Our palates are under attack from New Zealand

Now I’m no vinous xenophobe, my cellar covers most of the winemaking world, and this is not just another bit of puerile Kiwi bashing.

I’m the first to admit that our friends across the Tasman are pantsing us when it comes to pinot noir and doing frighteningly interesting things with shiraz but the time has come for someone to do as Don Dunstan once did and stand in defiance of the approaching tsunami.

Why?

Because most of the stuff is utter swill.

Sauvignon blanc is a variety that tries to make a virtue of being overt and obvious like the annoying kid on the end of the diving board shouting “ look at me, look at me.”

It’s in your face wherever it is grown but in New Zealand this tendency as been turned up to 11. When the pioneering wines from Marlborough first appeared twenty years ago the wine drinking world was quickly seduced by their aromatic audacity and shrill flavours.

Sure they were distinctive and unique but just because the hooker with the heavy makeup and fright wig is the first to catch your eye doesn’t mean you should go through with transaction.

A team of scientists have just completed a six year, $12 million research project to pinpoint just what it is people respond to in New Zealand’s sauvignons blancs and the dominant characteristics that draw people in are cats’ pee and sweaty passionfruit.

If sweaty passionfruit is a flavour you enjoy then save yourself some dough and knock off a can of Passiona after a long run. If it’s cat’s pee you’re hankering for, you need professional help.

And the stuff is riddled with methoxypyrazines, odour producing chemical compounds also found in things like tomato leaves and green capsicums, that gives many of these wines weedy flavour profiles more suited to the compost bin than the dinner table.

The other place methoxypyrazines are commonly found is in certain bugs that excrete them when threatened. So bugs find it offensive yet people pay good money to drink the stuff. I can’t be the only one who finds that weird.

While it can be argued that the wines from pioneers like Cloudy Bay and innovators like Dog Point have a legitimate place as benchmark examples of the Marlborough style, a great deal of what is coming out of there now is little more than the vinous equivalent of a Rolex bought on the beach at Kuta.

The global demand for Marlborough’s sauvignon blanc has opened the door to the kind of wine making that favours expediency and opportunism over detail and distinction.

Huge tracts of land have been given over to vast vineyards managed by distant investment funds, set up to crop at freakishly high levels that pump up balance sheets but dilute flavours, and flood these shores under a whole series of hastily concocted brands constructed with tenuous connections to the hard work of real winemakers.

And we lap it up and clamour for more.

For every bottle of this stuff squaffed with salt and pepper squid at a bistro in Brighton or necked at the apartment in Noosa a brilliant bottle of exquisite Clare Valley riesling or Hunter Valley Semillon lies unloved on the shelf.

Riesling’s too sweet? Crap. There’s more residual sugar in one bottle of cheap Marlborough sauvignon blanc than a whole case of a classic Clare riesling.

And Hunter Semillon will still be fresh as a daisy long after all these savvy blancs turn brown in the bottle and smell like a pensioner’s socks shoved in an old tin of peas.

That we drink this much mawkish sauvignon blanc is bad enough. That we drink it in preference to our own infinitely better alternatives is a national disgrace.