Australian Wine: Best Cost-benefit in the $10-$20 Range

By Nikki Berglund
Staff Writer

I have a love /hate relationship with Australian wine. In my younger and less well rounded days of wine drinking, my friends and I could be found drinking copious amounts of Yellow Tail. With its fruit forwardness and inexpensive price tag, its exotic sounding origin made us feel like we were drinking the fancy stuff.

Nowadays that sticky sweet fruitiness tastes more like an assault on my taste buds. Wines with fuzzy little creatures on the labels (“critter wines”), popular cheap Australian wines, have lost their cute factor, and the wines often found at this price point (usually around $6 on sale) just aren’t that good. I wonder if this is true for a lot of people. Have the cheap mass-produced Australian wines, oozing with in-your-face fruit, started to lose their appeal?

Getting the word out there: although an inexpensive Australian selection is often a better choice than a California selection around the same price, for just a few dollars more some pretty incredible Australian alternatives can be found. Some of my very favorite wines in the world are Australian Shirazes, with quality examples starting in the $10 price range. Recently I had the pleasure of expanding my own Australian wine horizons with a visit from Chris Rowe, the Central Sales Director for Old Bridge Wine Cellars, an importer of fine Australian wines. In town for a wine dinner at the Fargo Country Club, Chris brought with him a bunch of unbelievable wines, some new to our market and the fact that they all retail for under $20 made the experience and my acquisition of all of them for my store just that much sweeter.

Speaking of “critter wines,” one of the first offerings from Chris had a cute little iridescent fly on the label which immediately had me prejudging what was to come. After my first gulp, I was no longer scared of that pesky little guy. Shoofly Buzz Cut is an inexpensive white blend, which by the first couple of sips, had already found its way onto my list of summer wines I will be drinking on the patio. It was described to me as “the poor man’s Conundrum” in reference to the famous Caymus white blend which comes to you at around $20 while this one retails for more like $10. This wine is a great value and delicious to boot. It hails from Adelaide in Southern Australia, a cool climate wine region producing young crisp refreshing whites. A perfect appetizer wine, the Fargo CC featured it with the Amuse Bouche, a chevre Florentine phyllo turnover, the lightness of the pastry nicely complimenting the citrusy easy drinking Buzz Cut.

As long as we are talking “patio pounders,” another great white blend I tried and immediately loved was the d’Arenberg Viognier/Marsanne “Hermit Cab.” Established in 1912, d’Arenberg is considered one of the most important and well established wineries in Australia. Using wine making processes from the past, the winery strives to produce wines with unique characteristics often associated with wines produced in small batches. These wines are not meant to be mass produced but rather go by the standards of quality over quantity.

The d’Arenberg family has a reputation for creating wines that reflect the true essence of McLaren Vale, one of the most richly varied and highly developed wine areas in Australia. One I constantly recommend, not just for its very low price point but for the quality in the bottle is the Stump Jump Shiraz. This little bugger not only landed itself on the Wine Spectator Top 100 list for its 2008 vintage but also achieved a 90 point rating. With a $10.99 everyday price tag, I think this is currently one of the best values to be found around town. I also tasted and brought in an extraordinary Shiraz called “The Footbolt” after a race horse whose winning streak allowed for the original purchase of the winery back in the early 1900’s. This “rustic” hearty traditional style of red, retailing at $18.99, is just begging to be matched up with my next medium rare tenderloin.

Besides some great red and white selections, only a few of which I have the room to mention today, Chris also pulled out of his bag of tricks a couple of dessert style wines which will knock your socks off! The Innocent Bystander Pink Moscato, a sweet wine with a little bit of bubbles was served with a yummy strawberry tiramisu at the dinner, but could also just as easily have starred on its own. It comes in a 375ML bottle and retails for around $10 a bottle, which is really very reasonable when you are talking about dessert wines.

Also recently added to my ever expanding selection of dessert wines, is the Chambers NV(non vintage) Muscadelle. The dessert wines made here by the winery’s 6th generation winemaker, Stephen Chambers, are considered some of the greatest fortified wines in the world. This teensy paragraph will never even begin to do justice to the liquid crack in a glass that awaits you when you open a bottle of this deliciousness. Just know this, a quality dessert wine such as this one will change your life, or at least maybe your whole wine drinking philosophy. A tad bit more expensive at $17 for a 375ML bottle, I promise you it will not disappoint.

Lately I have been feeling like my Australian wine section could use a bit of a Spring spruce up, and Chris Rowe was just the man to do the sprucing. Also, the Fargo Country Club did an excellent job of showcasing some of the better selections available in Fargo from this importer. I love that all of these wines fall into the under $20 price range, hopefully gently nudging some of you to take that small step, out of the under $10 Australian wine category and into the wild and crazy world of quality Australian wine! Come on, you can do it , it is springtime after all—so live a little!

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