THE IMAGE WE HAVE of Australian wine in Britain is of sunshine in a bottle. It’s still Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden with their increasingly outlandish descriptions on the Food and Drink programme on BBC Two. Those exuberant shirazes and fruity chardonnays brought a New World optimism to rainy old 1980s Britain and are still cheering us up today.
And yet possibly Australia’s greatest white wine, certainly its most individual, owes its character to something that feels closer to home, bad weather.
The Hunter Valley in New South Wales might be one
