Cool-Climate Australian Wine

There is a dappled light I have never seen anywhere except Australia, which must be something to do with the shape of eucalyptus leaves and the strength of the sunlight. As everyone knows, Australia is hot and full of gum trees, but that is like describing England as a rainy country with a royal family: true, but limited. In the country’s south- eastern corner, clouds gather and rain falls, not with the dull predictability we get here, but with enthusiasm. The trees are ruffled by ocean breezes and overlooked by high hills – easy on the eye and, also, on the palate, because grapes soothed by cool air retain their acidity and elegance.

There are better wines here than many people realise: not the sun-plumped fruit bombs found on supermarket shelves, but fine-grained pinot noirs with notes of black tea, smoke and raspberry; spicy pinot gris; floral, juicy rieslings tense as tightrope wires; and citrusy chardonnays that have nothing in common with the vanilla-flavoured cream-cake potions of old.

Those wines still exist, of course: they are as reliable as the sunshine and about as worthy of comment. But Australia has 65 wine regions to its name, very few regulations and a great many producers who are more interested in fine wine than fat profits. There is shade here as well as light.

That lush, green south-eastern corner – Victoria and Tasmania – is not the only place in Australia that makes fine wine, but it is the most obviously suitable. When I visited Mewstone Wines’ elegant tasting room on Tasmania’s south coast, facing Bruny Island and, beyond that, New Zealand’s Southern Island, I was blown away by the quality of Jonny Hughes’ chardonnays and pinot noirs and then, when the skies opened, I was almost actually blown away. Yet two days earlier, some 200km north along the coast, Freycinet Vineyard’s winemaker Claudio Radenti and I had puttered up a steep slope in his motorised buggy to look down – almost vertically – on to his riesling vineyards, the grapes swelling in brilliant sunlight.

‘We are the coldest wine region in Australia,’ says Jim Chatto, who produces gorgeous, raspberry-and-herb pinots near the Huon River, half an hour inland from Mewstone. He also makes wines in Burgundy, which has surprisingly similar average temperatures, and those aren’t fruit bombs, either. I could bang on – about the green lawns and rushing river you overlook from Derwent Estate Vineyard’s superb restaurant, or the flower gardens and lake that accompany another great meal at Josef Chromy, best known for its sparkling wines. Or I could shut up, cross the Bass Strait to the mainland, and show you the vineyards of Mornington Peninsula.

Here, south of Melbourne, the tree-lined roads are stippled with that lovely light, and the town names – Shoreham and Hastings and Rye – signal the homesickness that this green triangle provoked in people more used to looking out at the English Channel. Stroll through the kitchen gardens of Tedesca Osteria before its five-course tasting menu – and I strongly recommend both stroll and lunch – and you will see something that does not grace the fields of Sussex: the grassed-over rim of a volcanic crater.

The wineries are largely clustered on this fertile red soil and it is possible to float from the electric lemon chardonnay at Ocean Eight to the savoury spice of Wallis single-vineyard pinot noir at Ten Minutes by Tractor, with its wine bar and excellent restaurant, and on to a spectacular orange sunset over the vineyards on the terrace beyond Port Phillip Estate’s six vineyard-level suites beneath the winery. Upstairs, there are also wines to taste from sister estate Kooyong – a favourite of mine, with its peach and grapefruit Estate Chardonnay, and tannins linear as railway tracks beneath the dark fruit and orange peel in the single-vineyard Ferrous Pinot Noir.

These are all sophisticated wines hailing from a complex place. They taste of ancient soils and recent longings, of acclimatisation, adjustment, acceptance. Of Europe,
which provided the original vines, and the Antipodes, which nourished them. Of sunshine, of course, but also of shade.