A Wine Intelligence survey, released at the London International Wine Fair in May, reveals that wine drinkers in the USA and the UK – our two biggest markets – show little awareness of Australian or New Zealand wine regions.

Even after a decade of dominance by Australian wine imports in both countries, just 38 per cent of the 1002 UK drinkers and 10 per cent of the 2069 Americans surveyed were aware of the Barossa Valley. Marlborough, New Zealand’s largest wine region fared even worse, being recognised by only 27 per cent of UK and 12 per cent of USA drinkers.

While the report partly quantifies the challenge ahead for our wine regions, it also confirms the important role regions play in consumer wine-buying decisions.

In both the UK and USA, about half of wine drinkers rated region of origin as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ cues when buying wine. Strangely, though, two thirds of the British but only half of the Americans rated country of origin as important or very important.

Not surprisingly, UK wine drinkers showed the highest level of awareness, and understanding of the wines, of the long-established European names, Champagne, Burgundy, Chablis, Bordeaux, Chianti, Beaujolais, Cava, Rioja, Cotes du Rhone Loire and Provence.

Americans seemed familiar with fewer regions and their wine styles than the Brits, with the Napa Valley (USA), Champagne, Bordeaux, Chablis and Chianti at the fore. However, even though the Americans showed little recognition of the regional names Beaujolais, Alsace, Cava, Rioja and Prosecco, they made valid comments about the wine styles behind those names.

This suggests a wider importance for regional names to Americans than the figure for buying cues suggests. Clearly there’s an understanding of wine styles behind some regional names even if the buyer doesn’t recognise their geographic meaning.

Repeating this pattern, only 10 per cent of American buyers were aware of the Barossa as a region, but about three quarters of them showed some understanding of the region’s styles. Figures for UK buyers were about 38 per cent regional awareness and 80 per cent familiarity with the styles. This suggests that in both countries the Barossa name is synonymous with a wine style rather than a region.

Wine Intelligence asked respondents what words came spontaneously in response to regional names.  When asked about ‘Barossa’ the commonest British responses were ‘Australia’, ‘red’, ‘good’, ‘shiraz’. The American response was a less emphatic ‘red’, ‘Spain’, ‘good’, ‘wine’, ‘Australia’, ‘great’, ‘Italy’ and ‘California’.

From the English, ‘Marlborough’ prompted ‘New Zealand’, ‘cigarettes’, ‘strong’, ‘white’ and ‘sauvignon blanc’. And the Americans weighed in with ‘cigarettes’, ‘New Zealand’, ‘good’ and ‘sauvignon blanc’.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity for Australian and New Zealand exporters lies in the tremendous goodwill towards us in the UK and USA – especially in comparison to other exporting nations.

Asked to rate their affinity to various countries, their people and their cultures, 78 per cent of British and 73 per cent of American respondents rated Australia as ‘positive’ or ‘very positive’ – putting us at the top of the list. New Zealand came in second with the British at 70% and third for the Americans 61% (behind second placed Italy on 71%).

Italy and Spain fared well in the affinity test, but poor old France, creator and doyen of so many classic wine styles, rated just 56% with the British and 46% with the Americans.

Perhaps this lack of empathy is a countervailing force to the widespread knowledge of their regions and styles – and a continuing opportunity for our winemakers.

And a warning bell I hear in the survey figures applies as much in Australia as it does in the UK, but probably not to America. The most powerful cue affecting buying choice in the UK is ‘promotional offer’, rated by 73% of respondents as ‘important’ or ‘very important’. In the USA ‘promotional offer’ rated only fourth, behind grape variety, recommendation by a friend or family and familiar brand.

The primacy of the retail offer in Britain reflects the enormous power of the major national retail chains. The same applies in Australia where our two biggest retailers now account for perhaps half of all sales.

While competition is unquestionably a force for good, keeping a lid on prices, too much market power can limit entry to markets for smaller wine players, especially when the focus is more on price than on quality. The power of our big supermarkets could well stifle our wine industry’s planned focus on regional identity.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

The truffle book (Gareth Renowden, Limestone Hills Publishing, New Zealand, 2005) says that this expensive little black tuber turns off perhaps as many people as it turns on.

But whether we like it or not, the truffle’s extraordinary, penetrating aroma can’t be ignored. It gets up our nose and stays there a long time. Indeed, it’s so pervasive that if it tasted exactly as it smelled, there’d be few, if any, wines on earth capable of standing up to it.

