The wine-export boom is being fed by a rush of investment in vineyards and wine-making and storage equipment. Nobody can say with certainty how much money the industry’s attracting, but we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Securing access to good grapes appears the crucial factor driving a spate of vineyard acquisitions and planting by big companies. Southcorp Wines, Orlando-Wyndham, and Mildara Blass have all recently announced major vineyard investments. They’ve been joined now by BRL Hardy’s securing access to 5000-6000 tonnes of high-quality grapes a year through the purchase of existing vineyards and planting of new land.

They’re buying, developing, or acquiring an interest in 400 hectares of vineyards during 1994/95. One hundred hectares are at Pemberton, south-western Western Australia. That’s a joint venture involving 60 hectares of established vineyard, with the remainder to be planted in 1994 and 1995.

What tells us more about the direction of viticulture in Australia in the 1990s, is that the remaining 300 hectares are all on the great limestone plain in South Australia’s south east.

The plain, a series of stranded limestone beaches, lagoons, and dunes stretching east-west from near the Victorian border to the coast and south-north from below Mount Gambier almost to Bordertown, embraces not just the large vineyards of Coonawarra and Padthaway, but a growing number of plantings outside of these established areas.

BRL Hardy’s new vineyard interests include 100 hectares in Coonawarra and 70 in Padthaway, lifting their total Padthaway holdings to over 400 hectares. But their biggest new planting on the limestone plain is a 160 hectare block at Jessie, between Coonawarra and Naracoorte.

I’ve not seen the proposed site, but Hardys say it’s prime terra rossa (a geological term for soil composed of weathered limestone) of the sort that accounts for Coonawarra’s and Padthaway’s best wines. The Hardy plantings join the even larger new ones of Mildara-Blass and the well-established Koppamurra vineyard in the undulating hills north east of Coonawarra.

I spent a day driving and walking through this area last year with Vic Patrick, Mildara Blass’s viticulturist. He was excited at the potential and totally confident that his 400 odd hectares being planted would produce exceptional fruit. He sees no reason why quality won’t equal or exceed that of Coonawarra.

What we’re seeing now is a search for good terra rossa plots outside of increasingly expensive Coonawarra and Padthaway. Thus, there are significant vineyards now not just in the strip between Coonawarra and Naracoorte, but at Mt Benson, near Robe on the coast, at St Marys, on an old dune 15 kilometres west of Coonawarra, at Lucindale half way between Naracoorte and Robe, near Bordertown on the very edge of the limestone plain, and small plantings near Mount Gambier.

Given the solid wine making infrastructure in the region and the exceptionally good quality of grapes coming from it, it’s easy to foresee new planting springing up wherever terra rossa soils coincide with a ready supply of suitable underground water (the rainfall pattern does not allow commercial grape growing).

If I had to bet, I’d say this will be by far the most significant viticultural region in Australia by 2000, if it isn’t already.

And the plantings won’t be done only by larger companies. Smaller operators need grapes, too. And not just in the south-east but throughout southern Australia farmers are looking at grapes as a cash crop offering potentially bigger returns than traditional activities, especially where long-term contracts can be negotiated with wine makers ahead of vineyard establishment.

Ken Helm (Helm’s Wines, Murrumbateman) tells me farmers in the Yass area have been approached by wine companies offering ten year grape contracts. Alister Purbrick, of Chateau Tahbilk on the Goulburn River in Victoria, says he’s developed one large vineyard under just such an arrangement and, given reasonable yields, the whole project should be paid for and profitable before the contract comes up for renewal. Encouraging words for would-be grape growers.

As the supply of grapes grows, demand for winemaking equipment and storage tanks grows, too. Thus the capital demands of the rapidly-growing industry multiply. Next week we’ll have a look at how one little company’s taking up the opportunity and challenge of servicing rapidly-growing export orders.

February 27th, 1994

Domestic sales are ticking over steadily, exports orders are flooding in, additional grapes have been found to meet surging demand, but what does the small maker do when the winery’s bursting at the seams? Where are the grapes and juice to be crushed, drained, pressed, fermented and stored?

The solutions are all expensive and need to be addressed now, this vintage. The urgency to cope with export demand and an increasing grape supply, explain an enormous rush of investment in winery equipment throughout Australia. And for smaller wineries brave enough to have a crack at the export market, the problem can be in raising sufficient capital to fund expansion.

You could do a Petaluma and offer a public float as Brian Croser did successfully last year. Or, as Alister Purbrick, Geoff Merrill and Joe Difabio have done just in time for the 1994 vintage, pool resources to come up with a facility capable of processing 1000 tonnes of grapes (about 70,000 dozen bottles of wine) a year.

Merrill and Purbrick were friends at Roseworthy Agricultural College in the mid to late seventies. I remember them as brash young graduate wine makers visiting Canberra’s National Wine Show Canberra sixteen years ago. It was party time then, and they switched with ease from drinking formidable quantities of beer at the ‘Wicked Lady’ in Belconnen to sipping the sublime Bernkastler Doktor Riesling Beerenauslese 1976 at the largesse of David and Richard Farmer.

But all parties end and Alister went to work as wine maker under his grandfather, Eric, at the Purbrick family’s Chateau Tahbilk (1200 hectares on a lovely anabranch of the Goulburn River in central Victoria). Geoff became wine maker at Chateau Reynella, then owned by Rothmans, and stayed on when Thomas Hardy and Son acquired the company a few years later.

