Some wine regions look picturebook pretty. Some look fairly dull. McLaren Vale in South Australia looks like pure fun. Barely an hour south of Adelaide on the Fleurieu Peninsula, it's a laid-back area of rolling hills, trailing its fingers in the sea. The vineyards stretch towards beaches of golden sand. The winemakers go surfing after work. Paradise, or what?
A climate often described as more Mediterranean than the Mediterranean suits not only grapes but the flowers festooned around the wineries - great billows of bougainvillea, bobbing rows of agapanthus. There are olive trees and almond trees - so many, at one time, that the little town of Willunga was once the biggest producer of almonds in the southern hemisphere. Avocadoes and mulberries are dropping from the trees at a friendly B&B where the first lavish breakfast sets the tone for a week of the most effortlessly spectacular food you've ever gorged upon. Wine, in McLaren Vale, is part of a much bigger picture of abundance.
You only need to glance at the thick carpet of vineyards, though, to see that wine is at the centre of it all. The industry has been maturing here nicely for well over a century. Some of the oldest companies in Australia - producers such as Hardys and Normans - put their roots down in this fertile strip only a decade or two after the first free settlers had sailed into Adelaide. By the 1890s, Rosemount was there too. "More wineries were set up in response to the demand for big, full-bodied dry reds in parallel to the fortifieds," explains Colin Kay, who still has the diaries kept meticulously by his grandfather and great-uncle at Kays winery from 1891. Some of these fullbodied reds were sold as "Colonial Burgundy", he says. "And some were blended with poor-quality Burgundy or Bordeaux."
Although you'll find plenty of white wines in McLaren Vale today, they pale into insignificance alongside those big, strapping reds. Fleshy and voluptuous, they were chiefly valued, until relatively recently, as the blending agents that would give countless Australian reds a vital touch of extra richness. "McLaren Vale is the middle palate of the Australian wine industry," pundits used to say.
You'll still see McLaren Vale acknowledged in small letters on the back label of many a formidable Aussie red. But these days the region isn't content to hide its light under somebody else's bushel. Where there were only 13 producers in 1970, there are now more than 60 - most of them making quality wines. Geoff Merrill and Maglieri are two of the names Ireland knows well from this flowering, which began some 20 years ago. Newer on the scene here are Maxwell and Tatachilla. But there's still a lot of tasty stuff to come. Look out for names such as Chapel Hill, Fox Creek, Hamilton, Steve Maglieri's brave new venture Serafino or the others mentioned below.
What grapes do best? My top marks all go to Shiraz, McLaren Vale's most widely planted grape, and the one that seems to be most capable of delivering wonderful nuances of flavour. "Shiraz here is a different animal on different soils," explains Rosemount's winemaker Charles Whish. "On sandy soil, it's floral, perfumed with violets. On heavier ground it's plummy and earthy. Most producers try to blend both."
But a panoply of other red grapes play significant supporting roles. Grenache and Mourvedre are here - riper and headier than in the Rhone. Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are soft and lush. D'Arenberg, a flourishing 90-year-old winery whose colourful roots involve a duel and descent from a former Trinity professor of languages, has plantings of all sorts of un-Australian grapes including Tempranillo and Sangrantino. Coriole specialises in Nebbiolo and Sangiovese; Pirramimma in Petit Verdot; Kangarilla Road in Zinfandel.
What does all this boil down to? Wines that aren't for weaklings. Even on a chilly Irish evening, McLaren Vale's generous reds can sometimes be a touch overpowering. In the oven-warm air of a summer evening dinner party in McLaren Vale, on a deck overlooking the ocean, they seem hazardous to health. The bottles on the table are around 15 per cent alcohol. One wine, Eclipse, made by Master of Wine Drew Noon, is rated 15.7 per cent. "Too heavy for you?" inquires a dentist-turned-grape-grower. "We like 'em this way. We love 'em!"
Thank goodness Greg Trott, the owner of Wirra Wirra, sides with your reeling correspondent. "We're making far too much alcoholic wine in McLaren Vale. Twelve to fifteen years ago, some of the great wines here were 12.5 per cent alcohol and they're still drinking extremely well. Now there's a belief that you should leave the fruit on the vine as long as possible to get the flavours up - and the alcohol goes up too."
But we probably shouldn't be too critical, because that quest for optimal ripeness is part of a generally welcome trend. At just about every winery, the emphasis is not so much on whizz-bang equipment in the cellar as on the blackening little berries out on the vines. "We're moving towards the European belief that great wine is made in the vineyard," says Simon White in BRL Hardy's century-old Nottage Hill block, after an airy warning to look out for tiger snakes. "Technology-driven winemakers are a dying breed in this area, and that's great."
Traditional methods seem to be winning out over high-tech wizardry. Companies such as Rosemount and Tatachilla are making their reds in old, open-top fermenters because they believe the results are unbeatable. Hardys and D'Arenberg are so convinced about the quality of the wines coming out of their ancient open vats, where the cap of fermenting skins is punched down by hand, that they've ordered dozens of new ones.
"You really notice the difference after a couple of years," explains D'Arenberg's Chester Osborn. "You get more youthful fruit, more fragrance, better length." As for the old basket presses that hundreds of Australian wineries have dumped, they are used here religiously. "We're going to start building them soon, so that we can sell them," says Osborn, who has been rejuvenating the family business with undisputed flair for the past 15 years. Then away he goes, long fair hair and hippy shirt both flapping in the wind. To another good restaurant, probably - or another great beachside party.