Chateau Chunder: When Australian Wine Changed the World

A lot of people in this country pooh-pooh Australian table wines.

This is a pity, as many fine Australian wines appeal not only to the Australian palate

but also to the cognoscenti of Great Britain.

Blackstone Bordeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint-flavoured Burgundy.

Whilst a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world's best sugary wines.

GLUGS

Quite the reverse is true of Chateau Chunder

which is an Appellation Controlee

specially grown for those keen on regurgitation. BURPS

A fine wine which truly opens up the sluices at both ends.

This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is "Beware".

This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.

It's the biggest question in the history of wine.

The colour, the smell, the flavour. "What is this?"

How did an unfashionable backwater

with no track record...

Listen, they don't make wine in Australia.

And if they did, who'd buy it?

..in a notoriously elitist business...

You should have seen their noses wrinkled up!

..go from making Chateau Chunder...

With a wine like this...

..to become the toast of the international wine world?

..you could conquer the world.

This is a story of courage in the face of adversity...

They used to say, "Chateau Chunder from Down Under!"

..of opportunity knocking...

We knew we had fine wine. All we needed was the chance.

..of preaching to the not-yet converted.

We were trying to create a wine revolution.

We needed some heroes to work with.

And our hero was Australia.

Australian wine helped us go from this...

to this.

Australian wine blazed the trail,

changed the drinking habit of the British Isles.

I love Aussie wine, yeah. Love it.

This is not just the story of wine.

It's the story of us.

You just opened the bottle, swirled it round

and whoa! You were home!

Wine. Old World. Revered.

Infused with history

and mystery.

And somehow, inescapably French.

We know how to make in France some wines which are very sophisticated.

I would say it is the evolution of knowledge in agronomy.

The French have been making wine since the 6th century BC.

It is embedded in the fabric of their lives.

For us, it's more about lifestyle

and something that we live every day.

And it's not written in a book.

You just have to...

You can't learn it by reading it. You have to live it.

Crucial to French wine-making is the notion of "terroir".

Terroir is the connection of soils,

pathological and geological,

climates and the know-how or the talent of the winemaker.

Hmm. Complicated concept, terroir.

When Australians started making wine,

terroir took a back seat to more practical concerns.

My uncle Dan used to sit in the corner, in a rocking chair.

I remember him being in here one evening.

I was with him. I was seven, something like that. Six or seven.

He was a dead shot.

A bloke could be sitting here and this bloody rat ran along the rafter.

And he just went "Bang!" and the rat fell in the red fermenter.

I said, "Do you want me to get that out, Uncle Dan?"

He said, "No, it'll add a bit of body to the wine. The ferment will kill it."

For fourth generation Hunter Valley winemaker Bruce Tyrrell,

and his father, Murray, it wasn't just rats in the rafters

that made wine drinking somewhat unsavoury.

Back in the '50s and early '60s,

if you drank wine, you were queer, eccentric or both.

I had a girlfriend at university from a country town.

Her parents weren't sure I was a suitable person for her to be going out with

because I was a plonkie!

I got kicked out of the house

when I took some sparkling Burgundy to a lunch and not another drink.

Get outta here, you plonkie! And don't come back!

And she couldn't do the washing up. Her father was not pleased!

Like the Tyrrells, the Hill Smith family from South Australia

struggled through the 1930s and '40s to make a living in the wine business.

My father, Wyndham, was a bit of a cavalier,

raconteur, sportsman.

He carried with him the badge of being the first man in Australia

to face Larwood during the bodyline series.

He came back to a business that was in jeopardy with the banks.

And Dad set on a course of rescaping the way we did business, the wine we made.

But still, through all those years,

there wasn't growth in the game.

There were lots of fashion moments where things took off

and people tried to chase the rainbow, but nothing eventuated.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century,

Australian winemakers had one big problem.

No-one drank wine.

The real Aussie went to the pub for rounds of beer with his mates.

When you were in the pub, you had to buy your round.

If you left before you bought your round,

then you were a piker.

And if there were nine people in the drinking group,

that meant you had to drink nine beers.

The Aussies' love affair with the pub

led to years of strict licensing laws

and a unique drinking culture.

Hey, shut it, mate. We're closed.

'We've got six o'clock closing of hotels,

'we've got excessive restrictions on the drinking of alcohol in public places.'

And that really did sort of shape our drinking history, if you like, for the next 50 years.

And we were, really, very aware of the six o'clock swill.

And we were also aware of the five minutes past six

when everyone fell out the door of the pub,

mostly drunk and incapable.

Binge-drinking beer was standard practice,

even applauded.

As for wine, that was for the dregs of society.

There were wine saloons.

Wine saloons had a very unfashionable reputation.

They were largely home to the alcoholic,

the old, the elderly, the lonely.

With an almost non-existent market at home,

Australian winemakers looked for one overseas.

Britain was the obvious choice.

But here, wine was only for the well-off, the well-bred

or the continentals.

If you said wine, wine was one of those words that you had to have audible quotation marks round,

like, "Wine."

