Australia: fortified to table wine and back to place

Vines arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, and by the mid-nineteenth century there were established industries in the Hunter Valley, the Barossa and Victoria.

For most of the following century Australia’s wine was fortified. Sweet fortified wine dominated production and export, and "Australian burgundy" and similar borrowed names were the norm for table wine.

The shift to table wine came in the 1960s and 1970s, enabled by refrigeration and stainless steel and driven by post-war immigration changing domestic tastes. The wine cask, an Australian invention of 1965, transformed domestic consumption.

The 1990s export boom was built on branded, ripe, oak-influenced Chardonnay and Shiraz at accessible prices, and it was enormously successful and eventually limiting.

The current phase is regional and technical: the Geographical Indications system formalised from 1993, a move into cooler sites, lower-alcohol styles, a rediscovery of old-vine Barossa and Hunter material, and considerable technical leadership through the AWRI.

Water and fire are the standing constraints. Irrigation from the Murray–Darling system underpins large-scale production, and smoke taint from bushfires has become a recurring commercial risk.