I’ve sometimes wondered, as I’m sure you have, too, why anyone would buy a wine from a place where it’s more expensive and possibly not even as good or as much to your taste as the region that initially popularised it. Italian varietals such as sangiovese from Australia, for instance, grüner veltliner and gewürztraminer from New Zealand, and albariño from Uruguay rather than Rias Baixas in Spain. The answer, I suspect, is simply just because you can, and since most of us who love wine are driven by curiosity (and I’m guessing you wouldn’t be reading a wine column if you weren’t), the opportunity is possibly too good to resist.
Some grapes, of course, are grown practically everywhere – chardonnay, sauvignon blanc and syrah/shiraz to name just three. Others, meanwhile, have ended up in wine-producing countries where regulations aren’t quite as strict as they are in the classic wine regions of Europe. Find me a winemaker who doesn’t want to experiment, particularly if they suspect that their terroir is ideal for the variety. In fact, we can get so used to the idea of an adoptive country being the go-to source for a grape that it’s easy to forget where it originally came from – malbec from Argentina, rather than Cahors or Bordeaux, being a case in point.