Alister took over as Managing Director of Tahbilk in 1980 while grandfather Eric stayed on as Chairman until his death in 1991. Under Alister, Tahbilk acquired an interest in the nearby Longleat winery in 1983 and also developed a new range, Dalfarras, with his wife Rosa.

Meanwhile Geoff Merrill kept producing unique grenache-based roses and brilliant vintage ports at Chateau Reynella, and played a major wine making role at Hardys through the eighties.

At the time Hardys allowed wine makers to develop their own wine making interests. It was in this period that Geoff developed his Stratmer, Mount Hurtle, and Geoff Merrill wine labels. He finally left Hardys and moved into the lavishly refitted Mount Hurtle Winery on the southern fringe of Adelaide’s suburbs, just up the road from Hardys Reynella Winery.

The winery struggled in the early years before the export boom but Geoff gained a toe hold for his brands in the local market. The wine industry may look prosperous today, but things were different then and Geoff was delighted to see his silent partner bought out by his old friend Alister Purbrick in 1991.

Geoff developed a successful budget-priced brand, Cockatoo Ridge on the local market and began taking quite large orders from the U.K. for the Mount Hurtle brand. In 1993 he struck the big time (for a small outfit) with a single order from Sainsburys for 10,000 cases of a new light, dry grenache shiraz blend. The British loved it.

By now both Tahbilk and Mount Hurtle wineries were bursting at the seams. As well, mount Hurtle had fermentation and storage facilities only – all the crushing, draining, and pressing (and much of the fermentation) being done under contract down the road at Hardys.

This worked well enough (at a cost) early in vintage, but late in the season as grapes from Hardys broad acres at Padthaway rolled in, finding a spare tank for Merill and Purbrick became a problem.

With Mount Hurtle hemmed in by suburbs, Merrill and Purbrick worked out a deal with Joe Difabio, wine maker at Mount Hurtle. Joe’s family moved to McLaren Vale in the 1960s and now owns about 40 hectares of vineyards.

Joe has built a large winery building behind his family’s McLaren Flat vineyard and is leasing it to Mount Hurtle. Alister and Geoff are furnishing the winery with all the latest equipment… sufficient to process and store the wine from 1000 tonnes of grapes and with ample room to expand. Total investment to date is around $1 million.

In this way the capital cost and risk has been spread, Geoff and Alister feel more secure in access to the Difabio family’s grapes, and the Difabio family can share in the profits if the venture succeeds.

While it all sounds like a fairy tale ending, the fact is, it’s only a beginning and all predicated on continued export growth. Good luck to them.

In polluted Europe, Australia has a clean, fresh image. It’s an image the Australian Wine Research Institute believes is based on fact and one that can be enhanced and sustained to the advantage of our wine industry.

Visit new vineyard developments, like Richmond Grove’s broad-acre Cowra plantings, and viticulturists talk of synthetic chemicals as a last resort against pests and disease. And there’s a strong trend to using just the right amount of water necessary to keep vines healthy. Scarcity has seen the end of wasteful old flood or overhead spray irrigation techniques.

The emphasis is to produce clean wines, free of chemical residues and to ensure sustainable viticulture through prudent soil and water management.

In wineries, too, we’ve seen a steady diminution of sulphur dioxide addition to wines as vignerons learned to measure exactly the right amount required to prevent spoilage.

At least two makers, BRL Hardy and Gil Wahlquist’s Botobolar, produced passable wines with no use of sulphur. For most of us, intake of a little sulphur seems completely harmless. But the release of these sulphur-free wines was welcomed by those allergic to it. And in Wahlquist’s case, the wine was produced in a totally organic vineyard and winemaking regime.

The tiny ‘organic’ market niche Botobolar carved for itself may have pointed the way to a future in which an increasingly affluent consumer is prepared to pay a premium for products guaranteed to have been produced organically.

Richard Everett of Southcorp Wines says fifteen to twenty per cent of vineyards in California’s Napa and Sonoma Valleys claim to be managed organically. Even so, the market for organically grown products seems small and, according to Everett, consumer support appears stronger in the U.K. than the U.S.A.

He says that U.K. grocery giant, Safeway, recently introduced with reasonable success organically-grown fruit and vegetables selling at up to double the price of conventional fare.

Encouraged by Safeway’s success, and with an eye to the future, Penfolds Wines (one of the Southcorp companies) last year released its first organically grown wine on the U.K market. The wine came only after several year’s planning backed by major long-term vineyard investment in the Clare Valley, making Penfolds a major organic player on a global scale.

Southcorp’s head viticulturist, Andrew Pike, tells me the Clare Valley site, an existing Penfold vineyard planted in the early 1980s, was selected for its “isolation from other vineyards, and low risk of vine fungal diseases, combined with a dry sunny ripening season and clean air and water.”

In 1991 the 25 hectare ‘E’ Block, in the Clare’s Polish Hill Valley, was certified ‘A’ level organic. The exhaustive certification process, conducted by the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia (NASA), carries global validity as it conforms with international standards set by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.

So, it’s not just a matter of going organic, but of conforming with strict standards enforced by continuous monitoring of soil, water, and fruit samples by NASAA. Leader of the organic project, Wendy Allan, says initial certification takes some time and can be influenced by residues in soil from past land usage.

