The Best New Wines from Australia

There's no question that Australian wine today is polarizing serious wine drinkers, both within Australia and in major export markets such as the U.S. It is clear that many Australian wines are being crafted to attract the attention of a few influential wine critics, for whom, it sometimes seems, virtually no wine can be too big or too ripe. The balance and aromatic complexity of these wines, their ability to communicate unique terroir character, their usefulness at the dinner table, and their ability to gain in nuance with bottle aging are characteristics that some critics and many drinkers seem willing to overlook in their shock and awe at the sheer size and palate impact of these wines.

For their part, many retailers have adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to Australian wine. If their customers don't ask for their opinions on some of the more extreme examples in the market today, the merchants won't tell them that they personally find these wines hard to swallow. In recent weeks, numerous retail merchants admitted to me that they don't care for these over-the-top wines, but as long as these bottles are being sought by their customers they're hardly going to badmouth the merchandise. (It should go without saying that this is hardly a strategy limited to Australian wine: 99 out of 100 wine retailers would be out of business next month if they sold only the wines that they enjoyed drinking.) These retailers also note that shiraz, particularly from Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, is by far the Australian wine category that consumers willing to spend more than ten bucks on a bottle are most likely to request.

Please allow me to vent, and then I'll move on to the good news. As Australian wine writer Jeremy Oliver opined in these pages two years ago, many of Australia's outsized shiraz bottlings, including a number of the wines most hotly pursued in export markets, are "caricatures, one-dimensional, exaggerated or contrived. Many are so monolithic that they lack approachability and essential vinosity. They are more impressive as feats of engineering than as drinkable expressions of a winemaker's art." I suspect I am more willing than Oliver to give high marks to the better examples of the ultraripe style of Australian shiraz (and grenache and Rhone blends). I find some of them to be quite impressive. And yet in my recent tastings, these wines tended to run together into a single giant wave. Many of these wines appear to be made according to the identical formula.