"Ooh, wine's not for the likes of us!"

Like you'd say round "Barbados".

People used to say that.

"Wine's not for the likes of us."

It wasn't part of normal life at all.

It was something very, very exotic.

People thought because they were the wrong class, they literally couldn't drink wine.

While wine drinking was rare in both Australia and Britain,

the difference was Australia had the climate to grow grapes.

They'd been making wine since the 1830s.

But most of it was high alcohol fortified wine,

like port and sherry.

'The perfumed sherries are wonderful wines.'

Especially for old ladies who can't sleep!

The high alcohol meant it travelled better than table wine

and much of it was exported to Britain.

For "medicinal" purposes.

-ADVERT:

-'A fine brandy after dinner

'is a delight for the epicure.

'While the same brandy is thoroughly known for its medicinal value everywhere.'

Ah, that's Penfold's!

I'm going to hand round a bottle of medicated wine.

This is when you could actually advertise that wine was good for you.

This is probably from the '20s or the '30s.

It's Penfold's. It's Australian.

It says, "This preparation to be used as medicine only.

"A glassful three times a day."

It is port enriched with beef extract and pure malt.

It says, "It is of considerable assistance

"to those called upon to undergo feats of endurance, vocal, mental or physical.

"Use regularly as directed and you MUST smile."

In the 1950s, less than half a per cent of the world's wine production

came from Australia.

But that was about to change

as boatloads of new immigrants began to arrive down under.

They brought with them new food and customs

and a taste for table wine.

They're not necessarily approaching wine

with a view to understanding vintages and vineyards and all those sort of things.

They just want a drink. But they're now eating foreign food.

They're eating pizza, they're eating spaghetti.

And so all that foreign influence

is associated with this other stuff, wine.

While immigrants were spreading the wine-drinking habit,

Australian society was growing more affluent.

More people owned cars

and they were beginning to travel.

We find people from all walks of life coming here for our wine.

And we find that younger people,

and there are increasing numbers of younger people coming each week.

For winemakers like Murray Tyrrell,

this meant for the first time they had more customers than they could handle.

'Of all the things my old man did, probably the most important one'

is he's probably the father of wine tourism in Australia.

How much do you know about the wines you're buying, or are you depending on the winemaker?

No, we're depending on the taste!

We reckon that Murray Tyrrell's got the game sewn up!

We're selling our total production here at our cellar doors

and we just can't meet demand.

To meet the growing demand,

Australian winemakers looked to the latest advances

in the science of winemaking.

They brought pressure tanks, they brought cool fermenting systems,

they brought cultured yeasts,

they brought knowledge about how to use sulphur dioxide to predict the wine and the juice.

Perhaps the most significant change for the whole industry was refrigeration.

So that in our hot summers, we could control the temperature of our ferments.

And so the quality of Australian wines in the '60s

just sky-rocketed.

On the back of its domestic success,

Australia set its sights on the major wine markets of Europe.

But in 1965,

international exports were still insignificant -

only eight million litres of wine a year,

about one-fiftieth of France's total.

Most people in Europe never saw an Australian wine.

They'd never tasted it. It was like anyone in Australia hearing about English wine.

It just wasn't there.

My father, who loved wine and drank good wine,

his sister emigrated to Australia one year, just after the war.

She would send us a case of Australian claret every year for Christmas.

It was labelled Australian claret.

My father wouldn't even drink it. He would say, "Just use it for cooking."

He didn't taste it. He just said, "It can't be any good."

Australian wine needed a champion.

An indefatigable soul to persuade the Europeans

that Australian wine was not a joke,

but a sleeping giant to mock at your peril.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please be seated where you will.

Len Evans was a man of many talents.

Golf professional.

Sculptor. And as head of the Australian wine bureau,

a passionate advocate for Australian wine.

I think this country has a chance of becoming a wine nation of note.

He genuinely believed that Australian wine had a world-beating future.

He used to say that from way back.

And I must say, I didn't believe him then.

To help him spread the word in London,

Len Evans inherited the Australian Wine Bureau's only overseas office.

But its location presented something of a challenge!

There used to be something called The Australian Wine Bureau

in the most unlikely place in Soho,

surrounded by sex shops,

that had a nice dusty collection of all the wines that were then characteristic of Australia.

And that was the sole destination for ex-pats or visitors

or curious drinkers to go to to buy Australian wine.

And to just be dealing with this almost hysterical bemusement

on people's faces was an endless toil!

Whether Len Evans liked it or not,

the British still saw Australian wine as a joke.

Malcolm insisted we brought some wine.

-How very kind of you.

-It's a new Australian label.

-Australian?

-Here's the white.

"Wombat White."

-And the red.

-"Kanga Rouge".

Malcolm bought them especially for you!

You know how he loves a really good wine.

Yes. Which is why he's given this rubbish to us!

We've always had a sort of love/hate relationship with Australians, as you know.

Particularly with sport.

So there was a certain amount of bashing Australians as being uncouth

and their wines were uncouth and so on.

