A few years ago, we began writing that inexpensive Chardonnay and Shiraz from Down Under had gone to hell. We said that Australian winemakers seemed to be in a race to the bottom of the price point; that finer, somewhat pricier Australian wines were getting shoved out of the market; and that, in the long run, Australia’s wine industry would pay for all of this. Oh, the grief we got. Today, it seems that just about everybody agrees that Australia’s inexpensive Shiraz and Chardonnay have quality issues and that the industry has indeed suffered for it, with slumping sales, oceans of surplus wine and the yoke of being primarily known as a “low-cost producer.” This has become conventional wisdom. But as financial journalists most of our lives, we know that conventional wisdom is usually wrong, so we decided it was time to revisit inexpensive Australian Chardonnay, which we enjoyed so much in the 1990s.  This seemed like a good time to do it. After dropping last year, Australian imports into the U.S. surged more than 50% by volume in the first five months of this year. But the average value per liter dropped 40%, to just $2.33 per liter. Wine from Argentina had higher value and Italian wines’ per-liter value was double, according to U.S. figures, which use constant dollars. We had a few guesses about these figures. One was that much of that wine had been imported in bulk, which meant we’d be seeing private-label, inexpensive wines from Australia on shelves of big chains—kind of Two-Buck Roo, if you will. Indeed, we later crunched the U.S. numbers and found that the entire increase in Australian imports—and more—was imported in containers larger than four liters, which analysts say is generally considered bulk wine. Our other guess was that, with some of the lake being drained by bulk wine and private labels and even the Australian industry itself conceding some quality issues, the better-known names might have gotten their act together to produce better wine.  To check our theses, we set out to buy about 50 Australian Chardonnays under $20 from recent vintages. In this case we included any house brands that we saw because we wondered if there was indeed any Two-Buck Roo out there.  We were in for some early surprises. Because the 2009 harvest is already complete, we expected to see plenty of 2008s, but we didn’t. In fact, finding a good sampling of inexpensive Australian Chardonnay was surprisingly difficult. Stores that used to carry dozens now had only a couple. And the vintages of the wines were an utter mishmash. These pleasant, easy-drinking wines are meant for early consumption, but just about every store had a jumble of wines from several vintages, in some cases going back to 2003. It seems clear that stores cannot move their Australian Chardonnay at any price and are keeping the crusty old bottles on shelves and not ordering new stuff. This is bad for everybody: for consumers (who get tired wine); for the stores (whose customers wonder why they sold them this relic); and certainly for the Australian industry (which can’t sell new wine while, meantime, consumers have unpleasant experiences with the old stuff). Wine stores, take note: This is what bargain baskets and 99-cent sales are for. Or, better yet, give it away to loyal customers, with caveats.  In a broad, blind tasting of Australian Chardonnay that cost $20 or less from the 2007 and 2008 vintages, these were our favorites. These go well with light, summery foods, picnics and roast chicken. These are meant to drink young; we’d look for the 2008 vintage.  Milton Park (Barossa Vintage Limited) 2008 (South Australia). $10.99*. Very Good. Best of tasting. Fresh, clean, sunny, balanced and complete. This really tastes like Chardonnay, with some weight and texture and a somewhat velvety finish.  Down Under by Crane Lake (Crane Lake Cellars) 2008 (South Eastern Australia). $5.03. Very Good. Best value. It’s not rocket science: Just good fruit made into a clean, zippy wine with fresh-fruit tastes.  Jip Jip Rocks 2008 (Limestone Coast). $14.99. Good/Very Good. Lively, with plenty of lemony acidity, minerals and a nice bit of fleshiness to add interest. Lovely summer wine.  Mad Fish Wines ‘Unoaked’ 2007 (Western Australia). $15.99. Good/Very Good. Pleasant and lively, with restrained tastes of grapefruit and pineapple. Fun. Would stand up well to food.  Nugan Estate ‘Vision’ 2007 (Riverina). $10.98*. Good/Very Good. The only wine in the tasting that was better warmer, which is a good indication that it has nothing to hide. Not afraid to be full-bodied, with nutmeg and some density, but the fresh-fruit acidity to pull it off. A wine of some presence.  Woop Woop (Galvanized Wine Group) 2007 (South Eastern Australia). $11.99. Good/Very Good. Clean, with nice weight and an almost Riesling-like clarity, which is high praise. Some nice tang at the end. Pleasant.  *Note: Wines are rated on a scale that ranges: Yech, OK, Good, Very Good, Delicious and Delicious! These are the prices we paid at stores in California, New Jersey and New York. *We paid $9.99 for Milton Park and $9.98 for Nugan Estate, but these prices appear to be more representative. Prices vary widely.  We finally put together enough for a broad, blind tasting. We tasted them over several nights. It was not pretty. About half of the wines were like Chardonnays from the bad old days, with pickling spices, some acetate, sweet vanilla, heavy oak flavorings, little acidity and even less real fruit. They tasted more like they were made from a base of pineapples than grapes, and not very ripe pineapples in most cases.  