If you take a vine from an Australian vineyard and plant it in California will the wine taste the same?

−D.D., Surry Hills, NSW

No, It’ll taste like a Californian wine because of terroir. Essentially, it means that a wine will taste of the place where the grapes were grown, reflecting the unique combination of geology, topography and climate that affects the growth of any plant in any given location.

Influencing factors include sunshine, temperature, rainfall, humidity, latitude and altitude, aspect, slope and soil fertility. And so a wine with “terroir” is a wine that has character specific to the place where it was grown.

Comparing Champagne with Australian sparkling wine is a vivid example. Australian makers of sparkling wine use the same grapevines, similar viticultural methods and identical winemaking techniques to those in Champagne, but the wines taste different. This applies whether the wine is produced in Tasmania’s Pipers River region, Victoria’s Yarra Valley or South Australia’s Adelaide Hills.

The question, “Why do California’s Napa Valley reds taste so distinctive?” has the same answer. It’s a very different place in terms of climate and soil (to name two factors) to any other winegrowing region. We shouldn’t expect its wines to taste like Coonawarra, Margaret River, Bordeaux or anywhere else.

New World winemakers are gradually accepting that they should be proud of the individuality of their wines and stop comparing them to the classics of the Old World. That is, we should stop comparing our chardonnays and pinot noirs with Burgundy, our cool-climate shirazes with the Northern Rhone, our rieslings with Alsace or the Rhine Valley and so on.

A famous American oenologist visiting Australia back in the 1970s – a time when cultural cringe was alive and well – was asked what he thought of Australian wines. His reply? Australia makes the best Australian wines in the world. We should, perhaps, be content with that.

Got a drinks question for Huon Hooke?
thefullbottle@goodweekend.com.au