"Couth" or not, there actually was a wine called Kanga Rouge!

When I arrived, they had the last bottlings of this vast volume of wine called Kanga Rouge.

I remember they had individual bottle labels.

Each of the bottles were numbered.

I range up the previous winemaker

and said, "I've been given the opportunity of buying bottle number one of Kanga Rouge.

"What do you think it's worth? 50? 100?"

And he said, "David, don't be so silly. We bottled 1,000 bottle number ones!"

That was the first I know of great marketing stories about the Australian wine industry!

While the marketing tricks and jokey names

created an image of a bottle best avoided,

the wine itself was a pleasant surprise.

I've got a bottle here of Kanga Rouge.

That was the wine that people now laugh at.

They've never tried it, the people who laughed at it.

I've tried it. I've drunk lots of this stuff.

See what that says? Coonawarra.

Shiraz.

1978. Not plonk. Not rubbish.

Top area of South Australia.

Top grape. Top year.

And down there, alcohol, 10.9.

And it tasted as rich and as juicy and as gorgeous as could be.

If people laugh about this, they don't know what they're talking about.

Facing the prejudice head on, Len Evans served Australian wine

to the Circle of Wine Writers in London.

I want you all to taste the sensation of this beautiful Australian wine.

Kevin's having more!

They responded with predictable disdain.

He then served the same wines blind at lunch.

This time to great acclaim.

Number two was...

That's what you call a great Australian wine!

The chastened wine writers immediately made him a member of their circle

and Len Evans' blind tasting games are still popular around the world today.

OK. You have a wine in front of you. First question. Is this Australian or not?

The so-called "options game"

is played with almost religious conviction

at the annual Len Evans' tutorial,

where young Australians learn the trade the Len Evans way.

Who says it is Australian?

You are the only one who's correct.

Cheers!

While Len Evans was having some success with London's wine writers,

throughout the 1970s, exports of Australian wine were actually declining.

By contrast, France's doubled.

Len Evans needed help.

And it came in the unexpected shape of a woman from Manchester.

There was a job advertised. "Australian Trade Commission seeks a business development manager."

It was advertised for a man,

which you couldn't do today,

but the Trade Commissioner at the time,

the Australian who was based there,

said, "I think we'll give you a go."

So I started work with the Australian government in Manchester.

An English person. Knew very little about, never been to Australia.

I was given a range of products

that I had to look after to help the exporters.

I worked with steaming coal, coking coal,

cardboard mousetraps, Oak boots.

And they asked me if I'd look after wine as well.

I had no background in wine, no knowledge about wine.

I didn't know anybody who drank wine at all.

When Hazel started out,

it's almost as though the industry was in such dire straights

that they had nothing to lose.

They used to say, "Chateau Chunder from Down Under."

So we were climbing a pretty big mountain.

It was like, "Let's let this crazy woman go out there and sell our wine for us."

She actually did that in the way of pouring it,

and getting the winemakers to pour it,

to tens of thousands of people.

In the first year we did it,

we probably did about 20,000 consumers at different events.

What was interesting was that in those days

the French, Spanish and Italians didn't pour wine for the public.

They didn't trust the public. The Australians did.

I remember I was at the London Wine Trade Fair

and I was doing a tasting of something, Beaujolais, or something like that.

And some bloody bloke knocked my elbow and I turned

and saw a really scruffy, unwashed kind of creature

in his khaki, and said, "Jack, can I have a word?"

I said, "I'm sorry. I'm busy. I'm doing a wine-tasting."

"Come on, give us a break, mate."

And he said, "What flavours do you like in your red wine?"

And I just thought, "I don't know." I remember saying to him,

"Oh, um, blackcurrant, something like that."

And he said, "What about white wine?"

I said, "I don't know. Peaches. Tropical fruit. That kind of stuff.

"Now, please, I'm really busy."

He said, "Hang on, mate. How much do you want to pay?"

I went,

"I don't... £3.99.

"And now, please, leave me alone."

A year later, I was at the London Wine Trade Fair again.

And there was a knock on my arm again!

And I turned round and thought, "Looks and smells vaguely familiar!"

And the bloke says, "Here, no, come on."

And he gave me a glass of red wine. He said, "Try this."

And I tasted it and went,

"Bloody hell, that tastes like blackcurrants!"

And he said, "Yeah, that's what you said you liked."

I said, "Jesus, how much is this?" He said, "£3.99. That's what you said you wanted to pay."

And he said, "I've got a white wine here."

I said, "Don't tell me - it'll taste of peaches."

He said, "That's what you said you liked."

I said, "£3.99?" He said, "That's what you said you wanted to pay."

It was a revelation.

The Australians made wine that we wanted. And they asked us what we liked.

That had never happened in the world of wine before.

While Australians were now making their wine according to British taste,

the names sounded distinctly European.

Burgundy,

Claret,

Moselle.

And Hermitage.

As Australia wine exports to Europe rose dramatically,

the Europeans retaliated by banning the Australian use of European names.

