Something very strange has happened to Australian wine. While more and more fine Australian wine is being produced, its fortunes and reputation have plummeted. Fashions in wine, just as in everything else, come and go but the speed with which Australia has moved from being revered to being reviled is quite remarkable.
Throughout the 1990s Australia's wine reputation continued to build so steadily that wine exporters around the world saw Australians as the all-conquering heroes. Exports increased tenfold in that decade. It was as recently as 2004 that Australia overtook France as principal supplier of wine to the UK and, briefly, looked set to push Italy into second place as most important exporter of wine to the US.
But today, interest in Australian wine in both the UK and US seems to have evaporated as rapidly as a puddle in Alice Springs. In the US, where Australian wine is a relatively recent phenomenon, the reasons seem to be twofold. The staggering success of Yellow Tail, with its kangaroo label, spawned so many imitation “critter” brands, as they were known, that at the bottom end of the market, Australia came to be seen as ubiquitous and vapid.