Should anyone be planting grapes in Australia today?

Winemaking is big business today, and planting grapes to fuel it can mean big risks. This is of course no news to the owners of the 40,000 tonnes of Australian grapes that were either dropped onto the ground or left hanging on the vine after the just-completed 2005 vintage.

With a record intake of 1.96 million tonnes, the immediate issue facing Australian winemakers is how to sell what they now have in tank, barrel and bottle. Against a preferred inventory to sales ratio of 1.7, the current figure is 2.1 or higher. Nobody should be planting any grapes right now unless they have a very clear idea of what to plant, where to plant them and what quality level of wine they want to make.

These might sound like easy issues to deal with, but the last four decades of Australian experience suggest the complete opposite. Many of the vineyards whose crops will shortly add to the present surplus of Australian wine should never have been planted at all. Initially driven by tax minimization opportunities fuelled by the optimism over the industry’s Strategy 2025 document, or egos that selectively excluded all viticultural logic, many vineyard owners are today wondering what do with their slopes full of vines. You can’t just move them to a better place.

Science has helped to reduce the time between planting a new vineyard and bottling its first wine to three years or so, sometimes even less. That’s still a long time between making a decision and creating a result, by which time the market might be heading somewhere entirely different. The ‘sixties saw unprecedented red grape plantings in Australia, which came into bear just as Australians discovered white wine. Merlot was the buzzword a few short years ago, but having tasted a string of indifferent wines from this variety, Australians changed their minds.

Another hot grape is sangiovese, which is everywhere and growing fast. Those who planted this grape might do well to invest heavily in Italian restaurants to shore up its demand, before drinkers move to something else. Witness also the imminent deluge of shiraz-viognier blends, wines that are making an appearance based on the stellar reputations but minuscule sales of names like Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier and more recently the Reserve Shiraz Viognier from Yering Station. They may or may not succeed – nobody knows. At least if they fail there is the fallback position of returning to straight varietal wines from shiraz and the almost omnipresent viognier, another variety Australians had hardly heard of three years ago.

Like sangiovese and pinot gris, some grapes are planted because people evidently want to drink their wine. On the other hand, there’s such a thing as ‘producer fashion’, when growers and makers plant grapes simply because they feel it’s the correct thing to do. Paul Van der Lee, the South Australian Wine Industry Association’s export manager and one of the industry’s leading marketing thinkers, says the only problem is that the producer fashion doesn’t always align with the consumer fashion. Take riesling, for instance. Most informed wine drinkers believe there is a powerful trend towards riesling in the marketplace, and it has certainly received the widespread support of the trade and the media. Frankly, though, says Van der Lee, its sales have hardly changed.

Who can pick wine fashions? Years ago I’d say Wolf Blass could, but in reality he was actually making them happen by doing things like using more new American oak in his reds and selling a riesling that was sweeter than everyone else’s. There’s actually very little genuine research on consumer preference undertaken with wine, and most of this relates to styles and not varieties. In other words, whether wines should be delicate and dry or full-bodied and extracted for particular market groups, rather than whether or not people are likely to be looking for some little-known grape in future years.

Michaela Murphy of Beringer Blass says that the key issue behind new developments in wine styles is that they must not compromise their specific wine-like nature. Women, she says, are interested in discovering a lighter, less alcoholic and refreshing style of wine they can enjoy on any occasion. But it still has to taste great.

Perhaps there’s logic behind the notion that there is a future for the finer, drier expressions of ros Please login to post comment