Farmers in these Southern Highlands grazed sheep and cattle and grew tulips until a few years ago, when they decided to bottle their future in white, red and even rose.
The wine bug has bitten farmers, urban dropouts, yuppies, retirees and young adventurers, all of whom are rushing to catch the rollicking bandwagon of Australian winemaking. Somewhere in the Antipodes a new winery opens almost every day, while another shuts down somewhere else.
The variety of so-called “boutique wines” coming out of one of the 1,465 Australian wineries is astonishing, given that many of the one-owner enterprises have no more than a couple of fermenting vats and small vineyards with fledgling vines.
Many of these pioneers learned to ferment grapes from borrowed textbooks or from cyberspace. They tossed their concoctions into a highly competitive arena that contains an amazing variety of labels for a nation of just 19 million people.
There is no shortage of tall tales about freshmen winemakers who stumbled onto prize-winning international concoctions or of novices who lost their crop because they went on vacation and came back and found the grapes withered.
Winemaking has turned into a fad. Owning a vineyard Down Under today is as prestigious as owning a racehorse. This phenomenon occurred in a country notorious for its beer-swilling prowess and its populist credo that wine drinkers are either snobs or perverts.
Australian pubs still cater mainly to beer drinkers, but most have a stock of wines. Wine shops are attached to bars, the ones on which real men still support their elbows and settle arguments with fists, not six-shooters. Many of these pubs still have “ladies lounges,” though pubs no longer can require women to stay there.
Sutton Forest, just over 100 miles south of Sydney, is Australia’s newest, much-talked-about winemaking region.
In these hills famous for colonial stone houses and chilly nights, vineyards have mushroomed, bringing huge storage sheds and laboratories where the wizards of the blend conjure the right aroma and flavor.
Many of these new winemakers are like Lucky Gattellari, who candidly admits: “I have huge ambitions but a small bank account.”
Gattellari, 53, could serve as a prime example of the Australian entrepreneur. This is a species that often goes from dizzy success to abject failure, from millionaire status to bankruptcy. Banks and friends are tapped for loans. Some are repaid, some are not.
In his many previous reincarnations, Gattellari was the Australian featherweight boxing champion, a used-car salesman, a racehorse owner, a restaurant owner, a builder and a caterer before he saw his future beckon in the form of a wine bottle.
Gattellari and his brother Frank bought Eling Forest Winery just over a year ago. They have converted the back-yard winemaking hobby of an elderly Hungarian immigrant with a nostalgia for his native Tokai wine into a booming winery with a wine bar for public tasting, a luxury guest house and an Italian restaurant whose cuisine has already been judged among the best outside Sydney.
“When I arrived, the winery crushed 15 tons, but by the end of next year we will be crushing 145 tons with new equipment,” said the entrepreneur who has already convinced six of his neighbors to sell him their grapes. He will market them under the Eling label.
Gattellari and his brother also hired Michelle Crockett, 39, the local winemaker who was still in the third of her six-year off-campus viniculture course at Charles Sturt University at Wagga-Wagga, a five-hour drive down the Hume Highway toward Melbourne.
Crockett seems to have the Midas touch. In her first year she produced a sauvignon blanc that won the gold medal for the best new white wine at the Canberra Wine Show this year. The legend of Eling Forest was born.
Crockett also “stumbled” onto a very presentable rose when she picked the shiraz (called syrah in France) early when heavy rain was forecast.
“Because the grapes were still a little green, I wasn’t confident they would measure up as a good dry red,” Crockett says, “so I made a rose out of it.” It was supposed to be a one-time experiment, “but people now like it so much I’m making it part of our portfolio.”
Crockett travels to Europe every year to study the winemaking trade.
“In Australia we are still learning,” she said. “We don’t have 200 years of experience that tells us this or that piece of land is the best area for this or that kind of grape. We are still pioneers because we don’t know what a region can produce yet.”
Contrary to folklore, Australia’s first white settlers did bring some vines with them more than 200 years ago. By the turn of the 20th Century exports to the United Kingdom were just 1 million gallons. By the end of World War II wine exports had grown to 26 million gallons, mainly from the Lower Murray River area and South Australia’s Barossa- Valley.
The wine boom came with the wave of European immigrants after World War II. In the 1970s Australian wines won a series of international awards and became the flavor of the year. By 1998 Australia was exporting 250 million gallons of wine. Over the last three years alone, the number of wineries–those that didn’t go broke–rose to 1,465 from 1,104.
Australian winemakers believe their wines have become attractive overseas because they are well-priced, clean and fruitier, a result of plentiful Australian sun, easily controlled drip irrigation and large-scale mechanization.
“But I guess part of the success of our wine industry is that people abroad consider Australia a good place to live, with an outgoing nature,” Crockett said.
“That attracts them. So they say: ‘I’ll buy one of these Australian wines.’ “
