Stanton & Kileen Arinto, Rutherglen, Victoria, Australia 2022 (from £16.50, vinewhisperer.uk; swines.co.uk) Are French grape varieties just innately better than those with origins in other countries? That’s the question that inevitably comes to mind when you realise how many of the best wines made in the so-called New World are made with French varieties. Argentine malbec, New Zealand sauvignon blanc, Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, Oregon pinot noir, South African chenin banc, Australian chardonnay etc, etc, and very much etc. The question came up again as I was tasting my way round the assembled offerings put together by the UK’s Australian wine importers at a recent tasting in London: so much of the good Australian stuff is built on French foundations, even if the finished constructions are so distinctive you’d never mistake them for wines from anywhere else. Still, it’s always refreshing to come across an Australian wine that shows off the abilities of varieties from other parts of the wine world, such as the glorious mix of lime-tangy acidity and tropical fruit fleshiness in Stanton & Kileen’s Victorian take on the Portuguese variety, arinto.
Chaffey Bros La Conquista Tempranillo-Garnacha-Graciano, Barossa Valley, Australia 2018 (£15.50, greatwine.co.uk) Australian winemakers get understandably annoyed when European journalists talk about its wines as if they all came from a single vast region with the same, intensely hot climate. In reality, as one of the country’s most influential wine producers, Michael Hill Smith of Shaw+Smith in the Adelaide Hills and Tolpuddle Vineyard in Tasmania, points out, it’s a “cliché that all Australia wine regions are warm. A significant number of our regions are cooler than Bordeaux and in some cases as cold as Champagne.” Then again, many of Australia’s vineyards are planted in places that have more in common climatically with regions in other, warmer parts of Europe. And that does rather invite the question why there aren’t more Australian wines made from grape varieties such as Tempranillo, which thrives across multiple, warm Spanish wine regions. All the more so when you taste a wine such as Chaffey Bros’ blend of 60% Tempranillo with Rioja’s other two main red varieties, garnacha and graciano, with its delightful mix of bright brambly berries and softly savoury tones.
Laurent Miquel Albariño, IGP Pays d’Oc, France 2022 (£12.50, Sainsbury’s) McLaren Vale is another good Australian spot for tempranillo, and it blends so well with the top Portuguese red variety touriga nacional and Spanish cariñena (better known by its French name, carignan), in the effortlessly drinkable floral-herbal Alpha Box & Spice Mistress Touriga Nacional-Tempranillo-Carignan 2021 (£19.45, ndjohn.co.uk). But it’s not just in certain parts of Australia where Iberian varieties have the potential to do well. While they are very much overshadowed, and certainly outnumbered, by malbec, wines made from tempranillo in Argentina (such as the spicy but suave and succulent Zuccardi Q Tempranillo, Mendoza 2018; £18.99, virginwines.co.uk) can be excellent. So too, Galicia’s (and northern Portugal’s) great white albariño in Maldonado in Uruguay (from producers such as Bodega Garzón), California (Marimar Estate in Sonoma) and, increasingly, New Zealand (Forrest and Left Field among an expanding group of others). Indeed, albariño is proving to be a rare example of a foreign grape finding favour in France, where the Languedoc’s Laurent Miquel is making it into an attractively pristine peachy, seafood-friendly dry white.
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