Australian winemakers turned adversity into advantage

by using the name of the grape variety instead.

So Australia had to introduce the concept of varietal labelling.

And that became very appealing to consumers

because they now suddenly realised what they were tasting.

A French wine, you always had to know a bit of geography and a bit of history

and also have a bit of luck to get a decent wine.

Australian wine just said person's name, the grape variety. So simple!

Like buying apples in a supermarket.

That was the door opener that Australia walked through.

JAUNTY TUNE

Now, Aussie winemakers called their wine Shiraz instead of Hermitage,

Cabernet instead of Claret,

and instead of White Burgundy,

it was Chardonnay.

Australia's love affair with Chardonnay had started back in 1970 in the Hunter Valley.

Murray Tyrrell discovered there were some Chardonnay vines next to his vineyard.

Dad always talked about those

when they used to come past coming home from school as kids in the buggy.

They'd always pull in and eat those grapes cos they were the ripest and the best flavour.

And in those days, it was called white Pineau, P-I-N-E-A-U.

The problem was, the so-called white Pineau belonged to Penfold's.

We asked Penfold's three times could we have cuttings. They said no.

Using some Aussie initiative,

Murray and Bruce set off on a midnight mission

that would change the course of Australian wine.

And after the third occasion, we snuck in one night and nicked 'em!

They weren't there at night when we did it.

And after we'd had 'em, it was a bit late!

And that's our Chardonnay as you know it today.

In Australia it got its start.

With Chardonnay the new weapon of choice,

Australia launched its invasion of the British wine market.

Alongside Tyrrells,

the invasion was spearheaded by Rosemount Estate,

also from the Hunter Valley.

It was a style of wine that the UK market hadn't seen.

It was rich, it was round, it tasted of fruit.

It was soft. It had a lot of things that were exciting.

It had flavour. I think that's what was probably the key to it.

I remember turning up at a big tasting in London that I think was at Lord's.

And the Great British wine trade was there, most of it men, wearing suits with the right kind of accents.

People used to drinking Burgundy all the time.

And they had Rosemount Chardonnay for the first time.

And it was like seeing people watching creatures from another planet!

The colour, the smell, the flavour, "What is this?"

It's a bit like seeing a naked woman for the first time!

Lovers of Australian Chardonnay

came up with a new catch-phrase for their wine.

"Sunshine in a bottle."

Suddenly, all those sort of Monty Python jokes about Australian wine

began to fall away.

The exciting new flavours of "sunshine in a bottle"

appealed to a society enjoying a social and sexual revolution.

I think it's true that Australian wine has contributed to the feminisation of wine.

I think it's because it arrived in Britain at a very particular historical moment.

The career woman was born in the '80s

with her padded shoulders and her Filofax.

Younger women with degrees, alone in big cities,

were going out, they needed something to do with friends.

Spit and sawdust pubs and pints of beer were not really what it was about.

I would say that wine-drinking was always a big girlie in Britain, anyway.

And by making wines less challenging and more fruit cocktaily,

it probably did make it easier for girlies to drink it.

-#

-Char-donnay

-#

-It's the upmarket drink of today

-#

Ever the master of sexual politics, Australia's cultural attache

added his own perspective on the career girl's favourite tipple.

-#

-It used to be double Tequilas

-#

-That could prize off the pants of those Sheilas

-#

-But now they won't have it away, no way

-#

-For less than a large Chardonnay!

-#

Despite the popularity of Chardonnay with the ladies,

the movers and shakers in the British wine business

were still mostly men.

Hazel Murphy had an idea.

Bring a group of them out to Australia

to see where "sunshine in a bottle" actually came from.

We arranged a trip for the aficionados of wine in the UK,

the most highly respected, who were, at the time,

not a very large group of masters of wine.

He's not trying to make a white Burgundy.

He's trying to make a damn good Australian Chardonnay.

The Pinot '73. That's got a hell of a lot of colour.

One of the masters of wine on the trip

was Bristol wine merchant John Avery.

You have to realise that on that trip in '85,

it represented about 70 to 80% of the entire buying power of the British wine trade.

In one hit!

In those days, we were nearly all men

and Rosemount arranged for a bottle of their Chardonnay to be posted

to all the wives, with a note saying. "Your husband will be drinking this wine in Australia.

-"Here's a bottle for you to taste."

-How wonderful!

That was a brilliant marketing stroke, cos everyone came back

and all the wives said, "This is a wonderful firm. You must deal with them."

'It was fun. They came here. They kicked up their heels.'

They took away the sense of fun that we all have in what we do.

There was always a serious tasting,

lots of questions, lots of answers, very open.

And then we'd go and have a glass of Cooper's Ale, you know?

You don't do that in France, I suspect.

They just took this whole thing back and said, "This is a new thing that we've discovered,

"that we didn't know existed. And it's exciting, it's new and it's fresh.

"And the people are nice!"

By the mid-1980s,

Britain was enjoying many influences

from the nice Antipodeans.

Australia was absolutely flavour of the month.

You had the whole Neighbours thing.