Fortunately the truffle’s ability to enhance the flavours of other foods gives it a role beyond that first jaw-dropping perfume – opening up any number of wine matching opportunities. Ultimately what wine to serve depends more on the food and sauce accompanying the truffle than the truffle itself. As that could be anything from ice cream to steak we really have the whole wine spectrum as candidate.

But before we attempt any wine matches, what does truffle (specifically tuber melanosporum or the black Perigord variety, now in season around Canberra) smell and taste like?

New Zealand truffle grower, Gareth Renowden, likens it to a mix of unwashed socks, armpits, the whole spice cupboard, crushed garlic, damp leaves mixed with moist soil and a big floral hit: lilies for penetration and roses for sweetness.

Not tempted? Then try this reminiscence of a first truffle hunt by Elizabeth Luard (Truffles, London, 2006), “I breathe deeply. The fragrance almost overpowers me, filling my nostrils with a scent so exciting, so overwhelming, so astonishingly familiar that my head swims and I have to sit down on a tree-stump… What exactly is it that makes the scent of a truffle so thrilling? Well. The chemists tell us it’s the pheromones, the stuff that tells Noireau [her companion’s truffle-sniffing dog] that the neighbour’s bitch is on heat. There’s no other way to explain the effect. It reminds some of us – not all, no doubt – of those nights when we held our first lover in our arms and learned, once and for all, what this thing they talked about in books was all about. Sex, actually – but all new-minted and carrying with it none of the baggage of later years. I breathe deeply again. These words spring to mind: sweet almonds, ripe grapes, thyme, rosemary, juniper, the scent of heather-roots, bonfire embers after rain”.

And 26 years earlier that great food writer, Waverly Root (Food, New York, 1980), described his truffle moment – in a new Parisian restaurant,  “I bit full into it and my mouth was flooded with what was probably the most delicious taste I have ever encountered in my entire life, simultaneously rich, subtle and indescribable. It ate it all, while the other guests regarded me with loathing… I find it quite impossible to pass on any idea of its taste. If I say it was as sturdy as meat, I will start you off on a completely wrong track as to its savor. If I say it was unctuous and aromatic as chocolate, I will do the same. Truffles taste like truffles, and like nothing else whatever; and it is a rare, rare privilege to be able to taste a fresh truffle of this calibre”.

If truffle’s hard to describe it’s also hard to ignore, thanks to that beguiling perfume which does, as Elizabeth Luard says, contain pheromones. But it seems the most important of the roughly 50 compounds behind the perfume’s appeal to animals, including humans, is dimethylsulphide – a compound used in perfume making, and an integral part of the flavour of some beers, especially lagers.

But it’s a complex mix and includes acetaldehyde, ethanol and acetone – which perhaps accounts for some of the soaring floral notes in fresh truffle, one that I described as jonquil-like in my one and only encounter.

In his book, Renowden says German researchers in the early eighties found that truffles shared a sex hormone, androstonol, with boar saliva and men’s armpits. They speculated that sows might be sexually attracted to truffle smell and that this might explain the folklore of truffles as aphrodisiac. But Thierry Talou, a leading authority on truffle aroma, synthesised the aroma, sans hormone, and found pigs to be just as keen to dig for the smell.

So, one way or another, if the truffle appeals, it’ll begin with that haunting, unique, pungent, penetrating aroma. What to drink with it?

What wine can match that aroma in intensity? None that I know of. Even the most aromatic gerwurztraminer, the most floral riesling, the most perfumed, musky pinot noir don’t go anywhere near it. If then, like Waverly Root, we’re tempted to munch right into our truffle (at $125 for 50 grams), why bother with wine. Water will do.

But if, as one equally extravagant recipe suggests, we simply boil our truffle for 20 minutes in dry white wine (with a few strips of bacon and a little seasoning to enrich the stock), then surely a very dry white wine would do the trick – perhaps Chablis or Champagne.

A classic and opulent combination is truffle with foie gras, sometimes cooked with Armagnac, the robust brandy of southwestern France. I can imagine a succulent wine like Sauternes or an Australian facsimile of the style – botrytis semillon – being in harmony with this almost unimaginably rich dish.

The setting, then, drives the choice of wine. It could be an aged, top-shelf chardonnay with truffle and cheese; a fine youthful pinot noir with truffle and chicken; an aged cabernet with rare steak and truffle sauce; a Barolo or aged Rhone red or cool-climate Australian shiraz with game, mushroom and truffle.

