I know I'm in mortal danger of becoming the Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez among wine hacks, but for the sake of completeness here is one final speech from my Australian sojourn, which is drawing to a close at present. This particular speech was delivered to the South Australian Wine Industry Association, an organisation I suggest changes its name as soon as possible (see below).

Future blog posts will, I hope, resume the chattiness generally implied by the genre. I'm all speechified out now.

REGIONALITY – WHO NEEDS IT?
It’s fair to say that most of Australia’s export success thus far -- and it’s been the star export performer, globally speaking, over the last decade and a half -- has been based on the Brand Australia concept. Simple, comprehensible, consistent varietal wines, in other words, offering sunny flavours from a sunny place. Whenever consumers are surveyed, moreover, regionality as a cue isn’t a high priority for them; they’re much more likely to buy a bottle based on variety, price, brand or word-of-mouth recommendation. Indeed the intellectual cognition of regionality by consumers is poor. Some 88% of regular US wine drinkers, for example, can’t name a single Australian wine region.

Touring Wangolina Station with John Goode and daughter Anita

So – why bother with regionality? It’s an important question. I’d suggest there are five answers.

1: THE DEVALUED BRAND
The first factor is one you’ll all be familiar with: oversupply. An oversupplied market is a buyers’ market, not a sellers’ market. Buyers are able to drive down prices, and low price devalues brands. It’s done that to Brand Australia. Generically speaking in the UK, for example, Australia as a whole is now intimately linked in consumers’ minds with deals and discounts, with gondola ends, with born-to-be-discounted brands, with three-for-a-tenner, with party wine, with pub wine, with cheap wine, with bottom-end wine, with binge-drinking wine, with commodity wine.

If you had unlimited water and a cheap labour force, there might be a future in this, though I still wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, though, you have a water crisis, a high-wage economy and a crushingly strong Australian dollar. There is in fact a pressing need to begin disengaging with this market. Regionality is one route out of the morass.

2: BANNER BETTER THAN BRAND
You might, though, argue that a purely branded approach is more comprehensible to consumers than a regional approach. It’s true that brands are more easily retained and understood by consumers than regions -- provided there are only a few of them. The branded marketplace always has a few big winners and many small losers. And Australia has several thousand brands. So do most other wine-producing countries around the world. Not even wine journalists have their heads around all of those.

Compared to 2,000 brands, 60 or so GIs present a relatively simple concept. The regional banner, in fact, is an exceptionally good way to provide market access to medium-sized and small brands. Consumers all over the world understand Chablis. SA’s larger regions like Barossa and Coonawarra are already well on their way to achieving that kind of recognition.

3: THE GOLDEN HANDCUFFS
Clustering under a banner is good, but there’s a better reason, though, for pursuing regional styles. Wine is all about difference: that’s its chief claim on consumer attention. And regionality is the fundamental way that difference is articulated in the wine world. It’s the grammar of the wine world.

Cabernet, Coonawarra, 2010To say that you like Cabernet is an ambiguous statement. To say that you like red Bordeaux or Coonawarra is not. Coonawarra is a unique place on the face of the earth; no other Cabernet can ever taste exactly like Coonawarra Cabernet. Once a consumer has bonded with that, that consumer will be yours for life, provided that you as a region continually benchmark and elevate your quality standards. True regional appeal is enduring appeal, as the world’s greatest wines all prove.

4: CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN
Once you have embraced the regional ideal, you will find it the best way to maximise your quality potential. That’s because it implies continual research and effort. Regionality means planting the most suitable variety or varieties in the most propitious sites. It means vinifying them with the maximum restraint in order to emphasise intrinsic, place-derived characteristics and vintage characteristics. These are both high ideals which will take you away from the homogeneity of commodity wine creation. There are no short cuts, quick fixes or easy ways out.

Of course, economics play a role too, and you cannot aim for Everest if you don’t have the wherewithal to get to base camp. But some pursuit of regionality is possible at almost every economic level, even the $15 bottle, and I would argue that at least looking for that is the best place to start to create quality.

5: USING THE COMPASS
I would also argue that embracing the ideal of regionality helps give the producers in a region a sense of unity and direction and purpose. I was in New Zealand at the 2010 Pinot Conference recently and one of the most striking contributions was made by Nigel Greening of Felton Road in Central Otago who said that he didn’t have competitors, only collaborators. Wine production is a collaborative enterprise, not a competitive one. Having an outstanding producer in a region benefits everyone in that region, and the more outstanding producers, the greater the benefits for all.

