In September of last year, fourteen wine professionals gathered in Australia’s Yarra Valley for, without exaggeration, the tasting experience of a lifetime. Chosen as scholars for the annual Landmark Tutorial – in 2010 hosted by Yering Station in conjunction with the Yarra Valley Winegrowers’ Association – this lucky crowd was joined by leading figures from the Australian wine community, among them James Halliday, Andrew Caillard MW and Dr. Tony Jordan. Led by other luminaries such as Michael Hill Smith and Jeffrey Grosset, the Tutorial comprised a series of seminars providing a cross-section of Australian fine wine organized by grape variety, style, contemporary relevance and historical importance.

Only in its second year, this week-long residential programme, organized by Wine Australia (and the brainchild of former GM Paul Henry), has the primary aim of broadening awareness of Australia’s fine wine offerings and fine wine heritage. Thus, participating scholars were drawn from various parts of the globe including the UK, the US, Denmark, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and – unlike in the inaugural 2009 Tutorial – Australia: sommelier Kim Bickley and wine writer Tony Love adding context whilst reassessing Australia’s fine wine capabilities for themselves (for a full list of participants click here).

Fongyee Walker and I represented mainland China, a significant new market for Australia, where we have been involved in a range of on-going educational initiatives. But whilst the Tutorial enabled an unparalleled assessment of Australian fine wine both in contemporary terms and across the decades – as well as a unique opportunity to be exposed to some of its greatest winemakers – what overall messages did ‘The Landmark’ convey?  This question can, perhaps, only be answered after considering the recent history of Australian wine as well as drawing on the highlights and debates the Tutorial offered.

Soul-searching and reassessment are currently at the centre of all things Australian wine. In 1996, Australia exported around 150 million litres of wine. In 2007, exports peaked at over 700 million litres. The Australian wine boom of the late 1980s, 1990s and thereafter led many first-time wine drinkers around the world to experience a glass of ‘sunshine in a bottle’, putting Australia firmly on the map in international wine circles. But in supplying volume ever more competitively (and with a growing surplus), there arose the danger that ‘Brand Australia’ would itself be compromised and its fine wines – often produced in quantities much smaller than the likes of Bordeaux’s top estates – would go unnoticed.

Australians, we might be tempted to think, are tireless over-achievers and the wine boom seems indicative in this respect. However, it should be remembered that the success of Australian wine was, initially, a relative uphill battle, at least in traditional markets, notwithstanding Aussie enthusiasm. A former Export Manager for Yalumba told me not so long ago about the response to ‘Australian wine’ from the more pin-striped element of the 1980s British wine trade, mimicking (in a suitably Port-soaked voice): ‘But, my dear, Ya-Lum-Ba, how does one even say it?’

Conquering the UK market was, in fact, a challenge that went back to some of the earliest pioneers of Australian wine keen to capitalize on the 19th Century British penchant for fortified wines; which, to this day, Australia produces at the highest level, even if the market for its sublime fortifieds, both domestically and internationally, is now minuscule. More discerning members of the 1980s UK trade, however, quickly realized how Australia, with its advances in wine technology and penchant for marketing would ultimately capture the UK and US markets with highly drinkable, affordable table wines with which the likes of France and the Old World could not compete. The Yellow Tail effect seemed, eventually, the epitome of everything Australia could do at its best (and worst) in the eyes of wine consumers.

But in conquering significant international markets with volume, there was an obvious price to pay. When I left the UK in 2007, supermarkets had for some time been heavily discounting Australian wines. That was the not the case in the late 1990s or even early years of the current century. By 2009, 35% of Australian wine exported was valued at around $2.50 AUS per litre.

Back in 1996, the Australian Wine & Brandy Corporation (AWBC) aimed to reach $4.5 billion of exports by 2025 – the famous ‘Strategy 2025’ – a figure reached twenty years prematurely in 2005. This led to a reappraisal of the industry entitled Directions to 2025: An Industry Strategy for Sustainable Success (May 2007), sustainability being precisely the issue. Australia, it has to be said, still makes the most reliable entry-level commercial wines in the world, but by 2007, if not before, expansion of the industry on the prior pattern would prove unsustainable for all sorts of reasons.

Max Allen Photo: weeklytimesnow

Before reviewing what the 2010 Landmark Tutorial offered, however, the issue of sustainability should be addressed for rather more pressing reasons. Max Allen, author of The Future Makers: Australian Wine for the 21st Century – who dropped in during the Tutorial for a fun dinner at Oakridge winery – begins his assessment of the current Australian wine industry on a cautionary note (not for nothing is the first section of the book called ‘The Big Picture’). For Allen, no one should forget that the two main issues really facing Australia are water availability and climate change, rather than the contingent concern that its production of bulk wine will obscure the Aussie fine wine message.

Drawing on the research and campaigning of viticulture experts such as Prof. Snow Barlow and Dr. Richard Smart, Allen ponders:

Can we reasonably expect this fragile, sunburnt country to keep on supporting an industry of 8,000 vineyards and 2,500-plus producers? Can the Australian wine industry continue to grow all the grapes it is growing now, in all the places it is growing them, using current viticultural and irrigation methods? The answer to both of these questions is no.

Those currently ‘making the future’ of Australian wine, at any level, are already facing these concerns, as Allen details. Fittingly, perhaps, the Landmark Tutorial began with a session by Dr. Tony Jordan on climate and Australia’s viticulture areas.

~Edward Ragg

Stay tuned for next weeks post: Explaining the wide diversity of climates in Australia’s viticultural areas with Dr. Tony Jordan

Editor’s note: This is an ongoing 13-part series of Edward Ragg’s account of Australia’s Landmark Tutorial. Each week, Edward will give us an insider’s view of the program. Join us next week as he introduces us to a handful of Australia’s regional classic wines and reports on Australia’s wide diversity of climates—seminars which were lead by Dr. Tony Jordan and Michael Hill Smith MW.