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The Review - FOOD & DRINK - WINE PRESS with DON & JOHN
 

Andrew Nugent from the Bird in Hand winery in McLaren Vale in Australia
Between a rock and a hard place

How can we avoid bland mass-produced wines and where can we go to find the more interesting varieties ?

WINE-MAKING has changed. Today’s wine market is part of a globalised industry. Thanks to skillful supermarket wine buyers, choosy consumers – guided by the nation’s wine writers – have access to the finest wines in the world. Mass-produced New World wines are, of course the best and Australia is the world’s leading wine producer.
Old world wine nations – France, Italy, Germany and Spain – are finished unless they adapt to the new reality. But it seems they do not understand the modern wine market. They persist in believing that wine is a natural product – made by farming types. Marketing for them is an impenetrable mystery. If only they’d follow the example of countries like Chile and offer tax breaks and grants to multi-national wine producers. Production costs will fall, profits rise. Old low yielding vines and quirky local grape varieties can be dug up and all those silly rules and regulations ignored.
Instead they waste money on grants for small farmers. This is the British wine industry’s jaundiced view of today’s wine world as described in various wine articles. It is of course complete nonsense.
Eighty per cent of the world’s wine is produced and consumed locally.
Australian wine consumption peaked in 1988 and nearly all the wine drunk is local and cheap.
Kiwis taking part in a tasting of New Zealand wines in Islington, told us their wine is not available, in Australian cities. It is only a slight exaggeration to say, that the globalised wine market starts near Land’s End and finishes at the last wine shelve before John O’ Groats. It is largely an UK phenomenon.
The Bordeaux region of France produces and sells more wine than all the Australian wine regions combined. Italy produces and exports more wine than any other country.
French, German and Spanish wine makers also export more wine than the Aussies. Australian wine export volume ranks alongside Portugal and Bulgaria. Its great success comes not through dominating a global wine market but from its ability to sell cheap mass produced wine, at inflated prices to British consumers.
Until recently, UK wine shelves contained a good range of interesting wines, produced by small – mainly French – farmer wine makers. These hand- crafted wines cost more than mass blended bottles. With the arrival of Australian wines onto the UK market this began to change.
Initially, Aussie wines were made by relatively small, independent companies. But as market share grew they began to consolidate and most were taken over by big drinks companies. Supermarkets were beginning to dominate UK wine retailing and wanted to cut costs, by buying from big drinks companies who were already supplying a range of beverages.
Many in the UK wine industry suspected French suppliers were taking advantage and dumping poor quality wine onto the British market. The combination of Supermarkets, big business and resentful wine writers proved irresistible.
Hand-crafted wines – including Australian ones – began to disappear off the shelves, replaced by mass-produced wines, cleverly marketed and subject to rave reviews in the press.
These wines may be more consistent in quality than hand-crafted wines but overall they are bland, predictable and overpriced. The British wine drinker keen to trade up to better quality wine is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Although there are hundreds of small independent producers – including some English – trying to sell reasonably priced, interesting wines, they are frozen out of the UK market.
Jamie Goode, wine critic of the Sunday Express writing on his website, the Wine Anorak before he was a national wine writer, stated: “Wine drinkers need to be told the truth…The wines recommended in most newspapers are the best of a largely indifferent bunch. At what point are the leading wine writers going to turn round and tell their readers that they’ve been leading them down a dead end?”.
The situation is not all doom and gloom; there are a few hardy individuals struggling to bring the world’s best hand crafted wine to the nations wine drinkers. Try these two - both based in central London.
For powerful fruit driven and concentrated Aussie wine visit www.austvine.com or call 0845 8387566.
For more artisan-style European wine, with a little bit of finesse visit www.agentsforwine.com or call 020 7486 5353.
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