Unity, naturally, doesn’t mean identikit wines. In the end, if you respect your terroir, every wine producer in a region cannot help but produce different wines, since no one has exactly the same plots of land. No one makes wine in the same way, either.

Everyone moving in the same direction is in fact much more enjoyable and creative than regarding your neighbours as enemy competitors and trying by any means to make your brand stronger than theirs.

So I hope the benefits of the regional approach are clear. I’ll next talk about its implications and dangers, but first I just want to address is the issue of regionality and consumer understanding.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND IT TO ENJOY IT
If a market researcher asks Mrs Jones what is most important when she buys wine for herself, I wouldn’t expect her to say regionality, since that would be a very intellectual answer to the question and Mrs Jones isn’t an intellectual. Price and variety will always be the primary cues.

But let’s look at what she is really doing. Let’s assume she likes Sauvignon Blanc. One week she will buy one from New Zealand, another week Chile, another week Touraine, and another week the Adelaide Hills. In a restaurant, the sommelier may talk her into having a Smith-Haut-Lafitte or a Cloudy Bay. She enjoys them all; she enjoys their diversity, accessed via the gateway of her varietal cue.

If she had had exactly the same Sauvignon on every occasion, she wouldn’t have enjoyed her wine drinking as much. It would have been boring. Mrs Jones is in fact enjoying regionality in wine. That’s what drives the differences she has relished. She will never intellectually comprehend the nuances of terroir in all those places, but that doesn’t mean she can’t taste them and enjoy them.

The same is even true of price. Many UK consumers now buy whatever wine is on offer that week. One week it’s Californian, the next Spanish, the next Romanian. They feel they are getting a bargain – that’s their gateway to purchase. But they enjoy the diversity of the offers. They get a world wine tour without the anxiety of having to decide what to buy themselves. If it was exactly the same wine on offer every week, they’d soon give up buying the offer, as that would get boring. Once again, what they are enjoying is the difference of regionality, albeit at a very rudimentary level.

Now I’d like to look at the implications and dangers of regionality, before finishing with a quick look at the South Australian context.

IT’S NOT JUST MARKETING
The first and most important thing to say is that emphasising regionality is not a marketing decision. If the decision to emphasise regionality is merely marketing, then it will fail. In other words, if consumers want to compare a Shiraz from Langhorne Creek with one from McLaren Vale and one from Barossa, and they buy them and despite all the guff on the back label they then find that they all taste pretty much the same, they will feel cheated.

It must be a complete, long-term commitment, within the constraints provided by the economic context. It means a search for the best-suited varieties, not simply the fashionable varieties. It means the most careful and fastidious and environmentally respectful viticulture you can afford. It means harvesting ripe fruit as carefully as you can, then giving that maximum respect in the winery, and in particular not changing the fundamental constituents of the must by exaggerated interventions and additions. You have to respect the balance and flavours of the place, and not force them to fit specific, universal technical parameters. That may mean that you make wines which at first seem strange or unusual or challenging, or outside conventional Australian norms. But if the place is a good one and the varieties are well-suited to it, then those wines will create their own following and find their own market.

Of course ...

NOT ALL PLACES ARE BORN EQUAL
You want limestone ...we've got it. Derek Hooper of Cape Jaffa in Mount BensonRegionality is elitist. Some places will prosper while others fail. This is always true. France has DRC and Lafite, but it also has thousands of winegrowers who struggle to make a living. It’s hard going in Côtes du Marmandais or Costières de Nîmes. In the end, everyone is searching for the best use for their land, and if viticulture isn’t that ‘best use’, then the sooner you address the issue and find out the better. If viticulture is the best use or at least the most appropriate use for your land, then following the path of regionality will help you maximise its potential. The most profitable wines in the world are all terroir wines or wines with great regional style.

Now let’s look at the South Australian context, and begin with its strengths.

SA STRENGTHS
In Barossa and Coonawarra, SA has what are internationally the best-known existing regional names in Australia. Only Margaret River and the Hunter Valley come close, and the Hunter is predominantly a domestic style. McLaren Vale isn’t far behind the Barossa and Coonawarra either.

Personally, I consider the Adelaide Hills perhaps the most potentially exciting single new GI in Australia. The Clare and Eden Valleys are Riesling and Shiraz references. Other GIs like Langhorne Creek , Wrattonbully and Mount Benson all have a distinct regional style.

