My review copy of Max's new book arrived just before I headed off to Tuscany, so I have only just started to read it. However rushing to judgment on the first 30 pages I think it is Max's best work so far. Its publication is timely as Australia suffers from a lethal blend of drought, over-confidence and mistakes by the large companies that dominate the Australian wine industry.
Max starts by looking at the effects of climate change in Australia and asks how can the industry best adapt.
'I visited Yalumba's huge, 265-hectare Oxford Landing vineyard an hour or so\s drive from Tony Barich's place, at the height of the vintage. It looked like most other large-scale Riverland vineyards: machine harvesters rumbled down vine rows that seemed to stretch away to the horizon. But Oxford Landing's young vineyard manager, Fred Strachan, showed me how he's changing the way he grows his grapes: using much less water, fewer chemicals, chasing lower crops of more intensely flavoured grapes.
The he drove through the fence into the neighbouring property, a big bare, red-sandy paddock. The plan, he said, is to put a new vineyard in here, plant obscure new alternative grapes and start from stratch using no chemical herbicide or fertiliser. Just organic methods. Maybe even biodynamics. And you could see the excitement in his eyes, hear it in his voice. The excitement that a Big Australian Wine Company like Yalumba should be investing in all this hippy shit. Who would have thought?
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Let me drag this back into perspective. The Australian wine industry is not, en masse, embracing organics, ripping out its chardonnay to plant drought-tolerant alternative grape varieties or searching for a unique taste of place in its wild yeast-fermented pinot noir. There are plenty head-in-sand winemakers, still plenty of corporate wine business accountants, still plenty of profit-driven grape growers all clinging desperately to business as usual.
But as climate change bites, and as the effects of the financial meltdown continue to ripple through both domestic and export markets, an increasing number of growers and winemakers have realised that business as usual simply isn't going to cut it any more. More and more people – including, crucially, people in the largest wine companies as well as the smallest – are thinking very deeply about true sustainability; thinking about adapting to and hopefully mitigating the effects of climate change; thinking about growing grape varieties and making wine that better express their unique patch of country. There are people trying to find a way out of the fine mess that the Australian wine industry has got itself over the last 15 years. These are the people building a new sense of pride in Australian wine.'
Max Allen: the future makers – Australian wines for the 21st century, hardie grant books, £30, 439 pages, hbk