Neighbours was, for many years following,

an enormous influence on how people perceived Australia.

You had Fosters starting TV ads with Paul Hogan.

He'd done Crocodile Dundee

which was a huge hit.

This is just like the dances at home.

These things had just begun to make people see Australia in a different light.

Strewth! There's a lad down there with no strides on!

The Fosters ads were very English humour.

People realised the Aussie humour was very like the English humour.

The shared language, culture and humour

paved the way for the wine to be sold on the back of the lifestyle down under.

And who better to bottle the essence of Australiana

than a couple of Yorkshiremen?

We were sat talking about how we were going to basically

give the British public Oz in a glass.

We were able to come up with some ideas

which would really do a fantastic job

in communicating to a Brit with no knowledge

that there was something better out there.

Statements like "Putting the cat out"

actually set out exactly what the promise in the bottle was.

Aghhh!

And these posters put the theme of the cat and a quiet game of Bridge

versus jumping off the bridge with a bungee.

This whole Australian aspirational lifestyle.

And it really did capture the public's attention.

'Australians are very particular about how they pick their wines.

'And when they find a bottle they particularly like,

'they'll go to considerable lengths to get it.'

Yee-hah!

Consumers were engaged. They'd seen something they'd never seen before.

It really excited people who normally weren't into wine.

They were intimidated by it. They didn't understand it.

But here were these brands that actually spoke to them in a language they understood.

'And you're sitting in middle England

'in a miserable Midlands town

'with fog all round you and a rotten job and the rain pouring down.'

And you get a glass of that.

And you think of this somewhere, way south in the southern seas,

there's somewhere called Australia

making this kind of nectar!

Britain's increasing interest in food and drink

was reflected by the imaginatively named BBC show, Food & Drink

and its flamboyant hosts Oz Clark and Jilly Goolden.

Anyway, now, at last, on to something to drink!

These Australian wines...

'I realised there was absolutely no point in using'

traditional wine speak,

which was all about breeding and structure and balance and finesse.

Things that meant absolutely nothing

to the bloke at home, or his missus.

Then have a taste. See if they can carry through this medley of delicious succulent flavours.

So I decided to use my point of reference

of what thing smelt and tasted like

to describe a wine as a thumbnail sketch.

You've got the nectarines. You've got the lychees.

All these lovely things. But you've got a zip of acidity as well.

'I was the very first person in the world to do that.'

Now every back label, every restaurant wine list, picks it up.

Oz is the man to ask about this. He's just come from down under.

And I drank rather a lot!

Jilly and her equally enthusiastic side-kick were on a mission.

..a refreshing wine. Jilly, we had to plough through a lot of stuff which was fairly washed out...

'Jilly and I decided we were going to try and democratise the world of wine.'

It sounds a bit silly, but we thought we could make a difference.

We thought using wine we could make a difference, we could cut through class barriers.

Get ready to put your schnozzle right into the glass and snort!

Australia wine gave us the chance to say, "See this?

"That bloke, his name's Tyrrell. Mr Tyrrell made this.

"See that name, Chardonnay? Can you pronounce that? Chardonnay."

That is exactly what I want from an Australian white wine.

'Tens of millions of people were watching this week by week.'

I said, "One other thing. On the bottom there,

"Produce of Australia. Produce of Australia."

The Aussies don't let you down.

With Oz and Jilly fuelling the British thirst for their wines,

Aussie winemakers flocked to the European trade fairs.

Excellent Aussie wine!

I like that. But it's half the price of the other one!

Something's wrong somewhere!

Probably the biggest congregation of us was in London

when there was the first wine trade fair in Olympia.

And there was a big Aussie contingent.

And I remember just this - it was like a crusade.

Everyone who came in the door wanted to talk to the Australians. Cos it was fun!

I remember running around,

and you got to the Australian stands

and not only was there people three, four, deep,

pushing people out of the way to get a taste of these new Australian wines,

but you had these guys behind these stands pouring these wines

and doing things like putting red wine in ice buckets cos it was so hot!

Breaking all the rules.

I do remember looking at the regions of France and looking at their foot traffic.

And these poor souls were standing behind their trestle tables

with their glasses and a few bottles of wine and absolutely no-one to talk to!

It was a revelation. It was actually quite exciting.

I don't think the French have forgiven us yet. I don't think they ever will!

Australia's democratic revolution was dismissed in France

as merely a triumph of marketing.

Marketing is good for the car.

Mercedes need the marketing.

But not the wine!

Marketing was the great black-out that Australia had mastered

and the French didn't place any importance in marketing.

They thought the product would speak for itself.

They thought we were hoodwinking the world with our clever marketing.

The wine is for the food.

When you have a nice chicken,

at lunch, at dinner,

with the nice potatoes, you don't need the marketing.

It's a different mentality,

different idea of the wine,

and different idea about la culture du vin.

And nothing epitomised the difference in "la culture du vin"

more than the great Australian invention,

the wine cask,

also known as the bag in a box.

Or down under as "the goon bag".

