Australian Wine: Technology vs. Tradition

The Barossa Valley is Australia’s premier wine producing region.  Many of its wineries date back to the 1840’s when the area was settled by German immigrants.  All the green you see in the photo at the left are vineyards.

And in how many places do palm trees line the roads along side vineyards?

Wine is big business here, agribusiness done on an industrial scale.  

Penfold’s...Barossa’s largest producer...ships 17 million cases of wine a year…making it 8 times the size of Chateau Set Michelle.  They market 40 different labels, everything from their renowned $600-a-bottle Grange to low-priced blends.  

The folks we rented a cottage from came for dinner one night.  The first bottle of wine was a standard Penfolds...that is where John works...as a grape counter (in finance.)  As the evening wore on, he pulled out a ten year old bottle of Bin 28.  It was really good, actually the first really good wine we had here.

There are far more vineyards here than wineries…meaning that many grape growers…like Terramoll…sell their output on contract to the big labels.

How does this make Australian wines different from the wines of France or Italy?

The Barossa Valley gets very little rain and lots of wind.  Evaporation becomes a real impediment to grape maturation.  Without irrigation…see the white pipes in the picture at the right…most of the vineyards would wither and die.  In France and Italy, irrigation is not allowed.

We got some insight from a cyclist we met on the road.  Vic Carr-Moody (see here with his wife Fran and us), started talking to us while we were re-inflating our bike tyres (local spelling) outside a bike shop.  He offered some suggestions where to ride.  Several hours later, he popped up in his car and asked us to join him and Fran the following morning for a ride to Barossa Farmers’ Market and breakfast.  Folks here are really friendly.  

Vic runs a business that sells wine-making equipment on three continents.  Vic told us in his opinion, European winemaking is constrained by  antiquated rules that are hundreds-of-years-out of date and mandate costly production techniques.

One example: many Australian wine-makers “tea-bag” their wine to season it.  Instead of aging their red wine in oak barrels, they put oak chips in a mesh bag, and immerse the bag in the wine vat.  By slowly agitating the wine in the vat, they can get the same “oak” flavor as years sitting in a cask.  This saves on the cost of barrels and brings the wine to market in a few months rather than years.

Other Australians in the wine industry are less eager to embrace the no-antiquated-rules approach to wine-making.  Thomas Girgensohn, a noted wine writer, disparaged one famous wine by saying, “The source of their fruit is not acknowledged.  Wines are blended across vintages, varieties, vineyards, and regions to create a particular brand and style.”

To which we imagine Vic Carr-Moody would respond, “People buy wine because of the way it tastes, not because of the way it’s made.”

This is not to say there are no small, family-owned, boutique wineries.  We tasted some really delicious blends at two wineries walking distance from our B&B.  The atmosphere was more relaxed and the staff more willing to answer questions about their wine.

Carol & Roger in front of their B&B...converted from an 1870's telegraph station