Nick Ryan, cheap wine, liver transplants, and why spend fifty bucks on plonk when you can get a decent quaffing red for ten

(Above: oh yes, hit me with your bubbles Orlando).

Shooting down wine snobs is like drinking down a fresh green stalky provocative red with a cheeky come hither grin and a bouquet of berries with a hint of plum and essence of tobacco.

It's been done a million times, and yet still they line up like ducks in a barrel, stomping on the grapes of wrath in which the treasured vintage is stored, somehow thinking their raw red calloused feet and a hint of tinea will add to the authentic hand crafted flavor of the brew.

No trendy rag, men's magazine or dentist's waiting room should be without a pretentious wine pundit waiting to rage at people who just like to drink plonk, cheap enough and good enough, without carrying on about the unutterable mystery of the fermented grape.

Sob, here I must confess. I was once a wine snob. Worse, I was a wine snob in Adelaide. Think about it! Back in the days before Cyril Henschke's wife mistook him for a bird and shot him, when Hill of Grace was so cheap even a student could buy it, or you could trot down to McLaren Vale where the good doctor was starting up his dream of Coriole, or you could trot off to the Clare Valley and pick up a great riesling for a couple of bucks, or shell out a bit more for a Birks' Wendouree red that would crush a meal of bacon and eggs.

But thank the lord I was cured, I was healed, I was saved, and by the grace of the lord, I'll never walk that unrighteous path again. Because it leads to you writing this kind of intro:

Things we should consign to the non-recyclable rubbish bin of a lost Australia.

Female tennis players winning Grand Slams. Babies christened Keith or Shirley. Bank branches in small country towns. Australian wine under ten bucks a bottle.

While you’re just as likely to bump into the Beaumont children as encounter any of the first three, there’s still an ocean of palate-numbing, environment-raping, image-trashing plonk out there and everything that is great and good about the Australian wine industry is drowning in it.

Who's the bleeding heart? Nick Ryan in The Punch, Australia's ponciest cheap skate conversation, and here he is with I got my cheap wine and a pending liver transplant.

As if you get a liver transplant from the price of the wine, rather than the amount and method of your drinking. Try knocking off three bottles of Penfolds Grange a night and see how you go about avoiding a liver transplant, as well as a severely depleted bank account.

Funnily enough, this whinge has been heard in the wine industry for decades. I remember when you could go off to Saltrams and buy heady quantities of rough red for home bottling parties, and the industry got into convulsions about how it would lead to the decline and fall of quality. Back then Kaiser Stuhl and their ilk were reckoned to be the villains. Wine-making co-ops with no grace or style, just pleb taste and a 'show me the money' attitude.

But to dress the fact that the industry thinks you should pay thirty bucks for a pretentiously labelled piece of piss as wholesome environmentalism is a new and perverse angle:

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.

Sssh. Don't mention the rice growers. Or the water sucking citrus vampires.

No, it's those bloody riverland wineries and their chateau cardboard pretensions that are ruining the Murray, and ruining the wine game for everyone else.

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.

Well dearie me, you don't say. Not everyone can drop fifty bucks on a bottle of booze? And here was I thinking that the Spanish and French and Italians would never go below thirty bucks for a rough red with an evening spag bol. 

Oh wait, I get the message, don't buy Australian, buy foreign:

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.

Which goes to suggest that head in clouds, with plenty of free tastings to hand, it's been awhile since Nick Ryan has sampled the sort of French, Chilean and Argentine gear you can get for under ten bucks in a big Dan Murphy barn. (Or is it just that we think the foreigners should fuck up their countries and exploit labor, so we can get cheap piss, while the local lords of the manor produce their quality drop for the ponces?)

Sadly, put a lot of the cheap foreign imports up against a decent Australian cheapie, from selected sources (no, I'm not saying, do your own field research), and a lot of them taste like cheap assed metallic, crudely assembled loads of liver transplant rubbish.