Most people hide this stuff!

'Orlando Coolabah.'

This was a bag in a box with a little tap on it.

It revolutionised drinking habits in Australia.

It basically meant you could take four litres of wine, or whatever it was,

and you could drink it over a period of days or even weeks,

without it going stale.

Because as the bag collapsed, there was no head space in there,

no oxygen getting in there to oxidise the wine.

A lot of that wine wasn't what we would call the greatest wine in the world.

But it converted a lot of people to wine drinking.

It made wine an everyday item in Australian households.

Its value and convenience meant by the mid-'80s

wine casks accounted for half of the entire Australian market.

My parents drank a two-litre Yolanda cask as opposed to the four-litre because they were classier!

And goon bags continued to be an essential part of life

for many Australians.

I remember one party using an empty inflated goon bag as a pillow.

-Goon of fortune is where you...

-Goon of fortune!

It's where you... Oh, it's so classy!

You tie the goon bag to the washing line and spin the line round.

-And, uh...

-The wheel of fortune.

This is a true lifestyle.

There is a lifestyle for people who are very original,

very clever, enjoy the poesie.

And there is a lifestyle for people who have no taste.

As more and more people developed a taste for wine,

Australia's position in the world as a wine exporter

soared from 18th in the early '80s

to sixth, ten years later.

New wineries sprouted up all over the country

as wine exports to the UK increased 20-fold during the '90s

to 140 million litres.

But the ever-increasing production of wine

caused one major headache for Australian winemakers.

Corks!

They were on the phone to Spain and Portugal, where all corks come from,

saying, "We need more, more, more, more corks."

And the guys producing the corks simply could not process them.

They couldn't get them through the cleansing process

which takes a very long time.

And they were shipping off actually sub-standard corks.

And instead of getting on the first plane to Spain or Portugal and giving them a punch

and saying, "Give us better corks", they didn't. They say, "OK, you shafted us. We'll shaft you."

So Australia developed a better alternative to cork.

In fact, the Aussies had been testing an alternative for years.

It was called the Stelvin, or screw cap.

We've now been developing screw caps for over four decades.

I could pour for you today the 1971 Autumn Riesling

initially bottled under screw cap. 40 years of age.

A lovely hermetic seal, perfect!

The French looked on with horror

as another sacred cow was slaughtered.

With a screw top, what do you remember?

Nothing. You open. Dup, dup, dup.

Where is the dream?

Where is the legend?

Screw caps is probably the last Waterloo for the French.

Because from the beginning, we know we've got to lost.

The only thing you dream, you dream with a screw top, screw top more.

You dream. People buy more.

People remember, "I have a nice screw top. It's wonderful.

"I make one, two, three. Oh, it was fabulous."

-It is for the wine.

-Do you think it is good, that?

Because we don't have an image of sharing of the moment of opening

and the moment of the "Pop!"

This is a part of the magic as well.

Some French wineries embraced the innovative Australians

and even invited flying winemakers to France

to reveal some of the secrets of their success.

There were about 16 of us who went over

over those five to ten years in the early 1990s.

So what do we do? Nothing clever.

Nothing alchemist, nothing ridiculous space age.

It was about sanitation,

good, clean winemaking. We clean tanks.

Once I was inside the tank and I had the feeling I was being watched.

I stuck my head out and there were ten Frenchmen

wandering what the noise was inside the tank.

They'd never seen that before.

All the tanks were clean on the outside but dirty on the inside.

The English wine trade loved it.

They were advertising it as a French wine made by an Australian winemaker.

What a great turnaround for the Australian wine industry

that ten years earlier was making Chateau Chunder!

ANGRY VOICES

But not everyone in France was so welcoming of outside influences.

A militant group called CRAV,

the Committee for Viticultural Action,

attacked the foreign imports that threatened their local industry.

The CRAV is quite a nasty little group of people

who have taken activism to its ultimate

of setting fire to wineries and emptying tanks and breaking windows.

I think it's quite a brave supermarket in the south of France

in Beziers, or that region,

would put a bottle of Jacob's Creek on their shelves.

As viticultural extremists smashed up commercial wine imports,

a British writer appeared on a leading French TV show

armed with a bottle of Australia's finest.

'I was the only non-French guest.'

All the rest were very high up French men of wine.

We each had to bring a bottle of wine to serve to our fellow guests.

I'd just come back from Australia so I had a bottle of Grange.

'You should have seen their noses wrinkled up'

even before they'd got the nose to the glass.

I mean, oh, it was dismissed as a sort of "pharmacist's wine"!

'They were so patronising and really contemptuous,'

both towards me and towards the whole of Australian wine.

But Australia had the last laugh

when, in 1999, the hugely influential US magazine Wine Spectator

put Penfold's Grange on its front cover.

'The '55 Grange was on the front page'

as one of the 12 wines of the 20th century.

You know, that sort of acknowledgement,

retrospectively, decades later,

does as much for a wine as, say, a review of the current vintage.

Penfold's had been making Grange,

a high-end blended Shiraz,

since 1951,

long before the Chardonnay boom.

