Vintage career, good to the last drop

The world of wine my son has entered is dramatically different to the world I was writing about in my early columns.

Wine styles that were popular in the late 1990s have fallen, or are falling, out of favour.

I began writing a weekly wine column for this newspaper in 1997. A year later my son was born. Last week he started his first job, working in a bottle shop. I know, I know: like father, like son; how time flies; all the cliches.

The world of wine my son has just entered is dramatically different to the world I was writing about in my early columns. For a start, there is so much more choice on the shelves now.

In 1997 there were about 900 wine producers in Australia; now there are more than 2500. The imported wine market is seven times bigger and is worth 10 times what it was in 1997. Australia’s vineyard area has doubled in that time. So has the number of grape varieties grown in those vineyards. Hardly anyone was producing pinot grigio in this country in 1997; it’s now Australia’s fourth most widely planted grape.

Wine styles that now are popular (prosecco, pale dry rose) or achingly trendy (organic skin-contact whites, biodynamic whole-bunch reds) were unheard of back then or incredibly niche. Wine styles that were popular in the late 90s (fat, buttery, golden chardonnays; overripe, over-oaked, over-alcoholic shiraz) have fallen, or are falling, out of favour. And when I started writing for this newspaper, you could still buy flagons of Barossa moselle, bottles of spatlese claret and Australian wines labelled champagne, for god’s sake — hangovers from a much more naive time.

The way we communicate with each other about wine has changed radically. According to the 1997 Wine Industry Directory only 63 of Australia’s 900 or so wineries had email addresses and only 46 had websites. To people like me, who still remember the excitement of ordering wine online for the first time — via their gleaming new dial-up modem — this doesn’t seem that long ago. To people of my son’s generation it must feel like ancient history.

As must the fact, in 1997, all Australian wines were stoppered with cork, not the screwcaps we now take for granted. This, too, is a radical change: I asked for a wine by the glass in a bar the other day and ended up having to open the cork-sealed bottle myself because the young waiter didn’t know how to use a corkscrew. True story.

There’s another reason I’m being so reflective. You see, this is my last weekly column. After 19 years in these pages, it’s time to move on.

During the past two decades I’ve been fortunate to witness first-hand — and report on — Australia’s changing wine culture. At the risk of big-noting myself, I like to think I have perhaps influenced some of that change through this column: by encouraging drinkers to embrace diversity and try wines made by emerging producers from new and unusual grape varieties grown in lesser-known regions; by poking fun at the bullshit and marketing spin, and exposing some of the industry’s downright dodgy practices; and by promoting producers adapting to the changing climate and adopting sensible, sustainable winegrowing techniques in vineyard and cellar.

I’ll be back next week with a special festive feature on champagne and sparkling wine — but after that, it’s farewell.

It has been a lot of fun. Especially when readers have engaged with what I’ve written, by sending in a nice handwritten letter in the old days, or making a comment online these days. Whether complimentary or critical, it has always added to the conversation.

And I feel like I’m leaving on a high note: there really has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian wine drinker — or, for that matter, a young man starting work in a bottle shop.