I love wine. Not just drinking it with good food, but reading and writing about it, sharing it with friends. I’ve loved good wine for decades, and the challenge of finding wines that stand out from the ordinary. Wines that we ordinary mortals can afford. And meeting the extraordinary people who make them.

It’s over fifty years ago that I discovered the joys wine can bring into your life. I’ve loved good food since I was 6 years old. For my birthday I’d ask for cheese and salami. No kidding. My parents shook their heads and mumbled words about a budding gourmet.

When I reached drinking age, I contracted hepatitis A and alcohol was off the menu for several years. My father used to buy some wine for Christmas, cheap and not very cheerful German wine like Zeller Schwarze Katz, one rung below Liebfraumilch. We weren’t exactlyI remember clearly when I discovered the joys of wine: I was at a trade show in Canberra, held in the old Hotel Canberra. On the last day I treated myself to lunch in the sun-flooded dining room on a cold winter’s day. I ordered a chicken dish and asked the waiter if there was a half bottle of wine that would go with the chicken.

He suggested an Orlando Riesling that was a revelation, and taught me a lesson in matching wine and food.

The sixties had seen big changes in the wine business down under. The popularity of Sherry waned, and so did that of cheap bubblies like Barossa Pearl and Mardi Gras. Table wine began to grace lunch and dinner tables, and soon outstripped supply. Chateaux Cardboard made it easy, affordable and ubiquitous.

A bottle of Grange cost $2.40, same as St Henri. Mildara’s Coonawarra Cabernet was up there with those two, and the most expensive wine was Seppelt’s Great Western Champagne. Yes, this was years before the Europeans objected to us using their place names.

The Big Bang

The 1960s saw new vineyards planted at breakneck speeds, from the Hunter to the Barossa. New areas were opened up for grape vines: The Upper Hunter, Margaret River, the Great Southern, the Limestone coast, then called Padthaway or Keppoch, and even Tasmania which was said to be too cold. Old areas that had ceased making wine long ago, were reborn: Mudgee, the Yarra Valley, Geelong, Bendigo

New stars were born and shone brightly – Vasse Felix and Cullens, Rothbury and Rosemount, Mount Mary and Seville Estate, Brand’s Laira and Piper’s Brook Grape growers in South Australia grew into wineries. The Berry co-operative grew into the wine giant of the Riverina.

New varieties were planted, such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. We saw the promise of Aussie Burgundies at a fraction of the cost. New Zealand saw the same drastic changes. Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough became the new wave that ended up conquering the world.

There were many setbacks, of course, once the dust had settled. Many new ventures failed to deliver on starry-eyed expectations, others had simply grown too fast. Big Business joined the heady gold rush and bought wineries, many with hallowed names and histories going back well over a century.

Barbarians at the Gate

The corporate raiders, as they became known, swept across the wine landscape like the Huns had swept across Europe centuries before. They didn’t understand that wine was different from iron ore or pork bellies. Their victims soon filled up the graveyards like so many old cars that had rusted into the ground they stood on.

Lindemans, Orlando, Mildara, Minchinbury, Saltram, Seaview and Stanley Leasingham are a few that come to mind.

The red wine glut hit the industry hard in the eighties. The writing had been on the wall for years but no one had taken notice. Shiraz muffins didn’t soak up the excess, so governments paid wineries to pull out vines.

What did they do? Being farmers first and foremost, most pulled out the oldest, least productive wines. The ones that produced the exceptional fruit.

During the nineties, I focused on caring for my wife Benita who suffered from a terminal illness, and wine took a back seat. When I came back to it in the new millennium, that world had changed. Prices for the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy were reaching for the stratosphere, driven up by American brain surgeons and newly minted Chinese billionaires.

Down under, wineries were creating prestige labels and demanding small fortunes for them. They grew the export market with vins ordinaires from the bottom end of their production, and sold them as ‘sunshine in a bottle.’ The export market boomed but our wineries lost money on every bottle they sold. 

In 2001, at the height of the export boom, Southcorp paid Bob Oatley the princely sum of $1.5 billion for Rosemount Estates and became the world’s largest premium brand winemaker. A couple of years later, BRL Hardy merged with Constellation Brands to create the world’s largest international wine business.

The new world was ruled by faceless people in shiny suits who knew nothing about wine and had no respect for tradition. Constellation Wines Australia sold the original .8 acre vineyard planted to Cabernet Sauvignon by John Reynell in 1838 to Pioneer Homes, which built 41 high-density homes on it. All they kept was the shingle.

