Upon our arrival last year, I recall being handed a glass of Morgon and just about spat it out so alien did it taste to my antipodean palette. I was assured we'd get on better with the more full bodied wines of the South, those produced in the area we now live - so have we?
Well, we have thrown ourselves wholeheartedly into a thorough and dogged research of Languedoc Roussillon wines, with a few other regions thrown in for good measure. This has involved buying and tasting a lot of wine ranging in price / quality from 1 euro a bottle (yes, 1 euro) to 25 euros a bottle, visiting domaines and caves, asking lots of questions, bringing back wine from Australia, America and Angleterre in order to do taste tests - basically being very committed to drinking a lot of wine.
Our taste buds still told us that we preferred Australian reds and vastly preferred NZ whites. Why was this? I very much like our local Picpoul de Pinet and can get along fine with most rosé wines as there just isn't really any rosé to speak of in Oz. But nothing beats a Marlborough sauvignon blanc. We bandy around words like 'body', 'meaty', 'fragrant and full', 'floral notes, flinty finish', 'fruit forward' etc. etc. to illustrate our point and hope we know what we are talking about.
Needless to say, we leapt at the chance to go for a wine tasting at Domaine La Sarabande in Laurens as this domaine is owned and run by an Australian Paul and his Irish wife Isla who have worked in the Southern hemisphere in Australian vineyards and in Marlborough, NZ and are now the first Aus/Irish vignerons here in the Langudeoc. They surely would have the answer to why we prefer Australian wines - along with the UK who import more of it than they do any other country's wine.
We tasted a few wines, had a chat about terroir and schiste, harvests, weather and mildew, talked of palettes, heritage, barrels, bottle shock, corks and culture and eventually found out why we like Australian wine.
Sugar.
French wines contain very roughly about 1.5g of sugar per litre, as opposed to around 8g in Australian wines. So there you have it. We rushed home and added sugar syrup to a bottle of red we had both rejected as nasty and - voilà! There it was, perfectly drinkable!
Good to know we have put in all this dedicated research to finally discover we are basically alco-pop binge drinkers. Bottoms-up everyone, and one lump or two??!
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