NASAA sticks its nose into the winery, too, issuing final certification only after chief wine maker, John Duval and his team, meet the standards. The first certified wine, a Penfold Clare Valley Chardonnay-Sauvignon Blanc 1993, is a vibrant, rich, fresh drop, very much in the mainstream of ripe Aussie white styles.

Andrew Pike says another 28 hectare plot near the original organic vineyard is under conversion and should be given an ‘A’ certification in time for the 1995 vintage. And new plantings of a further 50 hectares during 1994/1995 should see the group with 103 bearing hectares by 1998 – sufficient for an annual organic wine output of about 65 thousand dozen bottles.

However, for all the potential environmental and health advantages of organic wine, there is a cost because of the greater risk of crop failure.. Long-term yields are expected to be around 8-9 tonnes to the hectare compared with 11-12 tonnes for conventionally managed vineyards.

The wines are thus more costly to produce and their long-term future depends on the consumers willingness to pay. U.K. results are encouraging with the first wine selling well in the premium range at £6.99 a bottle. It’s to be released in the U.S.A. in April. At this stage, though, it looks like Australia won’t get a look in for some time.

According to the latest estimates (mine), 99 per cent of people reading this column today suffer mild to severe hangovers. If you wonder why the wine that caused it, especially if it was a good red, cost so much more this year than last, then a few real figures just released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) provide an explanation.

Booming exports are the culprit. That’s what’s behind higher prices on good-quality wine and even why you may have difficulty finding stocks of your favourite cask.

It’s hard to imagine now, but until the late 1980s the value of wine imports exceeded those of exports, even though imports never made up more than about three per cent by volume of the wine we drank.

Exports took off with a bang after the devaluation of the mid 1980s, growing to 102.8 million litres worth $293.2 million in 1992/1993. Those exports exceeded imports of $47 million by $246.2 million, a massive figure considering we had been nett importers of wine less than a decade earlier.

One or two good years of exports might have little impact on local prices. But sustained strong growth (and more expected) strains supplies to the limit: we exported 54.2 million litres in 1990/91, 78.7 in 1991/2, 102.8 in 1992/93, and reached 114.2 in the first quarter of the current financial year.

In 1990/91 exports represented 15 per cent of total sales by local producers of 350 million litres; in 1992/93, exports were 25 per cent of total sales of 414 million litres.

Those broad figures, though, take into account all styles of wine. In fact, exports are strongly skewed towards table wine, which make up 93 per cent of the 1992/93 litreage. Table wines constitute 79 per cent of domestic sales by Australian wine makers. Exports of table wines, then, account for 28 per cent of all table wine sales by Australian makers. And that’s why the domestic market is being made to pay more for what stays at home.

Despite the weakness of our dollar, the return per litre of wine exported fell by 14 per cent from $3.32 to $2.85 between 1990/91 and 1992/93. It recovered marginally for the first quarter of this year to $2.92. But still, we must ask the question, are domestic price hikes subsidising exports?

Certainly strong exports are forcing shortages of good red wine. I get the feeling from exporters that’s mainly because the pommies (they account for almost half of our exports) have taken strongly to our rich, ripe reds. British wine merchants and writers are common currency in Coonawarra, the Barossa, and McLaren Vale, the main sources of those delicious wines. I’ve seen them there and even been beaten to the punch by them on a few choice parcels of red.

Australian wine drinkers, unlike their fellows in the U.K. and U.S., won’t be rescued from rising domestic-wine prices by imports. Distance, a weak dollar, a high level of duty on imports, and entrenched parochialism, all defeat any hope of relief from the outside world

Wine imports still puddle around at between 2 and 3 per cent by volume of consumption. Although what we import has a greater per litre value than what we export: $5.99 a litre (before freight, duty or taxes) in 1992/93 and $5.14 for the first three months of this year compared with $2.85 and $2.92 for exports in the same periods.

Our imports show a weighting towards sparkling wine, making 30 per cent of the total. Local sparkling wines constitute just 11 per cent of sales of domestic wine sales. This heavy weighting to imported bubbly also suggests a reason for the high value per litre of wine imports as the bulk of it is very expensive real Champagne.

The ABS statisticians believe wine sales are on the decline. But measuring the trend has been made harder by strong swings in sales before and after the budget fiasco. Sales were up 18 per cent before the budget, fell 24 per cent in the month following, then bounced back 19 per cent in October.

Thankfully, making sense of those gyrations is their problem. My personal trend estimate is well and truly up, silly-seasonally adjusted that is.

All Saints Winery, Rutherglen’s most notable wine landmark, has been dusted off, refurbished and re-launched by new owners, Brown Bros of Milawa.

Importantly for wine drinkers, the re-launch goes more than skin deep. It embraces not just refurbishment of the famous castle and design of shiny new labels but vineyard rehabilitation, improved wine-making practice, the use of museum stocks in blending the winery’s unique muscats, tokays, and ports, and a philosophy that ensures Rutherglen-only grape sourcing for the wines.

Brown Bros acquired All Saints Estate early in 1992 after it had been passed in at the receiver’s auction on the site on December 17, 1991. All Saints found itself in receivership just two years after a syndicate, led by the late Mike Fallon, took control from the Sutherland-Smith family that’d owned it since 1864.