Things are obviously very challenging in the Riverland at present and I don’t know that region as well as I know some of the others, yet most of the world’s bulk-wine producing regions have quality enclaves and I don’t see why Riverland should be any different. So within the Australian context, SA starts from a position of strength. That’s a fantastic platform to build on. Don’t be in a hurry; remember you are at the very exciting initial stage of a 1,00-year journey.

SA WEAKNESSES
Red dirt, CoonawarraThe biggest weakness is that winemaking is still regarded as being more important and is taken more seriously than grape-growing by many SA winegrowers. The quality of viticulture is often indifferent, and there isn’t yet enough varietal diversity in the vineyards, though the situation is much better than on my three previous visits.

Another major issue is that while many wine producers claim to practice minimal intervention, few yet do. The consequence is that far too many South Australian wines taste similar to each other, which makes it hard to see and to feel regionality and vintage character in them. There are far too many rigid, hard and over-adjusted wines on the market. Red wines often lack texture due to over-short fermentation and maceration periods. Alcohol phobia plus the desire for low pH leads to some grapes being picked underripe. All of these are fixes. With very few exceptions, the world’s greatest regional or terroir wines begin with ripe grapes picked carefully, handled gently and vinified with care but without hurry, with no or with minimal adjustment. Just let them be themselves.

Another problem, particularly in South Australia, is the industrial mentality. Australian wine needs a de-industrial revolution. The word ‘industry’ needs to be excised from the collective consciousness – and from your own Association’s name. You are the South Australian Wine Creators’ Association, or perhaps Wine Creation South Australia. There may be other options. But you are not industrial. You are growing an agricultural product of high status and high sensitivity, and you are then crafting those grapes into a drink with a long cultural history, capable of revealing extraordinary nuances and revered the world over.

You are sending out a sensually beautiful message about Australian soils and Australian skies.

You don’t need to conform to norms or standards, or do things in the same way as each other. You just need to make something which smells or tastes unique and beautiful. That is best done in a spirit of independent, free-thinking and if necessary risk-taking craftsmanship.

New clones requiredI appreciate that everything I have said ideally implies an individual grower-producer with an assured market, and that much of South Australian wine is not like that. You have large company domination and oversupply; you have growers desperate to sell their grapes at no more than break-even prices; you have contract harvesting and contract winemaking and contract bottling. The production chain, in other words, is often broken in many places.

This does indeed make it difficult to create great regional wines of the sort I’ve talked about, but not impossible. The large companies have highly intelligent individuals working for them who would love to be let off the leash to create new, ground-breaking, risk-taking wines, and there is nothing which wine journalists, at any rate, would welcome more from large companies than that.

The crisis may well mean that wines can spend longer in fermenters than usual, or that parcels of fruit are available for experimental purposes. The future, in other words, needn’t be the same as the past.

To finish, I’d just like to address three challenges.

SA CHALLENGES
The first is climate change. Research work by Professor Snow Barlow of Melbourne University as well as Dr Peter Hayman and Associate Professor Justin Brookes shows not only the speed with which this is happening but the susceptibility of South Australia to climate change. If you combine this with Australia’s long-term history of drought and flood pulses related to the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and the ever-present bush fire danger, then the challenge you all face is substantial.

However, South Australia does have plenty of potential cool-climate growing locations, and warmer locations can be planted to or grafted to later-ripening grape varieties. Simply making wines differently will create a much richer spectrum of styles.

Flexibility is the key to these climate challenges, and denial the worst option. South Australia has produced many great wines in the past, and it will continue to do so in the changed climates of the future.

The second challenge is market prejudice. Cheap and boring branded or commodity wines on one hand, and often caricaturially rich, sweet, high-alcohol and then acid-corrected wine on the other hand have both been over-prominent on developed export markets. This has broken the bond of trust and affection between some wine consumers and Australia, particularly classic fine-wine consumers. The only way to repair these fractures is by creating a different set of model wines. Following the regionality path with honesty and courage and sincerity will create those new models.

The third challenge is the gloom of the present. There’s no doubt that this is a difficult time for Australian wine producers. The fact is, though, that the present crisis presents a wonderful opportunity to do things differently, to create new forms of excellence, and to grow in stature as a wine-producing nation. To be alive and active at the start of the great adventure of Australian regional wine-creation is another exciting opportunity, like being alive and active in Roman Germany, medieval Burgundy or eighteenth-century Bordeaux. Australia already has a major presence on world wine export markets, and is perfectly placed to achieve an early position of strength in the developing Asian markets. Look beyond the present, in other words, and you’ll find lots of reasons to be cheerful.