To me, and probably to almost everyone in Canberra, the fresh truffle is a totally new world to be explored. There are no rules, then – just one guiding principle: to be adventurous and enjoy yourself.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

In December last year Australia and Europe tied off a loose end that had been dangling since March 1994. But who’s going to tell grandma that the agreement spells the end of Australian ‘sherry’ (the name at least, if not the drink)?

We’d committed to dropping European wine names from our labels under a wine trade agreement on 1 March 1994. However, the agreement hadn’t specified the phase-out period. But the new agreement, signed in Brussels on 1 December 2008, details how and when we drop the few remaining European place names – plus a long list of ‘traditional expressions’ – from our labels.

The agreement will become effective when Australia amends the Australian Wine and Brand Corporation Act 1980 and Trade Marks Act 1995. From that point we have one year to phase out our use of Burgundy, Chablis, Champagne, Graves, Manzanilla, Marsala, Moselle, Port, Sauterne, Sherry (poor grandma) and White Burgundy, and ten years to drop ‘tokay’.

And good news for grandma – at a cost of a reported $1million ($500,000 of it from the Australian Government) the industry’s come up with a new name for Australian sherry. The draft Fortified Wine Code of Practice proposes ‘Apera’ – a word play on ‘aperitif’ – to apply across the whole sherry flavour spectrum, including those that aren’t aperitif styles. Don’t you just love committees?

But if grandma drinks commercial Apera, the transition may not be too confusing as the current descriptors ‘dry’, ‘medium dry’, ‘semi sweet’ and ‘cream’ are to remain. If, however, she enjoys a more expensive drop, she’ll search in vain for the now-forbidden ‘fino’, ‘amontillado’ and ‘oloroso’. These, too, will be replaced with style descriptors above.

The committee that gave us Apera also offers ‘Topaque’ as the replacement name for Tokay – the luscious, aged fortified wine made from the muscadelle grape, most famously in Rutherglen, northeastern Victoria.

This final mop-up of European place names is just the last fiddly little bit of a transformation that began in Australia long before the 1994 or 2008 agreements with Europe.

In reality, when did anyone last see on a retail shelf an Australian ‘Chablis’, ‘Champagne’ or ‘Burgundy’? Regional, varietal labelling began to replace these outmoded, derivative generic terms in the late seventies, gathered a head of steam during the eighties and had become mainstream by the time of the 1994 agreement.

And something the sherry – sorry, Apera – makers might note is the futile push by some in the eighties and nineties to come up with an Australian term for ‘Champagne’. Most makers didn’t give a toss. Rightly, they saw the discussion as irrelevant.

Large-scale commercial brands like Minchinbury and Great Western simply removed the word ‘Champagne’ from their labels. The strength of the brands and packaging said all that needed to be said.

And upmarket producers took individual approaches. Why, they reasoned, would a big country like Australia, with a diversity of sparkling-making regions and winemaker approaches, need a single name for upmarket bubbly styles? France’s Champagne was the distinctive product of a single region – hence, the regional name.

Our top makers gave us Croser, Pirie, Arras, Salinger, Chandon, Hanging Rock –  and many more individual brands packaged clearly as high-quality sparklers and quite often with varietal and regional information on the label. Quite simply, we didn’t need a single name. Indeed, creating one would have been a diversion from our more innovative, regional and cross-regional-blending approaches.

While it’s easy to focus on what the agreement with Europe takes away from us, it’s probably more important to see the protection it gives to our own wine names and winemaking practices.

The irony is that when we signed the 1994 agreement with Europe, we didn’t even have defensible regional names. The 1994 agreement forced us to develop our Geographic Indications system – the official naming and registering of our regions.

We initially defined Australia, then the states then the engine room of our burgeoning export industry, ‘South Eastern Australia’, embracing much of NSW, Victoria and South Australia. Then began the hard grind of defining zones within each state, then within the zones, regions, and within some regions, sub-regions to go on the register of protected names.

The new agreement protects our 112 place names, just as it protects Europe’s more than 2,500.  It also accepts many Australian winemaking techniques and eases the entry of our wines into Europe.

Grandma will soon get used to sipping McWilliams Cream or Seppelt Fine Apera. But the bigger challenge for Australian winemakers will be to convince the world that we’re not just one big, hot country making a single wine style. We’ve got a huge task ahead to reveal the tremendous diversity of styles produced across our 112 official wine growing areas.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009

There’s a saying going around the industry that you can always tell a Foster’s wine executive – but you can’t tell them much. It shows in every part of their faltering wine empire, and even in a recent press release announcing the launch in Australia of wine in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles.

It’s an admirable, environmentally friendly initiative. But did anyone check the facts? And where’s the corporate memory?

