Plonk, kangaroos and quality

A couple of days ago, I strolled in warm sunshine into the a wine shop on Melbourne Street, Adelaide. The shelves groaned with a hundred different labels, much of it produced in the vineyards that throng South Australia's coastal region. After being greeted with the usual "G'day mate," and some unfussy advice, I loaded a case of one of the fine local whites into the car.
   
Back in Paris, in a jet-lagged scan of the news today, I came across the latest Gallic put-down of wine from the Antipodes. "French wine has nothing in common with the factory product that is Australian wine," sniffed Philippe de Villiers, champion of the Catholic conservative right. He was reassuring growers in Avignon that he would defend them against the heinous assault on French identity that had been launched against them by Australian wine-makers. "A country that abandons its vines, abandons its national heritage," he proclaimed.

This was a good illustration of the disease afflicting the French wine business as its exports reel from the onslaught of the New World. De Villiers also spoke for the malaise that is dragging France backwards in the world.   

The collapse of French sales is the result of a supposed plot to foist an inferior product on an uneducated world. The answer, said de Villiers, was to treat French wine like culture. Like French films, world trade regulations must give le vin français special exemption from competing for the market as a product like any other.   

It is sad to hear such rubbish. As a growing number of French wine-makers now understand, the solution is simple: make better wine and sell it in a simpler way. Australia, California and the other New World producers have been running rings around France by ignoring the mystique and marketing wine like any other product. Having château in the title no longer confers superiority over labels with kangaroos and cookaburras in their names.

Australia's success at selling its supposedly simple-minded wines has now created something of a French-style grape glut around Adelaide, with producers turning out too much plonk (a good old Australian word, by the way). But arriving from France, with its antique regulations and years of violent protest by angry growers, it is refreshing to be somewhere that sees wine as a straightforward business in which you make a product with the aim of finding a customer.

The same thoughts apply to Australia as a whole. The cliché of the matey,  blokey, easy-going continent may be overdone, but a week in Oz offers an antidote to life in over-crowded, ever-defensive, continental Europe. Australia's informality is refreshing after France's stiff manners. In Paris, my young concierge of six years standing still calls me Monsieur and my local shop-keepers maintain a chilly distance. In Australia, you use first names immediately and the cashier ends the transaction with "no worries, mate."  French anguish about foreigners taking over the economy do not have an Australian equivalent.   Parisians, on the other hand, do not fret over some current Adelaide preoccupations, such as the size of your barbecue or whether the new Ute (known in French as le pick-up) has got a slot for the Esky (une glacière, or ice-box, for cooling the beer).

The differences leap out when you listen to Mike Rann, the state Premier, as he boasts of the great project that is expected to lift the South Australian economy. This consists of a gigantic new hole in the ground, an open copper and uranium mine that will be carved out at Roxby Downs in the Outback north, creating a new town of 23,000 people in the middle of nowhere. The European mind boggles at the notion of ripping open a dozen square kilometres of landscape. Open mining is beyond the environmental pale here, let alone such a gigantic one. But you cannot help being impressed by the old-fashioned spirit and sheer space that makes such a scheme possible.

I grew up in Adelaide, so these are not exactly neutral observations. Of course Australia has plenty of its own troubles and hang-ups. (To cite one problem, the land of beaches and barbecues is fast catching up on the American-British blight of obesity). But coming from the gloom that afflicts France these days, a dip into late summer Oz offers a glimpse of a simpler, less stressed world.

Comments

[John Rasher]

Since spending 6 mths in Paris last year (and 2 years in Brussels before that) I've become a regular reader of your blog, which I like. Now I'm one month back in Melbourne, Australia (my birthplace) after 7 years away from the country. So when I saw the title of this entry, I expected it to be about the different styles of wine-making and wine-quality: topics which, as far as I can tell in my short time back, appear to be exercising the minds of the wine-making industry here - instead it was on differing styles of another kind. Your views on wine and wine-making in both countries would nonetheless be interesting given your bi-cultrual position and diplomatic writing style, especially as a glut of grape-growing is not the only problem currently being experienced in Australia. The December row between Oz critic James Halliday and 'powerful' US critic Robert Parker is symptomatic of a growing realization within elite Australian wine-making circles of the problem with a global brand that is solely confined to good but cheap 'plonk'.

For example, how was the wine which you mention buying in your blog entry? Did you get around to tasting it? Was it a 'typical Australian, over-alcoholized fruit bomb' (the Jancis Robinson position - though she is of course more polite) or 'jammy, robust, HUGE' as the dreaded RP might put it? It is possible, of course, for it to be both, which is why I initially expected your entry to be about wine-styles (and tastes)!

