A sizeable portion of my desk time since I arrived in Australia has been spent preparing speeches, lectures and seminars on various topics.

Most of this material doesn’t merit further airing, though I hope it served its initial purpose. One or two chunks, however, might be of general interest. I have been busy with the filleting knife on two seminars in particular, and what follows is a more-or-less bloggable (i.e not interminably long) synthesis of the two.

Why wine regions matter

1973, 1974, 1975: those were the years I fell in love with wine. When you consider how dismal the vintages of 1972, 1973 and 1974 were in Europe, this was nothing short of miraculous.

I took a gap year between school and university in 1973 to 1974, and worked during those months at a hospital for the mentally handicapped. I enjoyed it enormously, and learned much about the fundamentals of life, and about the hazards of chance and how best to respond to those, from both patients and staff. I also earned a little money. Quite a lot of my weekly pay packet ended up in the tills of two long-extinct chains: Augustus Barnett and French Wine Farmers. I bought and absorbed the paperback guides of Simon, Sichel, Yoxall and Penning-Rowsell. They wrote about sublime experiences, but the wines I bought were patchy. (It was ever thus.) Even the Lafite `71 I bought with most of my second weekly wage packet (it had to be ordered specially) wasn’t as wondrous as I hoped.

What I enjoyed most, indeed, was the fact that every drop of what I was drinking had begun as rain, stone and sunlight in distant and exotic places like Burgundy, Jerez or the Mosel. I felt I was tasting those places. I read the poet Peter Levi describing a wine he had come across when travelling in Greece as tasting of ‘stones and thorns’. What could be more Greek than that?

Stones and thorns. Dawn on Ithaca

Arid Attica and the spirit of Sophocles, summarised in a mouthful of wine. This was exciting. That instant, intimate access to somewhere else on the surface of the earth seemed almost magical. It wasn’t true of broccoli or bacon or beer. No other product gave you the chance to taste geography in the same way. And it cheered you up. And when it tasted good as well -- as it did sometimes -- what more could you ask for?

I still think that those three things – place, solace, taste – lie at the core of wine’s appeal. The market-research view would be that solace and taste matter most, and place rather less. I disagree. This view comes about because of two myths.

The first myth is often used to make this discussion over-restrictive: It’s La Tâche or nothing. La Tâche is a great wine endowed with an ample sense of place, but this debate extends to a far wider range of wines than that very purist definition of a distinguished site.

I would argue that the sense of place is present, at least latently, in most wines. What differs is the degree of precision with which the sense of place is communicated. Or, if you like, what differs is the importance of that element of its personality -- that sense of place -- within the wine’s overall character profile.

Great vineyards. PetrusLet me give you an example. Oxford Landing Chardonnay tastes different to Concha y Toro Chardonnay, which tastes different to Skalli Vin de Pays d’Oc Chardonnay. A sizeable percentage of the differences is of course attributable to viticultural practices and winemaking techniques, but the broad climate/soil spectrum still shapes the fundamental constitution of the grapes. If you want to look for a sense of place in those wines, it is there, albeit weakly or distantly or hazily. That’s the first, very basic level of place in wine – the Australianness of Australian wines, or the Chileanness of Chilean ones.

Regionality in its strictest sense is the next level up. Eden Valley fruit differs from Barossa Valley fruit. Constantia contrasts with Stellenbosch. Priorat is not Rioja.

Up we go to another level, which we could call sub-regionality. Greenock or Moppa is different to Rowland Flat or Lyndoch. High Eden is different to other parts of the Eden Valley. All very interesting for enthusiastic consumers – providing viticulture and winemaking practices allow the potential differences to reach full expression in the wines.

Finally we go up another level, and then we come to the single site or single vineyard: La Tâche, or Hill of Grace, or Pewsey Vale Contours. When the right variety is planted in a single site of distinction and vinified with sympathetic restraint, then you have the apotheosis or epiphany of place.

Not every place can do that, though. It’s rare. It’s wonderful to sing and dance about it when you find it, but my point is that it would be wrong to limit the excitement that this place-hunting approach to wine can generate simply to single-site wines.

Place of origin is part of the personality of almost every wine if as a winemaker you chose to allow that aspect of the wine to come forward, and if as a wine drinker you chose to look at the wine in that light.

Yes, place in wine is elitist, because not all places are born equal.

But it is also democratic, in that inexpensive wines have just as much right to a sense of place, defined in their own way, as expensive ones.

Great vineyards. Block 42 and Peter GagoAnd it is also democratic in that every consumer of wine has the right to enjoy the sense of place in a wine in his or her own way. It can just mean buying Australian wine as opposed to Chilean wine; it can mean buying right-bank Bordeaux rather than left-bank Bordeaux; or it can mean only buying certain single-vineyard wines from Burgundy or Alsace.