The press release claims, “In an Australian first, Wolf Blass has released its latest range of wines producing 29% less greenhouse gas emissions. The new Wolf Blass Green Label wines come in a lightweight recyclable plastic bottle”.

It seems the attention-getting headline outranked truth, as Queensland’s Sirromet winery released its First Step range in PET plastic several months ahead of the Wolf Blass launch.

And what about corporate memory? Has Foster’s forgotten that it served Seppelt Fleur de Lys bubbly from PET bottles during Flemington’s spring carnival in 2006 – and added Wolf Blass table wine in PET bottles to the carnival menu in 2007?

These probably were the wine industry’s first use of 750ml PET bottles in Australia. And Foster’s had been an early mover in other markets, too, having launched PET-bottled Wolf Blass wine Canada in 2007 and the UK shortly afterwards.

And even before that, because of its lightness and safety, PET bottles rapidly replaced glass in the fast-growing single-serve market, dominated by those little 187ml bottles served on aircraft.

This seems to have sparked their successful uptake by consumers in the US – led by Fetzer’s Valley Oaks brand early in 2005 and followed in August the same year by Foster’s California based Stone Cellars by Beringer brand.

Both Foster’s and Sirromet push the environmental credentials of PET. Foster’s attributes much of the reduced carbon footprint to a “90% weight reduction of the 51gm PET bottle used for [Wolf Blass] Green Label compared to the industry standard glass bottle”. The lighter bottle contributes to a 36% reduction in the overall weight of the product, they claim.

But will this be enough to win wine drinkers over? In an online survey by Choice in 2007 those calling wine in PET bottles “sacrilegious” slightly outnumbered those saying they’d embrace it – but are outnumbered by those who don’t care.

We should remember, too, that almost half of the wine consumed in Australia reaches our dinner tables via the flexible bladder crammed inside chateau cardboard.

But not since the cask appeared some thirty years ago have we embraced any non-glass packaging so enthusiastically.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the four-litre cask (known more aptly in other markets as bag-in-box) drove the humble two-litre glass flagon from our shelves. Today only cheap fortified wines come in flagons, although the diminutive ‘goon’ lives on as the twenty-something’s jargon for cheap wine.

Various cheap, strong, light and appealing alternatives to glass and casks have enjoyed niche but not mainstream success.

In the eighties we saw sections of the trade boycott wine coolers packed in lunchbox-sized tetra packs. Some retailers feared that the fruit-juice-like appearance might appeal to underage drinkers, or that children might even confuse it for juice.

We’ve since seen some attempts at packing wine in one-litre tetra packs enjoying a modicum of success. And several makers have succeeded with wine in cans – most notably Italy’s Rich Prosecco, spruiked in Europe’s fashionable ski resorts by Paris Hilton.

But the successes are isolated and to date haven’t appealed to mainstream wine drinkers. However, environmental concerns about glass – particularly regarding its weight, high handling and transport costs and safety – mean that alternatives have to found.

As environmental concerns, backed by public policy, now dovetail with commercial cost-cutting needs, the number of alternatives is sure to grow. And PET plastic looks to be a strong favourite.

Like glass it’s strong, can be moulded into bottle shape, enjoys a long history as a drink container and is recyclable.
Unlike glass it’s comparatively light and won’t break into dangerous shards – which is good – but it’s not completely airtight, which is not so good.

Lightness is it’s overwhelming advantage over glass. Two years back, as they launched PET in Canada, Foster’s said that a 750ml PET bottle weighed around 54 grams, compared to a glass bottle’s 400–700 grams.

That means a significant energy saving for every inch of a wine’s journey. By my reckoning the forklift carries 266–496 kilograms less in every pallet; each 1000-case shipping container weighs 4.1–7.7 tonnes less; and the case you lug to your car weighs 4.1–7.7 kilograms less.

And the bottle even looks less bulky. The 750ml Sirromet sample in front of me, for example, looks like it might be 500ml.

At this stage, though, PET’s use will be limited to early-drinking wines as slight air permeability means a shorter shelf life than for the same wine in glass. Since most wine is drunk shortly after purchase, this perhaps makes the majority of wine a candidate for a PET bottle.

And will we wine drinkers accept the new packaging? A fair bit of evidence says that we will.

Indirectly, we’ve seen the dramatic take up of screw caps in the past decade. This can be viewed largely as a triumph of convenience over tradition – even if winemakers originally drove the change on quality grounds. The screw cap acceptance suggests that wine drinkers are not all that conservative and that the power of convenience and good sense should not be underestimated.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2009