good in their own right, but not even close
I think the best Australian sparkling wines are good in their own right, and also stack up well against French sparklers in similar price brackets. They are a different flavour experience. This is as it should be, given that wines are the product of a complex set of interactions – from grape varieties to climate, to soils and water, to wine production methods.
Over the last twenty or thirty years, Australian sparkling wine production has come on in leaps and bounds in terms of quality. In that time, there has been a lot of benchmarking and sharing of knowledge with French wine makers, along with the formation of business partnerships that have enabled the entry of Australian wines into the European marketplace. I think the French influence has been for the better, and has contributed to the improvement in Australian sparkling wine making.
Naturally, there’s quite a bit of variation across the Australian sparkling wines produced. For a start, there are hundreds of wineries making sparklers, across pretty well all the wine regions. That takes in a lot of different climates, and a lot of soil variation. In general, I’d say the best Australian sparklers come from the coolest regions, where conditions enable the grapes to be ripened slowly and picked when the acidity is high and the sugar levels are lower. Think Tasmania, Macedon Ranges or Yarra Valley.
Another variant in the Australian sparkling winemaking scene is the range of grape varieties used. Whilst the French are very strict about which varieties can be used where, and champagne is produced strictly from chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meuniere, Australian sparkling winemakers have greater liberty to use what they will.
A correspondent (from the US) recently remarked that Australian wine makers will make sparkling wine out of anything. To an extent, that’s right. Plenty of Australian sparklers use the classic ‘champagne’ combination; plenty use chardonnay and pinot noir, forget the pinot meuniere; others go for chardonnay only, or pinot noir only. Then, you get other alternatives – I’ve drunk domestic sparklers made out of Riesling, Grenache, Muscat of Alexandria, pedro ximinez … the list goes on. (And that’s without venturing into the field of red sparkling wine.)
The other variant is that Australia is making sparkling wine across all price brackets. The cheap end of the market uses the charmat (tank fermented) method. A while ago, I was interested to read a comment somewhere from the chief sparkling wine maker at Hardy’s, to the effect that they like the charmat method for commercial wines because it delivers bright fruit characters with less yeast contact. He seemed to be talking up the one-dimensional, sweeter, fruit-driven flavours as a market virtue. Well, I suppose it is: the cheaper end of the market probably is looking for unchallenging fizz. There’s a market for it, and I have no problem with that. (Just don’t offer it to me.)
In a nutshell, I’d say the best of Australian sparkling wine compares very favourably with sparkling wines of similar price bracket from France. There are plenty of Australian sparkling wines at all price points, and you get what you pay for - the range of quality available muddies the waters a bit when we're making comparisons. I just hope and pray that Australia is sending your wine shops some of the good stuff along with the barbecue brews!
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