DAN’S WINE BLOG- BIRTHDAY BLOG

2024-05-31

WOO-HOO I made it!!I have reached 3 score and 10 years.

I never thought I would last this long, especially not during the 1970’s & early 1980’s- my rally days, when my mates at the North Shore Sporting Club www.nsscc.com.au christened me “Sir Crash-a-lot” as I kept parking my various different rally cars into the scenery with monotonous regularity, yet I did manage to win one small rally.

Starting out as a “bean counter” I joined the wine industry some 37 years ago and I’ve had an amazing ride. In a nutshell, I have done pretty much everything there is to do in wine other than to actually make the stuff. I’ve marketed, sold and exported wine, managed a medium sized winery, managed a large Riverland vineyard, ran my own consultancy business for neigh on 20 years, helped re-commission a 20,000-tonne winery, conducted wine education sessions and judged wine both here and overseas as well as spending more than a decade as a freelance wine writer. Quite a ride!!

Along the way I met some absolutely fabulous people from across the wine world, made some life-long friends and only had to deal with a few dickheads and a couple of crooks.

The changes in the industry during my tenure have been as dramatic as they have been in society in general. When I joined the industry Australia probably had around 200-300 wineries, a handful of bigger ones that were distributed nationally and a smattering of small local boutique producers. Today we have around 2,450 wineries and one can pretty much source wines from any of them from the comfort of one’s lounge room.

In those days, red wines came mainly in flat bottomed brown bottles and labels were simplistic. Wolf Blass, Mildara, Lindemans, Seppelts, Penfolds etc were all separate wine companies before being swallowed up by big corporates. Wines were labelled as White Burgundy, Chablis, Rhine Riesling, Claret, Burgundy or Hermitage. Semillon was called “Hunter Riesling” and almost all the wine produced was consumed domestically.

We’ve come a bloody long way, today, our wines are mainly varietally labelled, we now export much more wine than what we consume (roughly 70/30), we have gone from making wine out of around 30 grape varieties to out of 155 (at last count), we led the screwcap revolution (thanks Clare Valley winemakers) and just about every month I hear of another new winery opening up.

So whilst there is much doom & gloom about wine at the moment, remember how far we have come over the last few decades. I am convinced that with the right attitude, our amazing degree of ingenuity and co-operation, the Australian wine industry can survive current challenges and will thrive into the future.

Just like today it is vastly different to 37 years ago, it will end up looking very different in the next 10-20 years, and I look forward to watching those changes for -hopefully, at least the next 10-15 years.

P.S. Later this year I will be marking another milestone, the 60th anniversary of my arrival in Australia- how time flies when you are having fun!!

Cheers from “an old-fart” as my kids call me!!

Dan T