I have been able to taste back every two or three years back to '52 Grange.

And that has reaffirmed, time and time again,

the extraordinary capacity that Grange has

to age over a minimum of 20 years.

'I think Grange is a rock'n'roll wine.'

It's actually a wine that takes you and takes you on a journey

that other wines don't do.

By the mid-'90s, Britain's enthusiasm for Australian wine

was matched by the Americans.

And leading the chorus was the world's most influential wine writer,

the so-called "emperor" of wine, Robert Parker Jnr.

The people who are making good wines

do get recognised immediately, where 30 years ago,

the school of thought was they had to make good wine for 20 years before we give them any credit.

I think Robert Parker, to some extent, launched Australian wine into the US market

and made the Barossa famous.

Those big Barossa reds got 100 out of 100

and suddenly went from 10 to 200 a bottle.

What Hazel was doing, people were doing in the UK,

was saying that Australian wines were great and cheap and cheerful, that sort of thing.

Whereas Robert Parker said these wines aren't just good value for money,

this country makes some of the greatest wines in the world.

Parker's Wine Advocate magazine was seen as an independent voice

and a swathe of cash-rich young Americans had money to invest in fine wines.

On Parker's word, the Silicon Valley set from the dot.com boom bought up big.

Some Aussie wine producers became millionaires overnight.

Robert is so powerful so that once you get 100 points from Parker

you're put into a different league. For example,

Parker re-reviewed one of my wines several years ago

and upgraded it from 99 points to 100. You wouldn't think that would make any difference,

but the few cases of that wine that we had left basically sold out within seconds.

Robert Parker's enthusiasm for their wine

encouraged Australians to target the cheaper end of the lucrative US market too.

John Casella, son of Italian immigrants,

found the Americans keen to try his new easy-drinking brand Yellow Tail.

They saw Australia as the next big thing

and hence we were given shelf space, we were given opportunities.

Yellow Tail arrived at just the right time.

We didn't have to age it for years in barrels.

We didn't have to wait for a perfect vintage.

It was something that we could do continuously

and grow at an ever-increasing pace.

In the first year, their target was 25,000 cases.

They sold over a million!

Now the family winery looks like this.

Yellow Tail boasts storage capacity for 230 million litres of wine.

It produces 58,000 bottles an hour

on the fastest bottling line in the world.

Of all bottled products now leaving Australia,

20% bear the Yellow Tail logo.

We've brought a lot of people to Australian wine that would have normally not bought Australian wine.

So the effect has been positive rather than negative.

In 2001,

the year Yellow Tail launched in America,

Australian wine imports to Britain were up to 171 million litres,

just over half that of France.

Only two years later,

it was 243 million litres

and overtook a declining France

to become the number one wine importing country to the UK.

'An enormous amount of success, so much so

'there's a whole generation of English drinkers

'who have been brought up probably drinking nothing else other than Australian wine.'

Australian wine revolutionised the way that people in the UK and Ireland drank wine.

They blazed a trail and changed the drinking habits of the British Isles.

Take that, Monty Python! We won!

I love Aussie wine, yeah.

It's lovely.

Shanny-shanny-shanny! Oi! Oi! Oi!

While the Aussie winemakers celebrated their success,

the smell of money attracted outside admirers.

Large corporations salivated over the rapidly increasing sales figures

and targeted wineries with offers of big cash buy-outs.

During the '90s, there was this massive global intrigue

about wine, in wine,

wanting to invest in wine, wanting to acquire wineries.

And we had a lot of people making phone calls.

And I would always say,

"Look, don't bother. Just don't bother.

"I'll see you coming up the drive and I'll just shoot you."

For some family-owned wineries, history meant more than the bottom line.

You keep looking back and saying, "What are the runs on the scoreboard?

"What have we achieved? Is it measurable in dollars?"

Possibly not.

But by the start of the new millennium,

it was increasingly difficult to keep the fat cats out.

Soon, 80% of the country's wine production

was controlled by only four companies.

The breweries came in. Spirit producers came into the wine game.

They didn't understand the cycle.

They thought it was on a perpetual trend line

that went from west to east like that.

Even Rosemount, with its all-conquering Chardonnay,

couldn't hold out against the tide of corporate takeovers

as beer company Southcorp, now owned by Foster's, bought them out.

Rosemount is a very different business today from when it was a family company.

I think it reinforces the concept that wine companies are probably best run by families.

For breweries, beer is made to a weatherproof recipe.

So the new owners had little patience for the mysteries of time and climate.

The wine industry is a long-term thinking area

where you really need to be planning a long way ahead,

as far as planting vineyards, exploring regions,

trialling grape varieties.

So that is completely at odds with the short-term thinking of corporations

who are always thinking about returns for shareholders.

The big companies just do not get it.

They think they can rationalise, streamline,

make marketing and sales, distribution, those things, bound together, more effective.

And, in fact, they march rapidly in the opposite direction.

There is a point at which growth has to slow down.