That was the year river trader, George Sutherland-Smith, acquired 420 hectares of land fronting the Murray River. All Saints thrived as he established vineyards along the riverbank and learned the art of winemaking. Business must have been good. For this descendent of generations of carpenters and joiners built a large castle of red bricks dug and fired on the property. It was modeled on the workplace of his forbears, the castle of Mey in the parish of All Saints, Scotland.

Over the next century, the castle and its magnificent elm-tree drive became entrenched as landmarks of the Rutherglen wine-growing region. But by the late1980s the business appeared to be fraying at the edges, evidenced by an overgrown and littered drive and a ramshackle state of affairs in the winery.

Wine critic James Halliday, normally a Clark Kent of the pen, wrote, “…it grieves me to be unable to find something truly complimentary to say. The plain fact of the matter is that the table wines are simple, dull, and ordinary… a very close and hard look needs to be taken at both the quality of fruit coming out of the vineyard and the wine-making techniques employed to deal with the fruit.”

Fallon’s team hit All Saints with a dazzling burst of energy on Boxing Day, 1989. A team of wine makers began an appraisal of every barrel and bottle of wine in the place that day. Sub-standard material was removed. The winery and driveway were cleaned and a rational marketing plan hatched.

But time and fate were against Fallon who had enjoyed such enormous success as Marketing Director for Wolf Blass. In better times he may have succeeded. But All Saints became caught up in the recession and, by all accounts, was strangled by debt. Fallon died suddenly early in 1991 and it was only months before the business found itself in receivership.

I attended the receiver’s auction which cleared a great deal of stock as well offering the Estate for sale. With local wine maker, Chris Pfeiffer, I spent a day scrambling over barrels tasting every wine offered for sale as well as many being kept for the new owners… a store of aged fortifieds being essential to continued production.

Large volumes of young fortifieds were sold off, De Bortolis and Brown Bros being notable buyers on the day. But from what I tasted, most of the very best casks of old material stayed in the winery. These passed to Brown Bros with their acquisition of the Estate.

In the two years since then, Brown Bros have spent a million dollars on All Saints.

With advice from the Historic Buildings Trust of Victoria, the castle has been fully restored; the cellar-door sales area has been upgraded; Chef Michel Renoux, serves local produce in the new Le Cafe Brasserie and 600-seat capacity Great Hall convention centre; and considerable landscaping work has been completed around the winery.

More importantly, Jim Baxendale’s viticultural team has been nursing the estate’s formerly neglected 140 hectares of vines back to health. As well, wine maker Neil Jericho takes responsibility for the All Saints range now made in Brown Bros state-of-the-art winery at Milawa.

All Saints’ new Heritage, Classic, and Show Reserve ranges are pure Rutherglen products, sourced predominantly from the Estate’s own vineyards.

A trophy in Adelaide for the Show Reserve Tokay tells us Neil Jericho knows how to us the museum fortifieds. That and a resolve to keep grape sourcing estate-based, gives wine drinkers reason to believe a revived All Saints is a good thing.

If you’re confused about which sparkling wine to buy for Christmas, don’t worry. You’re in good company. Even our top wine judges can’t make sense of the increasing array of sparkling wines available to us.

It’s clear from the results of the 1993 ACI National Wine Show of Australia, announced here in Canberra two weeks ago, that the judges, including a Chairman who presides over the biggest sparkling wine cellar in the southern hemisphere, cannot pick $10 bubblies from $20 bubblies on the tasting bench.

The Kit Stevens Trophy for best bottle-fermented sparkling wine was awarded to Killawarra Premier Vintage Brut 1990, a very rich, sparkling white burgundy style retailing widely at $9 to $11 a bottle. It was the top-scoring wine in its class of 37 mostly more expensive wines and went on to win the trophy in a taste off against gold medal winners from other classes.

In its own class, this modestly-priced bubbly vanquished, amongst others, both the 1989 and 1990 vintages of Salinger ($27), Hardy Classique Cuvee Pinot Chardonnay 1990 ($28), Andrew Garrett Randall Pinot Chardonnay 1989 ($18), Yalumba ‘D’ 1990 ($27), Yellowglen Cuvee Victoria 1990 ($27), and Yellowglen Vintage Brut 1990 ($20).

Taken at face value, the results should send us sprinting, wallets and purses open, to the nearest retailer. Alternately, we could see the results as erratic – simply more evidence that the notion of awarding points out of 20 to each wine in a big line up and producing any meaningful result is nonsense. Accept that last proposition, and we have to wonder about the future of wine shows.

The result certainly must puzzle the Penfold Wine Group. It provided 22 of the 37 wines in the class. Yet two vintages of the wine it regards as the company’s flagship methode champenoise, Salinger, fared poorly considering its retail price of around $27. The 1989 scored just 43 points out of 60 (an aggregate of three judges awarding points out of 20) while the 1990 earned a silver medal with 51 points.

My own hunch, and we see this over and again at wine shows, is that judges tend to note fuller, richer wines, while glossing over more elegant, restrained entries. So what we end up with from the judges is not an absolute, objective measure of quality but a simple vote of personal preference, based on sniffing, sipping, and spitting a lot of wines in a short period of time.

The fact that judges cannot split cheap bubblies from expensive ones also highlights a growing homogeneity. Very few of the sparkling wines entered in premium classes in our wine shows are made from anything other than pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier, the varieties used by the French in the Champagne region.

Entering a wine based on semillon, riesling, chenin blanc, or ondenc in one of these classes is the kiss of death, not because of poor quality but simply because they’d be different. Anything that stands out in a wine show is usually cut down.

