Australia Brings the Brawn and the Beauty

BY JOSH RAYNOLDS | OCTOBER 5, 2017

Australia produces as wide a range of high-quality wines as any country in the world, from almost all imaginable varieties and in all styles, while quality has never been higher than it is today. Consumers who view these wines as all red, all big, all the time are missing out.

Australia's wine regions

A good way to understand the vastness of Australia’s wine-producing landscape is to compare the island continent to the United States—not the viticultural U.S. but the whole country. Consider that the Hunter Valley, Australia’s easternmost wine region, in New South Wales, is more than 2,500 miles from Margaret River, home to the country’s farthest-west vineyards. That’s almost 400 miles farther than the distance from Atlanta to San Diego. The geographical differences are stark but to this day wine lovers speak of “Australian wine” in a broad-brush manner that’s by turns amusing, bewildering, frustrating and depressing to the country’s producers. Australia’s vineyards spread across an area that’s a thousand miles longer than the distance from Galicia to Kremstal (Austria) but I sure don’t hear many wine drinkers talk much about “European” wine in such a generic manner.

Australia can be considered a New World wine region by European standards but in the context of non-European wine-producing areas it’s actually quite old, with its roots, literally and figuratively, stretching back to the 1820s. Even more intriguing is that Australia can lay claim to some of the oldest producing vines on earth, including what some say are the most ancient Grenache and Syrah (almost always called Shiraz in Australia) plantings anywhere. Old vines are a common theme across the country—especially in South Australia—and the wines that they produce can be serious show-stoppers for their depth and power; they often sell for extremely reasonable prices as well.

As a jumping-off point for the wines reviewed in this article, a brief overview of most of the country’s best-known and mostly highly regarded wine regions is in order. The operative word here is “brief” as any one of the following areas is book-worthy, as are many additional regions that I have left out in the interest of brevity.

Margaret River