Nobody can go on exponentially growing.

Australia got caught up in its own hype, if you like, and started believing its own bullshit.

And a lot of us at the time started saying, "Is it really going to keep going like this?

"Are you sure that common sense wouldn't dictate that it'll start slowing off?

"No? OK. Right. We'll just keep going, shall we? Fine."

And keep going they did.

The industry set a target of 4.5 billion turnover for 2025,

a target that was hit 20 years early.

That of itself should have sounded a note of warning.

It's an agricultural industry after all, at its base.

A combination of corporate control

and government tax breaks

meant that more and more vines were being planted each year.

And quality was beginning to suffer.

The world was flooded with sub-standard Australia wine.

When Australia started dumping cheap glut stuff on our market,

I just thought, "I can't believe this!"

You've worked so hard to say Australian wine always over delivers

and now you're breeding a new generation of people who are saying,

"We've moved on from Australian wine cos Australian wine under delivers."

Whoever was left drinking Australian wine,

was the wrong kind of ambassador.

Bridget Jones was partial to a bottle of Chardonnay...

-Or six.

-..by herself.

-In the Cafe Rouge, yes.

-By herself.

-With her friends.

And after that,

-it's...

-Especially after the film.

-It became a bit of a loser's choice.

-It was a bit naff.

-It was a bit sad.

It wasn't the greatest of looks.

It was the final nail in the coffin for Chardonnay.

Footballers' Wives was on at the same time.

And one of them was actually called Chardonnay.

"Chardonnay! Chardonnay!" That's what did it.

Whether Footballers' Wives or Bridget Jones were to blame,

Australian wine was facing a crisis.

What happened in this whole recent story

is that people, to a degree, got a little lackadaisical

and a little bit corporatised as people.

That wasn't the Australia that people were buying into.

All of us had had enough of Australia's industrial junk.

And so we set out to get the things that were great about Australia's wine

back in front of the world.

There's more great wine being made in this country today than ever in its history.

There's more interesting wine, more diversity of wine style.

Australian winemakers are now focused on reflecting the variety

that comes from a land with more wine regions than anywhere else.

We're looking more at regionality and individual vineyard site.

Those wines which are about that sense of place

rather than looking at how are we going to get the biggest crop

or how are we going to make the most wine.

So it's everything. You incorporate everything.

It's the land, it's the vines, it's the people.

It's the whole farm.

I suppose, in a way, it equates with the French word "terroir".

The land, the vines,

terroir.

The Aussies are starting to sound almost French!

And in the Rhone valley in southern France,

there's a French winemaker with a fondness for all things Australian.

You can't imagine how much I've learned in Australia.

Australia was in the 21st century when France was still in the 19th century.

As well as boasting one of the largest collections of Aboriginal art in the northern hemisphere,

Chapoutier has invested heavily in Australian vineyards.

I have seen some of the most beautiful soils in the world there.

I really think that today, a lot of French winemakers

are observing what's happened in Australia

and trying to take inspiration in this direction.

French and Australian winemakers are now philosophically closer than ever before.

And the new generation is helping close the gap yet further.

'The old generation in France, my parents' generation,

'were more, "If it's a good wine it will sell by itself", blah, blah, blah.

But also the thing that maybe my generation

are starting to think about, "Yes, we need marketing"

and of course when we see some kangaroo on the bottle,

we have to say, "OK, we have to do something like this."

And some French wines are doing exactly that.

The marketing is really well done

because you really understand what is the variety, what is the grape.

And there is also a touch of humour

because some French wines are really boring!

Ribet! Ribet! Ribet!

The first one we've got is quite unusual.

It's a sparkling wine from Australia.

It's actually from Tasmania

and it contains Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier,

the classic champagne grapes.

Australian wine has gone from Chateau Chunder

to "sunshine in a bottle" to the mystery of terroir

in a single generation.

The Australian wine is a little bit more expressive, a bit more intense.

It is from a sunnier place.

From Old World to New World,

from banquet hall to beach party,

whatever your taste - or lack of it -

the Aussies have taken us from laying down and avoiding their wine

to standing up and celebrating it.

Whenever I encounter Australian winemakers,

they're still on a quest, all desperately trying to make each vintage better than the last.

It's like the French would say their best wine was made 100 years ago.

You ask us, our best wine hasn't been made yet.

# Dimiat, Oremus, Johannisberg, Teinturier,

# Montonico and Zinfandel And Carignan and Malaga

# And Rolle Bombrio Bianco And Gloria Mortagua

# Centurion, Camaralet, Franconian, Picutener

# And Carmenere, Tersallier, Marzemino, Livatica

# And Bouvier and Monastrell and Travenger and Trollinger

# There's Muscadet, Viognier and Muscat Blanc a Petits Grains

# And also Maritetico with Estadio Cubillo

# And ruby Claret and Roussillon and Sauvignon

# And Riesling, Mischa, Malbec, Marzemino and Semillon

# These are amongst the ones

# Of which the news has come to Jancis

# There may be many others But I don't fancy their chances! #

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