Aussie rules: when it comes to wine, surely it has to be shiraz

Jump to it: the most popular source of wine in the UK is that grown Down Under. Photograph: Kok Kai Ng/FlickrVision

Kangarilla Road Shiraz, McLaren Vale, Australia 2020 (£14.99, or £10.99 for a mixed case of six bottles, majestic.co.uk) Australia has been the UK’s favourite source of wine in supermarkets and other merchants for more than 20 years now, with much of the country’s popularity down to its winemakers’ way with its most popular grape variety, shiraz. Sometimes known by its French name, syrah (of which more below), shiraz is responsible for just under a third of all the Australian wine sold in the UK, according to figures from the industry body, Wine Australia. And I would hazard a guess that most shiraz buyers have come to expect a certain set of qualities that at the very least approximate Majestic’s description of the blockbuster 16% abv Mollydooker The Boxer Shiraz (£24.99): “hugely full-bodied and voluptuous”. These red wines are smoothly rendered but powerful, and filled with dark fruit and warming sweet spice, such as the same retailer’s good-value (and, at 14.5% abv, more digestible) Kangarilla Road Shiraz.

Ben Haines Grampians Syrah, Victoria, Australia 2021 (£17.69, stannarywine.com) Other reliably good providers of the classic sumptuous, fuller-bodied Aussie shiraz style include Tesco, in the shape of the plummy spice-inflected Finest Barossa Shiraz 2019 (£10); Jim Barry, in wines such as the lavender-infused blackberry succulent The Lodge Hill Shiraz, Clare Valley 2018 (from £10.50, The Co-op; Majestic); and Yalumba in the lush chocolately-bambly Yalumba Galway Barossa Shiraz 2021 (£12.99, Waitrose). But there has always been far more stylistic variety on offer in Australian shiraz than the caricature allows for. Tasting my way around the shiraz offerings at a recent gathering of Australian wine importers in London, for example, took me from the astonishing, evocative sinewy, salty, meaty, liquorice intensity of Argicola Ebenezer Shiraz, Barossa Valley 2021 (£70, swig.co.uk) to the graceful, perfumed delights of Ben Haines’s bottling from Victoria’s Grampians, via the chocolatey smoothness of Grant Burge Filsell Barossa Shiraz 2020 (£25.99, laithwaites.co.uk).

Distant Noises Syrah, Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia 2019 (£17.50, Swig.co.uk) I can see how it might be irritating for some wine buyers to open-up something that they were expecting to be saturated with ripe fruit flavours only to come across a wine that seems bleached out and skinny by comparison. Warding off that kind of disappointment at least partly explains why some Australian producers prefer to use syrah on their labels – the idea being to signal that the wine inside is likely to take its cue from the kind of wines you find in France’s northern Rhône Valley rather than a Barossan biggie. The French comparisons are increasingly moot, however, since Australian shiraz/style has its own regional variations. The reds made from the variety in the relative cool of Victoria’s Yarra Valley, an area best known for its pinot noir and chardonnay, for example, tend to be very much in the syrah camp, for example, with the Distant Noises bottling being particularly silky, fresh, and aromatic.

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