But let's not worry about the common folk here or the thought that they might like a cheap drink every now and then. 

So what's the new mission statement for the industry? 

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.

Excuse me, what price might that be? The collapse of the industry? Jerk the other leg in a gherkinish way. And if we don't fork over the readies, why's the price we have to pay a damn sight higher? For a decent NZ sav blanc or a bottle of Italian raspberry cordial?

How many ways from Sunday can special interest groups skin this kind of nonsense - from the "you must pay for online digital content or we'll lose all the seminal investigative reporting vital to Australian society" through to the "you must go to see Australian films about incest in the outback" or we'll lose all those vital insights into Australia no one can be bothered to pay money for.

If Nick Ryan wants to be spoken to evocatively by a sultry red wine filly in a classy expensive bottle, let him fork over the five hundred bucks or so for a bottle of Grange or similar. But if the punters are happy to chow down on a bottle of Penfolds Koonunga Hill for nine bucks the bottle, where's the harm?

Pretensions and delusions of grandeur and wild talk of great works that speak provocatively to ponces is no substitute for making wines that satisfy a market.

But then I don't have a problem with kids called Keith or Nick, let alone girls called Madge, Shirley, Daphne or Merle. Whatever. It's no worse than being called Peggy Sue or Betty Sue. So sue me. And tell me that Mall Cop isn't Citizen Kane. Meh.

Meantime, perhaps because paranoid conspiracy theories suit people who spend a lot of time downing plonk, Ryan is long on the ways foreigners are conspiring to reduce the industry to rubble.

First you have to believe in the good old golden days, which I suspect Ryan never tasted, or if he did he wasn't tasting anything worth tasting. Because the first rule is that rough wine deserves only six months - a year at worst - in the bottle before it should be imbibed and then pissed down the toilet to go on yet another magnificent journey. After that, forget it.

But back to the good old days:

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.

Actually back in the good old days - I'm talking the seventies here - nobody much cared about Australian wine and you could pick up the best at bargain prices because after all there wasn't much difference between sweet sherry and a bottle of Porphyry Pearl when it came to what the males in the backyard sniggeringly called leg openers (though you could always try Stone's Ginger wine if you had absolutely no taste).

There was always the same tension then between the mass market and the snobs, and it's never going to go away. But the delusion that you can persuade people to fork over fifty bucks a bottle is a never ending one for ponces and snobs:

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.

Which is only a problem if you don't like Police Academy 4. Some folks did, to the alarming extent that they managed to make another three shows in the franchise before it expired. But I keep a cudgel handy in case it comes back.

But hang on, it's surely someone's fault. Did you forget the conspiracy theory?

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.

Well here's the go. Remove any tax breaks, tear out the riverland grapes, and any grapes belonging to other bottom feeders, shrink the industry down to the size of boutiques making expensive plonk for ponces and poseurs, and let's see how things get better.

Or live with the notion that there's different horses for different courses, and if you've lived long enough, feel satisfied and amazed that Australians have taken to wine, especially the local drop, in ways that were unimaginable fifty years ago.

Does even a yokel local think that for three bucks you're going to get anything except a stew of chemicals and crap? Well it beats a flagon of Penfolds port or sherry, and where's the harm in that?

And enough with the paranoid conspiracy theories. Or a job as a bureaucrat at Screen Australia waits for you, as you churn out films nobody wants to watch, in much the same way as Nick Ryan's prescription for the wine industry will probably end up producing expensive wines people either can't afford, or don't want to drink.

Tojours gai, and I'll have a glass of your roughest vin de pays to wash it down, merci beaucoup.

PS Wynn's Coonawarra at Dan Murphys for ten dollars a pop, shiraz, riesling, whatever! The end of the industry is indeed nigh! 

Oh and they had heaps of grog for $2.90, with a cricket motif. I bought a bottle in memory of Nick Ryan, and by golly I'll grit my teeth and drink it.

(Below: the drink of champions).