Why do our sparkling-wine makers use such a narrow palate of grapes in the better sparkling wines? In white table wine we enjoy the varied flavours of chardonnay, semillon, sauvignon blanc, chenin blanc, riesling, traminer and several other lesser varieties. But for bubbly we’ve stuck with the classics.

I think the answer is partly that the classics make good bubbly and partly that the show system tends to perpetuate fashions. At the moment only pinot-chardonnay blends win gongs, so almost everyone makes pinot-chardonnay bubblies. It’s a hard cycle to break into, despite ample evidence world wide that pinot-chardonnay blends are not the be-all and end-all of sparkling wine.

Germans make exquisite Sekt from the riesling grape; French vignerons in Vouvray (Loire Valley) offer superb, long-lived bubblies from chenin blanc; in Piedmont there’s the delicious and sweet Asti spumante from the local moscato grape; and throughout Italy drinkers enjoy bubblies made from a multitude of grapes unknown in Australia. (One that struck me was a verdicchio/garganega blend). And, of course, the Spanish make terrific bubbly from a pot pourri of grapes.

In Australia we can still taste the unique flavour of ondenc in Seppelts Hans Irvine blend; the richness of semillon in JY Tulloch Hunter Cuvee Brut (the judges gave it the thumbs down); and the fruity delicacy of Clare Valley Rhine Riesling in Brian Croser’s Pine Ridge Brut NV (Croser doesn’t bother to show it. He knows the judging system too well).

Unfortunately, we won’t see many of the world’s more interesting bubblies this Christmas. And if we were, we probably couldn’t afford them. For wine drinkers the banana republic is here as our weak dollar diminishes the choices available to us. For variety, then, be bold. Forget what the judges think and follow your own palate. There’s no reason to believe their opinions are better than yours or mine.

Japan has more Sake breweries (3,200 plus) than Australia has wineries (700 plus)! It exports Sake to 67 countries, although the bulk of production stays at home for simple quaffing with food and for traditional ceremonial usage. It is brewed throughout Japan, but the biggest production centres are at Nada near Kobe and Fushimi in Kyoto.

Australians drink little Sake. Even so, most retailers carry at least one brand, often in dusty boxes, on the top shelf, just out of reach. The commonest brand here, Gekkeikan, became so through the strong distribution of Milne Liquor Agencies, a division of Swift and Moore.

The arrival of Japanese cuisine in Australian capital and provincial cities seems to have done little to promote the national drink. Even Sydney’s Suntory Restaurant, a benchmark for Japanese food, scratches its head in wonder when it comes to Sake.

On a visit there recently with James and Tomoko Horne of Deakin, we asked to sample a range of Sakes but settled for the one and only brand available. It was a cool night, and served at about body temperature, the Sake’s soft, rich flavours complemented the food as well as sparking a party atmosphere.

The body rapidly absorbs alcohol from a warm, strong drink like Sake. At 15-16 per cent alcohol, it’s more than three times stronger than beer, about 25 per cent stronger than most Australian table wines, but a touch weaker than sherry or port.

No doubt the first Sake fermented itself spontaneously only to be harnessed, over time, by a grateful population. Just when Sake making became fully controlled by humans, no one knows, but it appears to have been part of the Japanese way of life for a thousand years or more. Gekkeikan, the brand mentioned above, claims to have been in the business since 1637.

James Horne, a frequent visitor to Japan, tells me there are numerous qualities and styles of Sake, as you’d expect from so many makers spread over a varied landscape. An official classification exists, sorting it into two quality grades, first and second-class. Professional Sake tasters, chosen by the Alcoholic Liquors Council (under control of the National Tax Administration Agency) determine the classifications.

It seems top grade Sake comes from a combination of non-sticky type big grain rice and hard water.

Freshly harvested rice is rich in starch, a non-fermentable carbohydrate. It has to be polished, washed, steeped, steamed, and cooled, to produce “Koji” a mash now containing fermentable sugars.

The “Koji” is mixed with water, yeast and more steamed rice to form “Motto” a seed mash that kick starts an alcoholic fermentation. After the “moto” has been doing its job for a day, more water, “koji” and steamed rice are added over two days.

This mix forms the main mash (“moromi”) which undergoes a slow fermentation at 15 degrees Celsius over a period of twenty-five days.

With fermentation complete, the fresh Sake is separated from the sediment by filtration, followed by cold stabilisation, further, filtering and blending, pasteurisation, storage, and a final blending, filtering, and pasteurisation prior to bottling.

There are two main style produced commercially: the full-bodied and dry traditional “Karakuchi” and the lighter, sweeter “Amakuchi”. The latter apparently being mainly a post-war phenomenon to attract a younger drinker with a sweeter tooth.

In response to competition from other alcoholic beverages, Sake makers now also offer both low alcohol (12 per cent) and high alcohol (19 per cent) Sakes to cater for a wider range of tastes.

Traditionally Sake is consumed at about body temperature. It is warmed placing a porcelain serving jug (“Tokkuri”) in hot water, then served in small (about 18 ml) porcelain cups (“Sakazuki” or “Choco”). I notice Gekkeikan offers complete serving sets through liquor outlets.

Although Sake is quite rich, it is also delicate and goes well with sashimi, raw fish, tempura, fritters, and tofu.

