Saturday, July 31, 2004

Observation of the day

Cheap wine from Spain is often much better than cheap wine from France. Maybe this is due to the fact that when you visit Spain, Spanish people seem to start drinking red wine at breakfast time and then keep going all day, whereas in this day and age French people don't so much. I suspect that they did a century ago, however. If they did, does this mean that there has been a decline in French low end winemaking over the last century? Or is the relatively low quality of cheap French wine why they stopped?

Australia on the other hand doesn't really do cheap wine, or at least Australia does not export cheap wine. Australia does mid market wine, and has great quality control. (Australia also occasionally does fine wine, but only to a fairly small extent compared to the French or the Italians). The Australian wine industry's great triumph over the last 20 years is to have put its mid market wines on the British market (and to a lesser extent other markets such as Germany, Scandinavia and the United States) and to have moved people who were drinking low end French wine (or who weren't drinking wine at all) to mid market Australian wines.

And when I have more money (very soon, I hope) I may move back to mid market wines. But for now I am drinking a bottle of DOC Navarra 2002 for which I paid about £3.50. This is no great sacrifice, because it is really quite pleasant.

No comments:

Blog Archive