UncleEbenezer wrote:Back in the '80s it was a case of what to avoid. German - sickly white. Italian - bland. French - pot luck: a far-too-high risk of something truly foul. They've all come a long way since then!
German winemakers were forced to raise their game in the early eighties, after a number of the big producers got caught tipping sugar into their Rieslings in an attempt to make them seem 'better' than they were. Still, that was better than the Austrians, who were poisoning their customers with antifreeze.
The drop in sales was so bad that the Germans started experimenting with Sauvignons and Pinot Blanc and suchlike dry wines, and a younger clientele started buying them. Although I do remember some really fantastic fruity Moselles from the old days, I'm a bit surprised that Rieslings still have as much of the market as they do.
I was working with a London import consultancy in the late 1980s, at about the time when Australian red wine was getting properly popular in the UK. The story went that the Oz producers had pulled a fast one on the French, by importing their techniques and knowledge without telling them that they were going to make the stuff in million litre stainless tanks, instead of the wooden vats as required by French law and time-honoured custom.
The point being that France considered the oak from the barrels themselves to be essential to the taste of the wine. No problem, said the Aussies, we'll just tip a load of oak timbers into the million litre tanks, and it'll work out just fine. Which they did, with some success. The French spluttered and protested, but once the antipodeans started winning world prizes they were forced to up their own game and stop being quite so old-fashioned and elitist. (For standard bottles, obviously. No changes in burgundy production just yet.
) Come to think of it, it's been a while since I've had a seriously bad bottle in France, except when buying at under five euros.
Out of interest, I just looked up the size of Australian wine tanks. It seems that three million litres is not unusual these days.
BJ