The second myth concerning regionality is that You have to understand it to enjoy it.

No, you don’t. Let me explain.

The Australian Wine and Brandy Council commissioned some research in May 2008. Consumers in the UK, the USA, Canada and Sweden were questioned about regionality as a buying cue, and about which Australian regions they knew.

When the data got crunched, it didn’t look good for people like me. Regionality was never better than the fifth most important buying cue in any of the surveyed countries, and at worse (in the USA) it was the 10th most important buying cue.

Moreover if you asked American wine drinkers to name a single Australian wine region unprompted, 88% were baffled and speechless.

Looks awful. Or does it?

I believe there’s a fundamental flaw in this type of research, which is that regionality must be a matter of intellectual cognition. Let me offer some alternative scenarios.

The two most important cues when you do surveys of this sort are always variety and price. So let’s examine both.

Mrs Smith likes Sauvignon Blanc, so she looks for it in shops are restaurants. One week she buys Oyster Bay, another week she buys Gallo, she goes to a restaurant and the sommelier gives here a Sancerre, another week she buys an Adelaide Hills Sauvignon, then she goes to another restaurant and gets talked into splurging on a bottle of Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte or of Cloudy Bay. She’s with family, work colleagues, girlfriends, talking about all the things that matter most to her, and the alcohol is relaxing her.

Now if you ask her to name the producer, origin and vintage of all the wines she has had over this period, you will draw a blank. Mrs Smith is not a wine nerd. She just knows the name of the grape to ask for to get the kind of wine she likes. But she has really enjoyed all those wines she’s tried over that period. Indeed she’s enjoyed them more for being different and diverse than she would have done if she’d had exactly the same one every time.

Market researchers will of course tick Mrs Smith off as being a variety rather than a region person. But what Mrs Smith has in fact done is to enjoy regionality. What she enjoyed was the differences (delivered preponderantly by place) within a desired spectrum – which in her case is a certain variety. She just isn’t able to articulate those differences. All she can articulate is the desired spectrum.

The same can even be true of those who buy on price. Millions of people in the UK now buy their wine every week depending what is on the shelf ends at half-price, or two for one, or whatever. The victim-wines change all the time, depending on whose thumbs are currently in the Tesco or Asda (Walmart) thumbscrew.

Yes, price is the prime driver, but if it was exactly the same wine offered on those shelf ends every week sales would soon drop off. I’m convinced that what makes this sales mechanic so compelling to customers is that they not only feel they are getting a bargain, but they also get the chance to try different wines from all over the world without the stress and anxiety of having to make the decision about what to try themselves. Price is the desired spectrum in this case. It will be what the market researchers tick, but I would argue that it is again regionality within that desired spectrum which most of those consumers are really enjoying.

What does every sommelier want his or her list to have? The answer is something special, unique, distinct.

Exactly what this is will vary with the style of the establishment, and whether or not it has dedicated wine-sales staff. But the reassurance of the familiar is far less important at a restaurant table than on shop shelves. Since the sense of place is the main driver of difference within the wine world as a whole, I would argue that a sense of place is what people are instinctively looking for.

Because it is complicated and complications create fear, ordinary restaurant customers will rarely articulate their desire in that way. The gateway will very often be variety or price or style -- but what they don’t want is exactly what they had last night. They want a nice wine which is a bit different from everything else within their preferred variety or price or style, to make their evening out a special one.

You might want to butt in at this point and claim that it is in fact vineyard management and winemaking which provide these differences between wines which I’ve just suggested people enjoy so much, rather than place of origin.

Winemaking? Surely not. I’d argue that the most widely used winemaking techniques and interventions tend to make wines more samey rather than more different. They may make them consistent and dependable, which are virtues, but stylistically they bring wines together rather than prise them apart. (That’s Australia’s biggest challenge, by the way.)

I think there’s a stronger case for vineyard management being heavily influential in creating differences, but once you talk about vineyards you are already talking about the particular conditions of a place and about the human response to those conditions. It is, in fact, very difficult to separate the two precisely.

What I’d like to suggest in conclusion is that a sense of place in wine, which may be variously defined, is what provides wine’s magnetic field. It is what draws people to wine, and it is what organises the patterns in the wine world at the deepest level.

Aesthetically speaking, too, it is also the source of the most profound levels of beauty in wine.

Yes, it is complicated, so don’t expect most consumers to make a lot of headway with nomenclature and intellectual cognition – but don’t assume it doesn’t matter either. In fact, nothing matters more, and nothing provides more pleasure in wine, providing you can help people enjoy it via the routes which are familiar to them.