Western Australia: A Different Style of Shiraz
Shiraz (aka Syrah) is now firmly in place as Australia’s most popular grape–and wine. But it wasn’t always that way. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, plantings of Shiraz went down by half (to about 12,500 acres) because the Australian government paid growers to pull out vines as consumption of red table wine fell from fashion. However, during the following 20 years, Shiraz plantings rebounded remarkably, soaring to 100,000 acres and, by 2004, accounting for a whopping 25% of all Australian vines.
According to Bill Hardy, grandson of Eileen Hardy and group enologist for the Hardy Wine Company, James Busby, the father of the Australian wine industry, went to Europe to select vines for an excellent reason: there simply was no such thing as an indigenous vine in Australia. In 1831, he arrived in northern Rhône town of Tain-l’Hermitage, where he found that the best wines were made from Syrah–and not uncommonly shipped to Bordeaux to enrich their more famous but comparatively anemic cousins. (Thus the Australians were not the first to blend Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon, though they are probably the first to label the resulting blends explicitly). Busby returned to Australia with Syrah vines and the rest, as they say, is history.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under wines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
