Why do we Irish drink Australian wine with such relish? Easy, I hear you grunt. Those upfront, fruity flavours? Right. Good, consistent quality for the price? Right again. More interesting wines all the time? No doubt. Slick marketing? Too right, mate. And the Irish get on well with the Aussies, which can't do any harm. But there is one other thing which helps to explain why sales of Australian wine in Ireland have grown at an average 32 per cent every year for the past six. The Hazel factor.
Hazel Murphy is the Englishwoman who has been running the Australian Wine Bureau in London for the past 14 years. While countries with trade offices in Dublin seem to struggle with varying degrees of bureaucracy and inertia in their efforts to promote their country's wines, she and her Irish lieutenant, John McDonnell in Ballyvaughan, just keep pouring samples. The Irish wine trade, and indeed many Irish wine consumers, know Hazel Murphy as well as they know hazelnuts, because she's over here so often, persuading everybody in her path to taste Australia. People don't usually argue.
Talking about Australian wine, she comes across as bubblier than Angas Brut. Standing anywhere in the vicinity of a few rugged Aussie winemakers, she looks as fragile and delicate as a Meissen figure. But this is wine's Iron Lady. HMS Battleship, she is nicknamed by Robert Hill Smith of the major wine company Yalumba. "They say I'm an awful old battle-axe," she grins. "Small in stature, but I go for the throat." Stories are legion about her refusal to be messed about - or to abandon a brilliant PR idea because of some minor little problem like funding.
I have heard that single word "Hazel" uttered with fear and awe by a dozen of Australia's most confident producers. "Hazel says . . . ", they dip into their pockets, she gets her way, sales go up. "The day I lead them down the wrong path, that'll be it, but so far I've got away with it," she says. Not so much got away with it as been applauded. In 1996, she garnered both the Order of Australia and the Maurice O'Shea Award, which the Australian wine industry bestows on the individual who does most for its cause.
Hazel (whose Murphy, acquired through marriage, has no easily-traceable Irish connections) must come as close as an Anglo-Saxon can to epitomising that bright, blunt, get-on-with-it mentality which we recognise as distinctively Australian. From the mid-1970s, she worked for 10 years for the Australian Trade Commission in Manchester, promoting a range of consumables wide enough to embrace cardboard mousetraps and earth for fining beer. During that time, wine was added to her list. "I knew absolutely nothing about wine then," she says cheerfully. "I was probably drinking Mateus Rose." It was, after all, early days for the industry in Australia: there was no such thing as Chardonnay until 1975.
By 1985, she had been persuaded by nine producers to open a small London office to promote their wine in Britain and Ireland. Now the Australian Wine Bureau is bankrolled by more than 80 producers, and Murphy's territory includes Germany, the Netherlands, France, the Benelux countries and Italy. Not surprisingly, Australia's wine exports have increased, 25-fold.
Where other countries have tended to pour their promotional efforts into advertising, Murphy's approach - initially constrained by meagre budgets - has always been simply to let as many people as possible taste as many wines as possible. Tastings and roadshows have been mounted all over the place - from the Hampton Court Flower Show (22,000 visitors last year) to the Irish Ploughing Championships. As well, members of the wine and restaurant trades and press have been encouraged to visit Australia. The first Irish "Wineflight", taking in some 30 wineries in a fortnight, is due to take off in March.
The Australian Wine Bureau mounted its second annual seminar in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, with three heavyweights from Down Under. Brett Crittenden of Domaine Chandon, the Moet-owned winery which makes Green Point, talked about Australian sparkling wines, highlighting the "ultra-premium" category (£12.99-£15.99 here) as the way forward. Phil Laffer, chief winemaker of Orlando-Wyndham, spoke about Australia's firm belief in blending wines - for quality and complexity, rather than to mask shortcomings. Bill Hardy of BRL Hardy provided a whistle-stop tour of the regions which will be important in the future. Is the Irish consumer ready to think about Australian wine regions individually, he wondered? Maybe not quite, but it's a hot topic in the making.
Murphy, meanwhile, has zoomed back to London, all fired up about a new website which she is about to launch. "Young people - they're the ones I want to get to," she says. "Robert Joseph, the publishing editor of Wine magazine, caused a furore in Adelaide last autumn when he said "Wine is not interesting to most people" - but you know he's right! We have to find ways of making it interesting. That's what's so exciting about the Internet. Do you realise a site called Grapevine, which has nothing on it yet, has had 250,000 hits in just four months?' I didn't, and I'm wilting in the jetstream of her unrelenting energy. I think I need a drink.