In Japan, Sake was traditionally the toast on all ceremonial occasions. In fact, the Japan Sake Brewing Association still pressures politicians, diplomats, and businessmen to use it at official functions as a symbol of Japanese culture.

Traditionally, too, it was a social drink, the obligation being to keep your fellow drinkers’ cups filled and then toasting with a cry of “Kampai” – a ritual drug taking we Australians can relate to easily.

These days, Sake is served chilled, on the rocks and mixed with soft drink. But there are a million blander drinks for that sort of use. I somehow think it’s best enjoyed in the traditional manner with traditional food.

There are three good things about Australian rhine riesling: it’s plentiful, it’s cheap, and it’s very, very good. The best, often retailing at modest prices on release, show tremendous staying power, drinking well ten years and more after bottling.

Even if South Australia grows 30 thousand of the 40 odd thousand tonnes crushed for wine making each year, it does not have a monopoly on quality. Those marvellous Clare, Watervale, and Eden Valley rieslings have a peer in Mitchelton vineyard, located on a peculiar bend of the Goulburn River near Nagambie, central Victoria.

That riesling should be grown there at all, in an area not previously noted for that variety, came down to decision, now proven visionary, by Colin Preece.

Preece, a distinguished table and sparkling wine maker of the fifties and sixties at Seppelt’s Great Western, selected the Mitchelton vineyard site in the late sixties after an extensive search through southeastern Australia on behalf of the Shelmerdene family.

As Stephen Shelmerdene wrote to me: “Such was Colin’s vision and enthusiasm for riesling that extensive plantings were made in 1970 and 1971, well before the white wine boom. Colin believed that the specific micro climate of the vineyards – surrounded on three sides by the deep, very cold, constant-height Goulburn River, a site very conducive to autumn fogs , providing suitable conditions for botrytis cinerea – would put Mitchelton in a very strong position to demonstrate the quality of riesling in Victoria.”. His judgement was spot on, although he did not live to see it vindicated.

Instead, Don Lewis, a young man selected and trained by Preece, presided over the making of Mitchelton’s first riesling during the massive floods of 1974. Don cannot recall the quality of the wine. But he well remembers the 1975 Mitchelton Rhine Riesling, a multiple gold-medal winner.

But times were tough for the wine industry with producers battling for margin in a glutted market. The going was particularly tough at Mitchelton as the owners struggled to fund an extravagant and still mind-boggling underground concrete and brick cellar and landmark observation tower.

During a period in receivership, Mitchelton sold most of its riesling as grapes or bulk wine. Most of the 1976 went as grapes to Brown Bros. However, a small portion was bought by Brian Croser, then lecturing in wine making at Riverina College of Advance Education.

Using a discarded Maralinga rocket fuel tank as a fermenter, he turned Mitchelton’s 1976 grapes into the first Petaluma Riesling. By this time Croser was an accomplished riesling maker, having put Hardys Siegersforf on wine shelves and restaurant lists all over Australia. Stephen Shelmerdene tells me Malcolm Fraser loved the inaugural Petaluma riesling and secured a quantity for the Lodge.

By 1978 Mitchelton’s financial trauma was over. For an undisclosed sum, believed to be just a fraction of the building cost, Melbourne’s Valmorbida family acquired the winery, tower and Mitchelton brand. The Shelmerdenes retained the vineyards.

At the Adelaide Show in 1978 Mitchelton’s 1978 Rhine Riesling earned a gold medal and the Clampett Trophy for best current vintage dry white of the exhibition. Lewis sees this as the turning point for his Rhine Rieslings. And, as he pointed out last week at a dinner celebrating his twentieth vintage, every one of his rieslings since then, including the 1993, has won at least one gold medal.

Gold medals, of course, don’t tell the whole story. They tell us mostly that a young, fresh wine, at a certain point in time, in the judges’ opinions, scrubbed up well against its peers. It’s only by drinking a wine, and seeing it at various stages of development can we form a valid opinion.

In the case of Mitchelton’s Rhine Rieslings, it’s very hard not to put them in the top flight of Australian rieslings. Young and old they stack up well, with the best mature vintages appearing stunningly good.

I’ve been fortunate to taste all the vintages 1978 to 1988 in one tasting and to have encountered most of those and all of the more recent vintages several times at dinner parties and other tastings. In recent months I’ve seen the 1978 and 1982 tasting as fresh and rich as ever.

At Don’s twentieth vintage dinner, the 1993, now labelled as Mitchelton Blackwood Park Riesling (Blackwood Park being the vineyard name) tasted extraordinarily good. Don views it in the same light as the legendary 1978.

I agree with Don. At $10 to $11 a bottle you get more flavour per dollar than you’ll ever find in chardonnay at the price. But it may not be the last word on Riesling, as 1993 appears to be an exceptional year for that variety, especially in its homeland of Clare, Watervale, and the Eden Valley.

A few weeks back I mentioned in a general article on high-quality cheap wines, the sudden appearance on the scene of the Alambie Wine Company and its brands, Salisbury Estate and Castle Crossing.

These are hardly household names yet, but they may well be in a very short time as this hungry, efficient, and very smart enterprise fills a gap created by price rises from bigger companies.

We should all cheer. The emergence of Alambie put a lid on domestic prices just as the export boom appeared to be unleashing a round of increases.

The seeds of what is now the Alambie Wine Company were planted twenty-five years ago when Peter McLaren established a 40-hectare vineyard at Nangiloc near Mildura on the Murray River.