[alan morgan]

Here in deepest Languedoc we do not think we are French. So local red wine, increasingly made by English, Australian, Gid forbid ( an effort at Australian lingo ) American residents, is sold locally, consumed rapidly and slept off contentedly. Some products are so good they sell internationally.We even pinch ideas from other countries. Every local vineyard has an internet site. They are proud of their product and attempt to market it to their client base.
Unfortunately not everyone is good at this so there are many wine makers who are hard pressed. A sensitive subject in the run up to the presidential election.
We seldom pay attention to Parisians, a separate tribe with strange customs.A bit like Australians.Try a bottle of La Sauvageonne " Puech de Glen " produced at St Jean de la Blaquière by an Englishman Gavin Crisfield.
Glad you're back safely to civilisation!

Alan

[Sarah]

I'm not sure I've seen Australian wine in Intermarche here. I think I may have drunk a couple of glasses when in the UK, but it obviously left a marginal impression. For various budgetry reasons, I boringly buy a marvellous local red wine which won a silver medal at the Macon competition, for 2.60Euros in Norma, and a Picpoul de Pinet which also won a medal, bronze, I think at around the same price. Pre-Norma days, I stood, overwhelmed before the wine shelves in Intermarche, much as I did when I used to buy tinned catfood, but that was more because I was trying to calculate which food my cat might just accept this time. (Witter, witter).

[Sean]

Vive la difference! Surely, like so many things in life, it's diversity that makes it interesting. As an Aussie who lives in a cool climate wine producing region within Victoria, I consider myself lucky indeed to have the local "plonk" on my doorstep. I do relish, however at every (affordable) opportunity sampling the produce of European winemakers (am I allowed to call them that?). To my palette, the Mornington Peninsula , Bellarine Peninsula and Yarra Valley produce some startlingly good wine; very decent Pinot Gris among them. However, they posses a different character to the French product, of course, and I would have thought that very fact provides one with half the pleasure in drinking a wide variety of the stuff. If one is blessed with a good palette and an appreciation for wine then, ipso facto, discerning the subelties is both pleasurable and interesting. I fail to see how a culture so confident in its own heritage (here I mean the French wine growers not the French per se) can be threatened by another producer who shares the same passion for the noble grape.

[Nick Breeze]

Australian wines have hugely taken over the main bulk of sales in here in the UK by offering cheap ordinary wine. Old world wine producing nations and, in particular France, have lost a huge market share in what is a fiercely competitive market. France must learn to focus on the uniqueness of their wines and to market them more effectively. By producing less everyday ordinary wine and concentrating on better quality production of fewer wines, the marketing would perhaps be easier as there will more to differentiate French wine from the full fridge of Australian wine at the off-license. Dare we say it, but France must get inside the mind of the consumer.

[michael robertson]

One innovation I saw frequently in Australia, that I have not come across in the UK, was the idea of selling wine in Cardboard boxes, fruit juice style, but further contained in a collapsible plastic inner liner, with a small tap to dispense the wine from. Left in the fridge, this clever system prevented air from reaching the wine remaining in the "cask" as I seem to remember it being called, despite draining wine from the tap over several days, so keeping the wine tasting fresh and enabling it to consumed over an extended period without its taste degrading as a result of oxygen contamination. Presumably us Brits are considered far too sniffy to have their wine dispensed in this remarkably clever fashion, preferring instead to struggle with crumbly corks, and the stale tasting wine that results from anything other than instant and total consumption of the whole bottle in one go!

[Fred Wiseman]

Here in Provence there is wine of all quality and price, and herein lies one of France's problems. It produces too much wine of inferior quality whilst affirming that French wine is the best -which at times it can be. At our local domaine we can buy excellent, inexpensive wines ; but supermarket wine at £1 a litre on the same shelves as the very best gives the game away.
This was acknowledged at the International wine fair held in Bordeaux last year.Wine exports, by volume and value, had fallen about 13% in the first quarter and French growers were up in arms (and got the government to inject further subsidies - another French problem ), but analysts were sensibly pointing out that there is too much wine, too many confusing labels ( ask French shoppers,facing the bind-boggling selection available at Geant Casino, how they choose wine and you get a Gallic shrug ) and a need to overhaul the AOC accreditation system.

The French are intensely patriotic ( pronounced ' blinkered ' ? )when it comes to wine. The Foreign Wine section in our Casino amounts to a grudging half dozen bottles, and try buying sherry in France...! The good news is that the system is changing, if only slowly.

[Fred Wiseman]

Here in Provence there is wine of all quality and price, and herein lies one of France's problems. It produces too much wine of inferior quality whilst affirming that French wine is the best -which at times it can be. At our local domaine we can buy excellent, inexpensive wines ; but supermarket wine at £1 a litre on the same shelves as the very best gives the game away.
This was acknowledged at the international wine fair held in Bordeaux last year.Wine exports, by volume and value, had fallen about 13% in the first quarter and French growers were up in arms (and got the government to inject further subsidies - another French problem ), but analysts were sensibly pointing out that there is too much wine, too many confusing labels ( ask French shoppers,facing the mind-boggling selection available at Geant Casino, how they choose wine and you get a Gallic shrug ) and a need to overhaul the AOC accreditation system.

