Australia Shifts to Terroir

Australia led the New World wine revolution. With its emphasis on rich, ripe fruit, successfully married with voluptuous oak flavors, its labeling by grape varieties and down-to-earth marketing, it seduced European markets raised on the tradition that wine should be understood as an expression of the soil.

By the middle of the Noughties, its domestic and overseas wine sales had ballooned to more than £2.5 billion, and the country was overtaking France as the biggest exporter of wine to the U.K. Its influence on winemaking was growing too. With a slew of graduates from Australia's numerous colleges and universities working in the northern hemisphere, practices honed in Australia such as temperature-controlled fermentation, hygiene and efficiency were being readily adopted in Europe's vineyards. Institutions such as the Australian Wine Research Institute were exporting the latest oenological science. As Australia's wine styles were exported around the world and the number of wineries grew to more than 2,000, the world's major drinks companies moved in with a series of takeovers, joint ventures and mergers. Now the landscape is dominated by major corporations such as Constellation Brands, Inc., Foster's Group Ltd., Hardy's and Pernod Ricard Pacific.

On one level Australian wine has mirrored the efficiencies honed in sister industry's such as beer. Entry-level or budget wine is now subject to sophisticated marketing practices with a standardized flavor deliberately produced to appeal to a mass market. With its immediate fruit flavors, easy to open screw-cap bottle and garish label, this wine is effectively made to be drunk like beer, with an afterthought to where it is produced. For brand Australia, the name of the grape variety, wherever it is grown, is all the consumer needs to understand the wine in the bottle. It worked, appealing to a generation of wine drinkers unfamiliar with the unfathomable and unpronounceable appellations of the Old World.

And yet at the other end of the spectrum, in the fine-wine category, Australia is beginning to appreciate the notion of terroir and the complexities of France's Appellation Contrôlée system. All the European regulatory systems are based around an understanding that what makes a wine unique is not the grape variety or blend of grapes used in producing the wine but the character of the wine's vineyard, its combination of soil, climate and exposure to the sun.

France has encapsulated the system of terroir into law. The words Appellation Contrôlée guarantee that the wine will reflect the character of the region. In the U.S., the American Viticultural Area similarly guarantees the geographical origin of the wine. Incidentally, both systems are by no means a guarantee of quality.

While Australia's labeling integrity program does reflect regions in a loose sense, such as Southeast Australia or indeed in far greater detail areas such as the Barossa Valley, there appears to be a shift in philosophy.

"Thirty years ago the winemaker thought his job started in the winery," says John Duval, who for 16 years worked as the chief winemaker to Australia's most famous wine, Penfolds Grange. "Now we spend more time in the vineyard. We are trying to get over the 'big is beautiful, riper is better' practice of the past."

Mr. Duval, who now runs his own winery, John Duval Wines, points to the Barossa, the winemaking valley that sits around an hour's drive north of Adelaide. Amid its hot, arid plains, wines such as Grant Burge's Meshach, Penfolds Grange, Charles Melton, Peter Lehmann and Henschke's Hill of Grace have caught the world's attention with their deep, bold, voluptuous, spicy interpretation of Shiraz. Mr. Duval says work has shown there are now 13 different regions based on the geology of the region.

But unlike in Europe, which has experienced centuries of viticulture and where in a region such as Burgundy the ancestral inheritance is evident in the medieval monasteries and churches that pepper the landscape, in Australia it might be too early to conclude which grape variety matches which region. In recent years, Italian varieties such as Nebbilio have thrived in Australia.

While there are many wines that do show the expression of their region, in real terms the history of Australian terroir has only just begun.