starts, nudged ahead by the British demand for Port-style wine from their new colony, governors who tried to use wine as a temperance measure to wean locals off Bengali rum, and new immigrants who brought vines from their homelands.
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I should confess, straight up: one of my steepest learning curves in the world of wine has been Australia. When I first became fascinated by wine, Australia was exporting the forerunners of critter wines— those simple, one-dimensional sippers with cute animal labels. But when I put my head down for serious wine study some time later, there was a lot to learn.
The first hairpin turn on the learning curve was answering the question,“ How did grapes get there in the first place?” After all, there were no grape vines growing when the First Fleet pushed ashore in 1788 with its 800 convicts and their keepers. The culture of the aboriginal communities living there did not include tilling crops. Those first European immigrants were Brits and Scots, and the closest most of them came to fermented products was tipping pints in the local pub.
By Sylvia Jansen, Sommelier( ISG, CMS), CSW
The answer to that first question was that vine cuttings came with that First Fleet, from their stopover in what is now South Africa. Like immigrants in other New World countries, they plunked the vine cuttings down in their back yards and waited to see what would happen. The vines were grown in what is essentially a thin ribbon of lush, sub-tropical green hanging at the edge of a large central tract of desert.
My next question was“ Why did they persist?” That it occurred to anyone to import vines and make wine must have been a combination of sheer genius and the blissful lack of knowledge about everything that could go wrong. The heat of the growing season produced super-ripe grapes— not the long, slow ripening of some of the world’ s classic wine regions. But persist they did. The early wine industry grew in fits and
Next I wondered,“ What do you mean, the oldest and best?” In the mid-1800s, James Busby, a Scot who had studied viticulture in France and Spain, decided that the wine industry could use real vines from great wine regions. He arranged for a mass of European vine cuttings, including Shiraz from Hermitage in the Rhône Valley, to be transported to the island continent. A good number of these were sent to the Botanical Garden in Sydney. As a result, some Australian vines are reputed to be the oldest vines in the world, untouched by the nasty phylloxera bug that devastated Europe’ s vineyards in the late 1800s.
My final question was“ What do you mean, they make every style?” The belief that they had something really good kept the pioneers going. Today, Australia’ s vineyards stretch over more than 60 regions, and Australia is the fourth largest wine exporter in the world. Wine pours $ 5 billion into the national economy. They offer spicy, complex Barossa Shiraz; distinguished Coonawara Cabernet Sauvignon; stunning, aromatic Riesling and unique Semillon; heavenly sweet wine and beautiful fortifieds in a class all their own. It is an amazing array of classics alongside a host of critter wines. Australia is poised with the giants of the wine world and wants to better them all. There is a lot to learn.
So here’ s to you, hanging on to the next bend of the learning curve. b
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