On the hunt for Australia’s bargain bottles

I was recently emailed by a reader who had read about Australia’s wine glut in the wake of the loss of its most important export market, China, thanks to a trade dispute. He wanted me to write about “the best way to get value out of this”.

Having tasted several handpicked selections of Australian wines in London — including wine writer Matthew Jukes’ 2023 100 Best Australian Wines and an assortment from The Wine Society — I’d be delighted to oblige. I should point out that while Australian wine may be effectively barred from China by sky-high tariffs, it is not currently that popular in its other important export markets, the UK and US, either. I audited a recent trade showing of 300 offerings from The Dirty Dozen, a collection of trend-conscious UK wine importers, and only eight were Australian, far fewer than from South Africa and California. A far cry from the glory days (2004, to be precise) when the UK’s imports of wine from Australia overtook those from France.

In the US, Australian wine still hasn’t recovered from the effect of the ubiquitous mass-market brand Yellow Tail, which means that few Americans associate Australia with fine wine. Jane Lopes and Jonathan Ross are trying hard to combat this via their import company Legend and their book How to Drink Australian. I met them as they passed through London on a book tour recently and sensed that, although Australians had warmly embraced an encomium to their favourite drink written by two Americans, Lopes and Ross (who both previously worked in Melbourne) were still finding it a struggle to make much headway in the US. Australian sections in most American wine stores are minimal and the US is still importing twice as much wine from relatively tiny New Zealand as from Australia.

The implication in the reader’s request for guidance is that the glut of Australian wine (the equivalent of far more than one entire harvest is in storage and in need of a buyer) must have resulted in huge price reductions and bargains aplenty. It’s certainly true that this is what happened in Bordeaux: wines from the region’s petits châteaux, the least famous ones, are arguably the world’s best-value wines at the moment due to the glut at the bottom end of the price spectrum.

But I’m not sure we’re seeing that many distressed parcels of Australian wine in the UK. Even at the tasting put on by The Wine Society, the UK’s least rapacious wine retailer, I marked only nine of the 33 wines I tasted as good value, a considerably lower proportion of bargains than I found at their recent general tasting for wine writers.

But I reckoned one of The Society’s Australian bargains was not just good but very good value. D’Arenberg of McLaren Vale has long over-delivered on interest and value, and its Money Spider Roussanne 2021 stood out as exceptionally subtle for £13.95. (Yangarra’s organic version of the same white Rhône grape and vintage, selected by Jukes, was also very good, but costs £34.) Also at £13.95 from The Society was d’Arenberg’s d’Arry’s Original Grenache Shiraz 2020, which was another good buy.

The wine glut is especially marked in the interior of Australia’s wine country, in the mechanised, heavily irrigated vineyards of the Riverland which depend on the River Murray for their existence. You would expect some real bargains to be found there, but even The Wine Society’s one wine from the Riverland, Vanguardist’s La Petite Vanguard Corsair 2021, a juicy blend of Portuguese grape varieties, is £15.50, which is not a bargain-basement price. It is, though, a good wine. Perhaps better value from the Riverland is one of the cheapest wines in Jukes’ selection, the zesty white Berton Vineyard Winemakers Reserve Vermentino 2022 at £11.97.

I marked another six of the 49 wines I was able to taste in Jukes’ selection as good value (though none very good value). They were all red, with prices ranging from £8.45 for a really convincing Listening Station Malbec 2022 from Victoria to £19.49 for Langmeil’s Three Gardens 2021 Rhône blend from Barossa Valley.

I suppose seven out of 49, or 14 per cent, is a creditable proportion of bargains, given Jukes’ annual choice has to be restricted to the 100 best Australian wines available in the UK, and he clearly tries to range over price points, colours and styles.

My good-value picks at The Wine Society’s tasting were in more or less the same price bracket as at the Jukes tasting but included two Chardonnays, the wine that arguably put Australia on the international wine map in the Bridget Jones era of the 1990s, before oakiness was a sin. There was not a trace of obvious oakiness on these two. Wirra Wirra’s Scrubby Rise 2022 Adelaide Hills Chardonnay is made of largely (80 per cent) unoaked offcuts from the blend for their more expensive 12th Man bottling and is great value at £9.95.

The other good-value Chardonnay at The Wine Society tasting was £11.25, it is currently sold out there but is available elsewhere from £12.15. It comes from Tyrrell’s, the Hunter Valley wine producer that is, along with Penfolds and Yalumba, one of only three producers to have featured in Jukes’ top 100 throughout its 20-year history. It’s a bit fruitier than the other two, not exactly complex but extremely easy to like.

So Australian bargains can be found but, to judge from Jukes’ selection at least, it’s much easier to find Australian wines retailing at over £60 a bottle than at under £20.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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