It was clear, however, that at least some wineries are trying to get a handle on quality. More than usual had different tastes—sometimes floral, sometimes grassy—as though there is experimentation going on to find out where Australian Chardonnay should go from here. Unfortunately, most of those were failures, too, because the watery underlying fruit doomed any attempts to make the wine more interesting. At one point, John said it was as if we were judging one of those Food Network shows, in which a bunch of winemakers were given New York City tap water and told to use whatever flavorings they needed to make it taste like wine. (Hmmm, not a bad idea for a show, actually….) But, clearly, more thought is going into these wines than in the recent past, and that is a good sign for the future.  By the way, several of the wines we tried were unwooded, unoaked or “virgin.” These generally were also not successes because they didn’t have the fruit to pull it off and in some cases seemed to replace oak with sugar. They mostly tasted wan and uninteresting (with one exception—see the index).  The question isn’t whether Australia can produce a good Chardonnay for under $20—of course it can—but whether the bottles you are likely to find at stores today will be good values. The answer is no. We did find some winners, wines in which the vintner really did seem to grab hold of good grape juice and make it a balanced, fun and palatable wine. For less than $20, we are not looking for a wine that will change our lives, but simply something that we’ll enjoy sipping. There were far too few of these, but there were some—our best of tasting, Milton Park, for instance. This truly tasted like fine Chardonnay, with a little bit of the oily texture that gives Chardonnay its velvety and sometimes sexy feel. For about $11, it’s a steal. The importer, Kysela Père et Fils of Winchester, Va., says the winery made 7,000 cases, of which 5,000 were imported into the U.S. and distributed to 40 states.  One other wine stood out. In our notes we wrote: “Crisp, with crackling acidity and good, lemony fruit. Quite fruity, especially on the finish, with a summery mix of fruits like grapefruit and pineapple. Lovely, fresh wine.” When we took the bag off, this was a new wine to us: Down Under by Crane Lake, from the 2008 vintage. When we checked our notes, we were surprised and pleased to see that we had paid just $5.03. As we looked further into this wine, we were even more surprised: It is a wine imported in bulk and bottled in the U.S. The producer: Bronco Wine Co., the very same people who brought you Two-Buck Chuck. This did indeed turn out to be, in effect, Down Under Chuck, the liquid affirmation of one of our theses.  We were never big fans of Two-Buck Chuck, of which more than 500 million bottles have been sold since it was introduced eight years ago, though we thought the Sauvignon Blanc was OK. But this Australian Chardonnay, tasted blind (and tasted blind a second time), is clearly a winner. And, interestingly, its alcohol content, an easily palatable 12.5%, was tied with just two others as the lowest of the tasting (most were 13.5%).  The newspaper the Australian recently reported that bulk Chardonnay was selling in Australia for about 60 Australian cents per liter, which means that the juice inside of a bottle of Down Under Chuck probably costs about 35 U.S. cents or less. Harvey Posert, a spokesman for Bronco and for its cheerily combative CEO, Fred Franzia, confirmed that the wine is brought over in bulk from Australia and “blended and finished” at the big Bronco facility near the Napa airport. He wouldn’t say how much wine Bronco bought or how much the company paid for the wine, but he did say that “bulk wine is in oversupply all over the world.” The wine was released this month and is being distributed nationwide. While we paid $5.03, he said it’s available elsewhere for about $3. He also said the wine was intentionally bottled at a lower alcohol level than most Chardonnays and in a different kind of bottle—Down Under is in Bordeaux-shaped bottles—to distinguish it from others.  The success of Down Under in our tasting—and, we’d guess, in the market—is clearly a double-edged sword for Australia. On the one hand, it will help drain the lake of surplus wine and may also convince some consumers that Australian Chardonnay really can be as pleasant as they remember. On the other hand, it also helps tighten the “low-cost producer” collar.  As we have often written, Australia makes some world-class wines, such as Penfolds Grange, and, among more-affordable wines, it shows its stuff with less-popular varietals such as Riesling. But in terms of its inexpensive Chardonnay, it clearly is still finding its way and we’d continue to avoid that aisle because there are so many whites on shelves these days from all over the world that are better values. All that said, back in 2005 we wrote: “It’s time for the Australian wine industry to wake up and smell the bad wine.” Since then, it has. The industry clearly understands there is a problem and seems committed to doing something about it, in the long run. We wouldn’t be surprised to see a renaissance in Australian wines, even inexpensive Chardonnay, in a few years. We look forward to it—and we’ll let you know when it happens.  Write to Dottie and John at wine@wsj.com
The Journal’s wine columnists find that Australia’s wine industry is trying to fix its oversupply and quality woes, but the results mostly haven’t hit shelves. Meantime, there’s “Down Under Chuck.”