Well, well, well. Wine
Australia, the industry’s regulatory body, has scrapped the controversial
export tasting panel.
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| Full cloud alert: one of these things is not like the others ... |
I wrote about the tasting approval process in
The Weekend Australian last year. Since 1929, before being allowed to leave our
shores, every wine destined for export been assessed by a panel of wine
professionals to ensure it is ‘sound and merchantable’ and does not ‘bring
Australia’s reputation into disrepute.
I - and other journalists - have long
pointed out the problems at the heart of this process. If a wine has already
received an export order from a customer overseas, for example, surely that
alone makes it ‘merchantable’? And while many of the wines that were being
rejected for being faulty (i.e., ‘unsound’), they are exactly the kinds of
funky, quirky, idiosyncratic styles that could actually enhance Australia’s image overseas - an image founded on
technically sound (there’s that word again) but ultimately bland wines.
This issue enjoyed a burst of international
attention in August when winemaker Gary Mills of Jamsheed in the Yarra Valley
hit Twitter to complain about how he had had a wine rejected by the panel -
despite the fact that it had already been selected by a Master of Wine to be
served at a special dinner in Japan, and was receiving rave reviews back home.
I tracked down a bottle - it was a 2011
cabernet franc - and tried it. Yes, it was hardly what you’d call squeaky clean
- it was a bit cloudy and a but sharp - but it was super-juicy, fun,
refreshing, and very much in the ‘natural’ style so beloved of trendy wine bars
and indie retailers (indeed, it was floor-stacked inside the front door of the
indie retailer I bought it from). A few re-Tweets later and suddenly
international journalists were taking an interest, joining the chorus of
disapproval for the approval process.
Soon, rumours started circulating (on
Twitter of course) that Wine Australia was seriously thinking of disbanding the
export tasting panel. And now, a few months later, this has indeed come to
pass.
So what happened? Why the change of heart?
The power of the press? A triumph for Twitter? Or simply a case of good
old-fashioned common sense prevailing?
Probably a little of all of the above.
Certainly the new approach is more sensible and realistic than the old
approach: rather than mandatory pre-export tasting for all wines, the existing
system of compliance audits (which includes checking winery records and labels)
will be expanded to include analysis and taste-tests.
It would be great if this could be
supported by some in-depth wine training for the auditors (it would have been
good if this could have been offered to the old tasting inspectors, too). Anybody
assessing whether a wine is ‘sound and merchantable’ need to be exposed to the
incredible diversity of styles out there: from big, black, overoaked,
over-alcholic shiraz to cloudy, orange, amphora-fermented sauvignon blanc,
almost anything goes out there in the modern wine scene.
As Wine Australia chief executive Andrew
Cheesman himself said when announcing the overhaul: ‘The market place and
consumers should be the arbiter of wine quality.’
(a version of this article first appeared
in The Weekend Australian A Plus on 11 Feb 2012)
