Caught up with Giant Steps/Innocent Bystander winemaker Steve Flamsteed at the London Wine Fair last week. He was showing their Giant Steps 2010 Chardonnay and Pinot Noir single vineyard wines among others. Great stuff – early days though and you’d expect these to develop well over the medium term. Overall I’m a great admirer of Giant Steps. Production is tiny, the pinnacle of a triangle supported by the Innocent Bystander brand. What’s not to like in their vivacious, bright Pinot Noirs and their classy Chardonnays?

Sarah Ahmed led a thoughtful tasting of a dozen wines cherry-picked from the Margaret River at the London Wine Fair. There was great homogeneity in the wines shown, something of a characteristic of this region that sits below Perth in Western Australia.  There is an obvious maritime influence with the Margaret River vineyard strip being between 3 and 7 kilometres from coast, and the entire area being an effective peninsula surrounded by the Indian Ocean. The season starts early and ends late, and the soils are generally gravelly and lean.

Noses to the grindstone at London’s Saatchi Gallery

January is certainly antipodean month on the London tasting calendar. Just ahead of Australia Day, Wine Australia put on their annual trade tasting, christened A+ Australian Wine at the Saatchi Gallery in London’s Chelsea [above]. Much has been made of how Oz wine has lost its way in recent years, at least in marketing terms and certainly in the battle of the brands, but as the big conglomerates have lost ground, or at least looked uncertain, the real excitement in Australia is the bevy of superb wines being made both by established names and relative newcomers at the smaller and medium sized end of the business.  

Last week’s New Zealand Wine’s annual trade tasting in London [despite the rugby ball it was held at Lord’s Cricket Ground] provided confirmation of the rude health of the Kiwi wine industry. The figures are fascinating. 80% of New Zealand’s wine is exported, its wines have the highest average retail price on the UK shelves and in terms of Sauvignon Blanc it has a whopping 45% of the market.  That’s simply incredible when you consider that twenty five years ago New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, or for that matter the entire wine industry, was hardly on the map. Despite the ubiquity of the grape in the Loire, Bordeaux and universally as a vin de pays varietal, France by comparison has a dismal 5.1% of the Sauvignon market.