New World

I didn’t like the new world of wine, and the new generation of pretentious punters and wine writers that came with it. Suddenly sommeliers strutted like peacocks at precious new restaurants that charged small fortunes for smaller servings. They were needed, I soon realized, because the diners at these places knew nothing about wine or food. They just wanted to impress the people they were with.

I opted out of the whole scene, except for dinners with the front bench as we called the motley lot of true wine lovers that had gathered at Peter Bourne’s Wine Emporium since the late 1970s. Peter decided to move to Orange but the dinners continued at a nw venue at Pyrmont.

I didn’t like many of the wines either, not just because their prices were inflated but because their alcohol levels had gone through the roof with them. Grange and St Henri were 12.5 to 13% when I made their acquaintance; now they were 14.5. Others went to 15 and more. The biggest, ripest, plushest reds won all the trophies in those days, with the judges falling for their ever-so-obvious charms.

The same story played out in France, where more and more winemakers in Bordeaux picked their grapes later and cranked up the alcohols because Robert Parker loved big, ripe, plush reds.

My new partner Tracey lived in Cremorne, on Sydney’s lower north shore, with a Vintage Cellars an easy walk away, and we tried some of their $7 blackboard specials. I kept looking for affordable bargains, and became pretty good at finding them. I still had a lot of wines from the good old days left in my cellar, which were ready to drink, and we’d share a couple of those with friends most weekends.

Lift-Off

One day over a long lunch with good wine friends, one of them was so impressed with my latest find that he floated the idea of setting up Best Wines Under $20. I had no trouble seeing a ready market of wine lovers who’d be happy to pay for good advice that raised their drinking pleasure while reducing its cost.

I ended up with a couple of thousand rusted on subscribers who keep telling me that I’m the only wine scribe they trust, which is gratifying. The downside is that I buy many of the wines I taste, because many wineries want nothing to do with a wine site that’s focused on bargains under $20.

I’ve lost track of the number of winemakers I meet who tell me they don’t make wines that cost less than $20, and I have to tell them how wrong they are and remind them of their lower-level labels. Some seem stunned and then dart off to talk to someone else, while the smarter ones sign up to my weekly mailer so they can stay in touch with the real world they lost touch with.

Other wineries, distributors and merchants have been happy to support what we’re doing. Yalumba is one winery I have enormous admiration for. Intelligent, forward-looking, pioneering. Kumeu River is another, run by the Brajkovich family. Neither one has nothing to gain from talking to me but always responds with enthusiasm. Jim Barry, Rosily, Richard Hamilton / Leconfield and the Usual Suspects Collective (formerly Hesketh) are others.

A few independent wine merchants have survived and thrived in a world dominated by Woolworths, Coles and ALDI. Kemenys in Sydney continues to support us, despite reviews that CEO David Reberger has described as ‘brutal’.

Winedirect in Adelaide is an outfit I admire just as much. They continue to send us samples despite the harsh words I’ve written about some of them. MyCellars in Adelaide has also been really supportive, offering free freight to our subscribers.

All Things Nice, Never Mind the Price

Harsh words are rarely spoken in this industry; more often whispered. All the wine scribes are ever so polite, at least in print. You don’t bite the hands that feed you. The exception was Philip White who had a huge scare with cancer a few years ago, and is hanging in there against the odds, but no longer smithing words for his Drinkster site. I miss his words and his wit.

I think it was Len Evans who said good wine writers should make their readers want to rush out and buy the wine they’re reviewing. Len lived in some vinous cloud cuckoo land, mostly writing about wines that cost hundreds or thousands, or wines that were simply not procurable. Halliday follows his advice to the letter.

I never saw my job that way – I thought it was to tell subscribers what wines not to waste their money on: bottles decorated with medals and poetic descriptions on back labels, tricked up wines with artificial charms, or ‘industrial autoplonk’ as Philip White describes it. The big guys have become really good at making deceptive wines of this style.

Most wine writers describe the wines they review in great detail, and what they come up with often has me rubbing my eyes, twitching my nose and shaking my head. They must resort to the aroma wheel to find the fancy words they use, and who is going to argue with them? The punter who shells out hard-earned dollars for the wine, and then wonders why he can’t see what the reviewer raved about.