New Releases from Australia

Everybody in the Australian wine industry has a theory about where things went off track. Most believe that the greatest harm was done by allowing the perception to grow that Australia was a one-trick, one-variety pony (are you listening, Argentina?). I’m sure that if you played a word association game with a typical American wine lover and offered “Australia,” you’d get “shiraz” in return, and that’s no recipe for emphasizing the diversity of this wide-ranging land mass. When it comes to wine styles Australia literally does it all, from bone-dry sparking wines to fortified dessert wines and uniquely Australian oddballs like sparkling shiraz and barrel-aged sweet wines, but only a handful of American winos seems to be clued into that fact so far. How long it will take for Australian producers to get their message across is anybody’s guess, but since most of the industry’s moves are directed by monolithic, corporate-minded and bureaucratic entities that lumber along at a sloth’s pace, few of the Australians I talk to are optimistic that change is nigh.