McLaren, an agricultural scientist, planted not only vineyards but citrus orchards as well and claims his McLaren Management Pty Ltd is Australia’s largest horticultural farm management company.

With wine as with fruit McLaren sees total integration of production, manufacturing and marketing as crucial to success here and overseas. Strong exports of fresh citrus fruits to Asia and of wine to the UK, Sweden, and the USA earned his company the Austrade Primary Products and Commodities Award in the Governor of Victoria Export Awards earlier this month.

In wine making the concept of ‘total integration’ means simply that McLaren manages the vineyards from which he sources grapes, makes and packages the wine himself, and then takes it direct to the market place.

If it sounds simple, the first two steps especially add immeasurably to wine quality.

Any wine maker will tell you quality begins in the vineyard. Most might also add that Mildura is not their first choice of sites for high-quality table-wine grapes. Well, it is broadly true that Mildura’s wines can never scale the greatest heights, but they can provide very good everyday drinking at a keen price.

Indeed, much of the prejudice against Riverland wines gets back to the feeble flavours resulting from over cropping. And that’s where Alambie is different.

Without irrigation, grapes could not survive Mildura’s hot, dry climate. Pump plenty of water on and vines thrive… yields of 20 tonnes of grapes to the hectare are not unheard of. Plump grapes like that, of course, have little flavour. Modern wine making turns them into clean, fresh, but neutral wine cask material.

But over 25 years McLaren, in conjunction with CSIRO scientists, has developed vineyard management to a sophisticated level. Crops are lower than the area average, but viable economically because the quality is stunningly higher. That means better wines that finally retail for $5 to $9 a bottle rather than cask wine going out at $1.50 a litre.

With other investors McLaren now manages about 400 hectares of vines in the region. The development of minimal pruning techniques over the past 20 years not only cuts costs but increases fruit quality and produces healthier, disease-resistant vines. Mechanical harvesting also cuts the other big management cost to the bone.

As well, soil management, water control, vine selection, pest and disease control, and trellising design have all contribute to sustainable vine cultivation, lower costs, lower chemical use, and higher quality.

Vineyards are managed through to harvest with specific wine styles in mind and of course that’s done in conjunction with the winery manager, Bob Shields.

Acquiring the winery and the services of Shields were perhaps McLaren’s greatest coups, allowing him to process all of the grapes coming in from his fellow investors under one roof.

Bob Shields is an old accomplished hand when it comes to making wine from Mildura grapes. For years he was one of the leading technical people at Lindeman’s giant, state-of-the art winery just down the road at Karadoc. Here, with Philip John and Phil Laffer he helped develop mass-production techniques. Perhaps the most notable product being the outstanding Lindemans Bin 65 Chardonnay, a phenomenally good wine for the price now made in million litre lots and sold worldwide.

All that know how moved to Alambie with Shields and the innovation goes on in his new winery. The winery, he points out, cost just $2 million in a distress sale, but has a replacement cost of around $8 million.

Shields seems delighted with the quality of the fruit coming in, all to his specification. His work on chardonnay shows up in the outstanding Salisbury Estate 1993. I tasted it beside the similarly priced ($6-$8 a bottle) Lindemans Bin 65 this week. The Lindemans is a good product, but I rated Salisbury higher.

With wines like this pushing into export markets at keen prices, I think competing wine producing nations have a lot of catching up to do.

A little band of Tanunda grape-growing wine makers, dubbed the ‘Rhone Rangers’, lead the way in hand crafting wonderful, rich wines with a true Barossa thumbprint. They work mainly with grape varieties originating in France’s Rhone Valley but established in the Barossa in the mid nineteenth century.

Shiraz, the most widely planted Rhone variety, of course, needs no introduction. We’ve all enjoyed robust Barossa reds and ports made from it. But the Rhone Rangers have also seized upon another work horse variety, grenache, and are doing wonderful things with it both in its own right and in blends with shiraz and the even more obscure mourvedre (aka mataro).

On its own, Barossa grenache makes a most distinctive wine. It’s a variety achieving exceptional sugar levels – sufficient to produce table wines of 17 per cent alcohol (Barossa shiraz usually sits between 13.5 per cent to 15.5 per cent). This high sugar level makes for an ideal fortified-wine component but gives wine makers a real challenge when it comes to producing a full-bodied table wine.

Pick grenache at a more civilised alcohol potential, and the colour is too pale. In fact, as you can see and taste in Charlie Melton’s Rose of Virginia, Barossa grenache readily makes a lovely, crisp, fresh rose with a welcome touch of tannin in the finish.

Peter Schulz of Turkey Flat Vineyard says the making of fuller-bodied grenache starts in the vineyard. He says you must have mature vines managed for low yields. By ‘mature’ he means a minimum of twenty years. But in practice, the best wines being made from the variety often come from vines much older than that, some dating back to last century.

Given the right fruit – small berries with deep colour and rich, concentrated flavours – a wine maker has some chance of coming up with a decent red. Schulz has his wine made up the road from his vineyard at Robert O’Callaghan’s Rockford winery.

Now there’s a maker leading the way with grenache. According to Schulz, the secret is to make grenache to its full 17 per cent alcohol potential – thereby capturing all its unique flavour – then diluting it back to a more approachable 13 or 14 per cent.

