Australian Wine: Liquid Gold

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Soon after leading the first European crossing of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, explorer Gregory Blaxland was back on his New South Wales farm, tending his vines. By 1822 he had sufficient confidence in his winemaking skills to submit a quarter-pipe (about 37 gal.) of red wine for assessment by the London-based Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. The society's judges awarded him a silver medal--and five years later a gold medal--for a wine they described with tepid enthusiasm as having "much the odor and flavor of ordinary claret."

Blaxland was a colorful pioneer, but the business he started in Australia has become famed for producing wine that's not a cheap facsimile of other nations' wine but a unique, hardly ordinary invention. While Australia's wine matches the best in the world in technical expertise, there is something special about the taste of the country's top blends that has made it an irreplaceable flavor in many of the world's great wine cellars. This week Sotheby's and Christie's will conduct two of the largest wine auctions in history, each boasting impressive lots of the famous Penfolds Grange, a peppery, $200-plus-per-bottle wine that's almost impossible to obtain. And while Aussie winemakers have been building a great business--exports are up more than 50% in the past five years--they are also changing the way wine is made in some of the oldest vineyards on earth. Says Jancis Robinson, editor of the newly revised Oxford Companion to Wine: "It is difficult to overestimate the Australian impact." Explains New York City wine expert Humphrey Oguda: "No one has done so much for wine so fast. The giants of Australia, like Penfolds, make more than 1 million bottles of wine a year, and they scare every French winemaker because the quality that goes into a $10 bottle of wine is exactly the same quality that goes into the top of their line. It's madness! It's why they are considered a war machine when it comes to wine."

For 160 years after Blaxland's first endeavors, the development of Australia's wine industry was steady but unremarkable. But the past decade has brought a renaissance. Partly it's been spurred by domestic growth: though historically not big wine consumers, Australians now drink an average of 26 bottles of table wine a year--more than any other English-speaking nation, although less than a third of the average Frenchman's needs. But the real growth has come overseas, where inexpensive (less than $30) Australian wines are hailed for richness, approachability and reliability--characteristics that put them on a footing with good French wine. "Australia is now seen as a credible dinner-party wine," says Simon Farr, a director of Bibendum, one of London's top wine shops. "Ten years ago, it would have been French all the way--even if it tasted disgusting."