The harvest was to begin in six weeks, and on this hot summer day in January, as I looked out from my terrace in Australia’s Barossa Valley, I thought of a wry conversation earlier that afternoon concerning an American television crew so in need of shots of the Napa Valley in summer that they had come to Australian wine country in January.
Now, gazing across the acres of vineyards and beyond, fields of blond grasses with a lone wind-bent tree silhouetted on a distant hillock, I felt for a moment that I could indeed be looking at Napa in July, with however, one major difference. For all of its beauty, Napa’s vista is not as sweeping. In the Barossa Valley the land and the sky are so vast, they seem to go on forever.
And so, for its part, does the red Shiraz grape. The day before, a group of winemakers and I had been tasting and talking about Shiraz. “We can make the best Shiraz in the world here, better than we’ll ever make Cabernet or Merlot,” one winemaker said. “Well, we’ve been growing Shiraz since the 1840’s.
That’s a pretty simple message; it does well here.” “But you know, we don’t really do that much work on new red varietals.” “Why should we? We’ve got Shiraz. It’s a classic. It’s the best of our past.”
Read more courtesy of TravelClassics.com