ALTHOUGH NOT FROM THE MARGARET RIVER AREA, TWO EXAMPLES OF EXCELLENT WINERIES
Excerpted from my book OUR SUMMER IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND, AMAZON.COM
From Point Leeuwin we picked up the pace to the Margaret River region, visiting a
newly opened winery looking very similar the new large “industrial” wineries built recently in California. It was there I confirmed my long held notion that the ubiquitous Australian wine Shiraz was actually Syrah, “flowing,” under different colors. I had to convince the winery guide, who was not accepting my assertion.
In Australia, as in the United States and most other countries (except France,) wines
are sold and labeled according their grape, not their region of growth. Thus, Chardonnay,Merlot, etc., rather than Bordeaux or Burgundy. The situation in Australia, I pointed out to the winery officials, is that there was no grape named “Shiraz.” The grape Australians called Shiraz derives from the Syrah, native to France, and the grape for their great Burgundy label,Hermitage. The guides at the winery were having none of this, so I thumbed through their Australian reference book, located the section on the syrah grape, and was pleased to find there was not only confirmation, but documentation on how Shiraz came to replace Syrah.
The book revealed that the Syrah grape was brought to Australia in 1832 by James Busby, among hundreds of cuttings he gleaned from Europe, to determine their adaptability in Australia. A trial in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens proved the Syrah was very adaptable, and later notes by Sir William Macarthur, a wealthy and influential Australian, writing on Australian wine in the 1840s, referred to “Scyras as an excellent grape…a very hardy plant,produces well…” The reference book I was using brought home my point by adding, “Shiraz,an understandable Strinisation of Macarthur’s Scyras…” What Macarthur had done is what Australians do to this day, reconstruct the English language, speaking "strine," which in itself is taken to mean speaking Australian. So that’s the story from where shiraz originates, and I am pleased to say that the winery guides took this “French Connection” of their Shiraz very well, and thanked me for adding this information to their discussion. No, they didn’tgive me any free plonk; which is strine for cheap wine. It’s very Australian to understand how they get plonk to mean cheap wine. In WWI French soldiers pronounced vin blanc, ordinary French white table wine, van blonk. Having heard Australians for several months I can almost hear them say this when I see the words. But what really makes it strine is when they simplify it altogether by saying simply, plonk. I don’t know how they get from “blonk”to “plonk”, but they do.
