I got my cheap wine and a pending liver transplant

There was a time, back when footballers shorts were tiny and their arms stiff and horizontal, when we made the best cheap wines in the world.

Our winemakers were well educated, technically savvy and free from the shackles of tradition that meant much of the ‘vin ordinaire’ that came out of the European strongholds tasted like salami and socks and was riddled with more faults than a Stevie Wonder v Ray Charles five setter.

Aussie wine was ‘sunshine in a bottle’, cleanly made, easy going and a hell of a lot better than anything else at entry level price points in the English supermarkets we were so keen to please.

But the export success story of the 80’s and 90’s has soured and become the pigeonholing of today.

The rest of the winemaking world has lifted its game, thanks in no small part to globetrotting Australian winemakers exporting expertise and virtually every winemaking nation on earth can compete on quality and kill us on price at the bottom end of the market.

So the logical step is to escape this race to the bottom and focus attention on the fact that we have an enormously diverse range of wine regions, some of the oldest and most precious vineyards on the planet and an array of compelling wine styles unique to this country.

Makes perfect sense right? Well it does, and a lot of very good people are working outrageously hard to spread the message in export markets that are increasingly of the opinion that Australian wine is simple, fruit forward and about as serious as Police Academy 4.

And then some mercenary bastard, or bastards, sells a lake of surplus chardonnay to an aggressive American booze merchant who bangs a tacky label on it, calls it ‘Down Under’ and sells it at $US3 a bottle and the stereotype just gets stronger.

That a brash Yank can come stomping on the reputation of Australian wine is bad enough, but the fact that someone bent over to tie up his hob-nailed boots for him is even worse.

The sad fact is there are elements in Australian wine more interested in clearing inventories and managing bottom lines than the long-term health of the industry.

We’ve done untold damage in export markets and now we’re doing it at home as well.

When the French find themselves with excess wine it’s sent off for distillation into industrial alcohol, here we flog it off as cleanskins, and sit around wondering why nobody’s buying the branded stuff.

Next time your standing in your local liquor barn looking over your shoulder to make sure no-one you know can see you eyeing off the $3 cleanskin, consider this. It took something like 800 litres of water to make each and every bottle of that crap. From the water sucked out of the dying Murray to slake the thirst of large vineyards owned by managed funds lured by ludicrous tax breaks, to the torrents of the stuff that splashes through the refineries masquerading as wineries that churn out this dross, making wine is bloody thirsty work.

These are wines that have no benefit to anyone apart from the fact they’re cheap.

That we buy them here is bad enough, that we ship it offshore is insane.

Sure, not everyone can drop 20, 30, 50 bucks on a bottle of booze, but if money’s tight think wisely about where you spend it.

You can find imports from Chile, Argentina, where the labour is plentiful and the water even more so, that are perfectly good drinks for single digit prices. You can even find some pretty decent French gear for a tenner.

And if some sense of misguided patriotism is holding you back go and ask a fisherman on the Coorong what he’d rather you drink.

We just have to accept that if we want a healthy Australian wine industry, one that produces truly great wine that speaks evocatively of the place it came from and the people who made it, we have to be prepared to pay a fair price for it.

Because the price we’ll pay if we don’t is a damn sight higher.