CRITIC’S CORNER | Nick Ryan on Australia’s image problem
Nick Ryan is the senior wine writer for The Australian newspaper, a columnist for The World of Fine Wine, and the inaugural winner of the 67 Pall Mall Global Communicator Award for Short Form Writing. After attending a glittering launch of the new Grange La Chapelle joint cuvée in Paris, he ponders what it means for Australia’s ‘poor-relation’ status in the wine world
The jetlagged Australian writing this on a train from Paris to Tain l’Hermitage can’t help but contemplate the tyranny of distance.
The countryside flashing by, blurred by tired eyes and wet windows, remains familiar. He rides these rails often. It’s just what you do when you’re a wine writer and France’s place in the world of wine demands its landscape becomes almost as familiar as your own. Yet he can’t help but wonder why it is that his own country seems to be fading from the map entirely.
I’m not suggesting Australia and France would carry equal billing if wine were Woodstock. You get no argument from me about which of them is rightly coq of the walk. France’s pre-eminence is warranted. But Australia’s apparent disappearance is bizarre. It has become the disowned royal of wine. Hidden out of sight, never discussed even though everyone knows it’s there.
In the 30 years I’ve worked in wine, stumbling upwards from bottle shop shelf-stacker to wine writer for the national newspaper, Australia’s fine wine scene has never been more exciting, diverse and consistently outstanding than it is now. Yet try and find these wines in any meaningful numbers in major markets around the world and you’re more likely to slide into an Uber driven by Lord Lucan.
Australia seems relegated to the supermarkets at best, invisible beyond cartoonish concoctions with 19 criminal convictions at worst. All while a driven, worldly, intuitive and ambitious cohort of winemakers push the country’s best wines to ever ascending heights.
There are pockets of hope, a small band of advocates around the world working to pull understanding of Australian wine into tighter focus. But they can only do so much. Distance is the enemy of detail, and for too many, Australian wine is seen through binoculars held backwards.
That’s why the recent unveiling of a wine of both French and Australian composition – the reason for this particular train ride and the collector of these particular thoughts – seems especially timely.
The release last week, in Paris, of the 2021 Grange La Chappelle, an equal blend of arguably the best known New and Old World Shiraz/Syrah-based wines, has created the kind of heat you would hope it would. It’s the ultimate extension of the Penfolds plan to establish a bigger global footprint that has seen the most famous name in Australian wine plant its flag in Champagne and China, Napa and Bordeaux.
This greater global engagement has raised plenty of eyebrows, but I tend to think the cynics who want to say Penfolds has lost touch with its roots are missing the point. I see great benefit in Penfolds striding the world stage in this way, keeping the company it keeps and refusing to yield to those who think ambition is somehow a fault.
It keeps Australian wine in the global wine conversation – and maybe, just maybe, it might remind people there’s more to Australian wine than the picture painted by the broad brushstrokes of limited understanding.
Nick Ryan says he has not yet tired of telling people that he was the inaugural winner of the 67 Pall Mall Global Communicator Award for Short Form Writing – ‘and probably never will’. Entries for this year’s awards are now open – see here for details
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WHAT
I’VE
LEARNED
Marc Kent, Boekenhoutskloof
IN
THE
VINEYARD
Leeuwin Estate, Margaret River
UNDER
THE
SURFACE
Harlan Estate