The French are intensely patriotic ( pronounced ' blinkered ' ? )when it comes to wine. The Foreign Wine section in our Casino amounts to a grudging half dozen bottles, and try buying sherry in France...! The good news is that the system is changing, if only slowly.

[Fred Herrmann]

I am co-owner of a house in Caramany, which produces the best wines, along with Maurey, that I have ever had anywhere. Yet, when buying wine in a store in the U.S., I will usually gravitate away from the mediocre French wine available there to the usually acceptable and sometimes great Chilean, Australian, Californian and South African wines. A mystery.

[Victor Tan]

Your absence for over a week is lamented. I speculated that you may have been so overwhelmed by the enormous volumn of blogs on the Muslims and the cartoons, or you may have been threatened by some fanatics that you had gone to ground, only to surface in Oz. Tasting wines Downunder, eh? Nice job if you can get it. Delighted that you are safe and well.

Back in the land of the expiring socialists that are the only ones saluting and preserving their model of government in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is no longer working. It is not a surprise that the protagonist is of the ancient school, de Villepin. The same misguided attitude to their wines have brought grief to countless winemakers who rigidly adhere to their antiquated labelling. Travelling to France regularly over a decade, I have not met anyone in Bordeaux who professes to be a wine expert. Alright, you may think that my lot is not bourgeois, but they are. They are not only bourgeois, they are pied noirs, colonials, as we call them in English. They may recommend several wines that they are good value, and generally stick to the ones they are familiar with.

Imagine the British at home scanning the shelves of wines in the supermarket, confronted with names that they barely can pronounce, let alone the knowledge of the regions. Is it a wonder that the Australian wines outsell the the French in the UK? I read recently that some enterprising French winemakers are labelling their wines by their varieties to compete with the New World wines. Better late than never.

My wife and I have been drinking Aussie wines for years, long before it was fashionable, about the time in the early 90s when the Governor of The Bank of England, Eddie George who served it at a lunch in The Bank, an event so radical that it merited reporting. For us initially, it was the lower price, but gradually we preferred the fuller body with our spicy food.

[David]

Though I have access to all that Oz can offer through my local giant Tesco or (excellent) Majestic, I tend to drink mainly a good standard Guigal Cotes du Rhone or a French chardonnay, like a Macon Lugny.

Why? Just because I prefer the taste. Despite 2 years in S Africa I still find mid-range New World wines fairly overpowering in their no-nonsense flavours (Oz Chardonnay in particular - buttery headache in a glass).

Your correspondent is right though re French attitudes to non-French wines - often dismissed with the withering "ca existe". A year living there taught me that the French are generally big on self-regard (often, it must be said, with some justifiation) and genuinely find it literally incredible that anyone would question their superiority in matters of food, wine or culture.

That might be fine if it was simply national pride (or chauvinism if you must) amongst the wider population, but when the producers believe their own propaganda rather than the market share data, there goes an industry in deep "ca-ca". All rather reminiscent of British motor cycle manufacturers dismissing those funny little Hondas in the 60's

David

[Geoff Douglas]

I dont know where Michael Robertson lives in the UK but I have been buying wine in cardboard boxes for 10-15 years, so long I can't remember when. He should get out more

[Fred Wiseman]

Has Michael Robertson not seen wine in boxes in, say, Tescos or the Co-op ? Incidentally, the French here in Provence say ' bag in box ' for this packaged wine, showing a healthy disdain for Parisian or Academie Francaise sensitivities concerning the anglicisation of the native language.

[Malcolm Sykes]

Very interesting observations but I would suggest you all might take a close look, and taste, at our very fine Canadian selection fron the Niagarar region to the far reaches of British Columbia. You might be pleasantly surprised at the results.

[Nick]

As Europeans we should be helping the French here. Let's buy more French wine and ditch this punchy Australian stuff. We've been duped by marketeers who are filling our minds with glut wines. The demand should be for MORE FRENCH wine and more DECENT French wine!!

Burgundy Pinot Noirs are the best in the world and yet I can only see foreign ones in the super markets. California and New Zealand are forging ahead claiming theirs are the new world leaders.

C'mon France... I with you. Just get your national brand sorted and we'll all start buying again!!

[tony]

i don't now much about australian wines. i just taste autralian wine which name shiraz. but i taste many kind of french wines and they are making finest wines.

[Pierre Bernardi]

My father-in-law makes Beaujolais Villages whites and reds. Both are excellent.