Try Rockford or Turkey Flat grenache and you’ll be struck by the vibrant colour, notably lighter than shiraz of the same strength, and by the richly-scented floral aroma. That lovely floral character comes through on the palate as well. Despite that, these are solid reds, quite firm and sufficiently astringent to carry robust food.

While Rockford and Turkey Flat offer straight grenache, suitable material is scarce and most makers tend to serve it up blended with shiraz just as the real Rhone Valley people do in France. Charlie Melton’s Nine Popes is an excellent example of a grenache-shiraz blend with a touch of mourvedre..

If grenache offers novel flavours, shiraz still makes the ultimate Barossa reds. Though a multi-district blend, Penfolds Grange Hermitage has at its heart the phenomenally opulent aromas and flavours derived from shiraz grapes grown on very-old low-yielding vines from the Kalimna vineyard, northern Barossa.

Many other wineries now produce rich Barossa shiraz off old vines. Each offers a unique variation on the main theme.

Some of the best I encountered there recently were: Veritas Hanisch Vineyard Shiraz, Rockford Black Shiraz, Burge Family Draycott Hermitage, St Hallett Old Block Shiraz, Turkey Flat Shiraz (from a small block of vines planted in 1847), Charles Cimicky Signature Shiraz, Charles Melton Shiraz, Rovalley Old Vines Shiraz, Bethany Shiraz, Heritage Rossco’s Shiraz, Greenock Creek Shiraz, and Grant Burge Meshach 1990

In Australia, the multi-district blend is a fact of life for wine drinkers. With ease and speed our winemakers shift grapes, juice, and bulk wine over thousands of kilometres. Such flexibility results in large volumes of consistently good wines at reasonable prices.

If the rule for big-volume wines is varied grape sourcing, there are exceptions: Mildara’s Jamieson’s Run red and Wynns Coonawarra Hermitage are examples of mass-production from within a single region – even if the grapes are sourced widely within that area.

Even as we shift up market, many of our wines are cross-regional blends: Penfolds Grange Hermitage, Bin 707 and Bin 389 and Lindemans Nyrang Hermitage are examples of high -quality reds blended across regional and, in the case of Nyrang, state boundaries.

But as our taste for wine grows more sophisticated, it’s easy to see consumer interest at the middle and top of the market focusing more strongly on the distinctive flavours delivered by individual vineyards.

This infinite flavour variation based on vineyard location, of course, is the spice and life of wine buffs and always has been. Australia is peculiar in having developed multi-regional blends for its top-shelf brands.

Traveling through major wine-growing areas in the past few weeks there were everywhere signs of growing emphasis on regional and individual vineyard identity.

It’s hard to point to the source of it, but consumers, merchants, growers and makers all have a hand in it. And, finally, the interest springs from the emergence of wine styles peculiar to an area.

In Coonawarra, source of perhaps the most exciting reds in all of the new world, we’ve seen in recent years the emergence of a band of individual growers making small batches of phenomenally good reds.

The well-established Bowen Estate, Hollicks, Brands, Redmans, and Leconfield vineyard-wineries have been joined by Rymill (simply brilliant wines) and Zema Estate (in my view, inconsistent to date, but beautifully located and getting better).

As well, a number of growers without wineries now turn a portion of their fruit (and they don’t pick the worst batches for themselves) into wine. This is partly to spread their risks. But when you talk to them you sense an immense pride in their vineyards and a desire to build a brand, and, hopefully, a better living.

Mike Wetherall, Doug Balnaves, and Brian Lynn (Majella) are all primarily grape growers now making sensationally good wine in small batches. None of them have wineries: Wetherall makes his at Hollicks, Balnaves at Leconfield, and Lynn at Brands.

The other thing they have in common is that you’ll have to go to Coonawarra to buy a bottle! It’s well worth it if you’d like to experience the subtleties and shades of this great wine growing area.

And if you do go to Coonawarra, you may trip over the odd English Master of Wine buying for a supermarket chain. They’re everywhere. And if the main focus is big-volume value-for-money wines, they are also actively seeking small parcels of distinctive wine from small individual vineyards.

They’re in Coonawarra, and they’re in the Barossa as well. On a call to Rolf Binder at Veritas Winery, we were hot on the trail of a British buyer. He’d bought a parcel of a wonderful shiraz made from very old vines and was talking about making specific small batches of other Barossa hallmarks for the U.K. market.

Rolf, with his sister Christa, are just two of a growing number of Barossa growers beginning to focus strongly on table-wine styles peculiar to the area.

They represent a new generation, descended from the Barossa’s original German settlers. For previous generations, grapes were just one farm item to be sold to wine makers.

The new generation’s been to Roseworthy, worked in winemaking with big companies for a decade or more, and is now bringing advanced technical skills back to the farm. Why sell the grapes, they say, when we can make our wine and give it our own identity.

These new makers turn out a full range of wine, but the great specialties are the absolutely delightful, full-bodied shirazes and grenaches made from very old, bush-pruned vines. St Halletts, Rockford, Turkey Flat, Charles Melton, and Bethany are a few of the wineries at the hub of this discovery of a regional and vineyard identity.

If the world’s interest in wine continues, there’s a bright future for those emphasising an area’s unique wines. With time, I guess names of our better wines will be vineyard names, just as we’ve seen in France.

If there’s one thing we can learn from the French, it’s that a strong regional identity provides a marketing umbrella under which thousands of small makers may prosper, each with his own vineyard thumbprint.