a degree of sophistication, with lots of juicy fruit balanced by a suitable charge of acidity and increasingly friendly tannins (once the bane of Portuguese reds). Of course, a vast and varied range of wine styles comes from a peninsula as vast and varied as Iberia, but it is in the more obscure wine regions that the best value is to be found.

The price-quality ratio in fashionable Ribera del Duero is utterly unpredictable, for example, and Rioja--hurtling into the 21st century to delightful effect--already has enough reputation to command relatively high prices.

But all over both Spain and Portugal there are pockets of winemaking ambition using either grape varieties sought after elsewhere--the likes of Mourvedre (Monastrell) and Grenache (Garnacha) in Spain--or such fascinating, characterful local specialties as Portugal’s majestic Touriga Nacional or obliging Castela~o Frances (Periquita).

As recently as a year ago, I would have nominated the vast Languedoc in southern France as a region offering notable wine value. But the best Languedoc wines--happily for their underfunded producers--have been spotted by value-conscious wine consumers around the world (if not necessarily in Paris) and prices have been rising recently.

So what of the motherland in general? Is France still primarily a source of overpriced classics? Yes and no, I would argue. At the very top end, even now that prices have fallen from the absurd levels of September 1997, value is not a relevant concept. But in the middle, say at cru bourgeois and particularly village Burgundy level, the Old World is increasingly good value compared with its most lauded imitators in places like Australia and, especially, California. In today’s torrid California wine climate, as in Pomerol/St. Emilion, it seems that the more you charge for a new wine, the easier it is to sell it.