At the risk of stating the obvious, Australia is a rather large country in the southern hemisphere, bounded by the Indian and Pacific Oceans. If you overlay a map of Europe on Australia you’ll find they are about the same size, and so you need to apply this scaling when considering wine-growing areas. Australia is not one big, homogeneous vineyard producing big, homogenous wines, but has many different wine-growing regions, each with its own topography and climate. Australia’s southern location means that the temperature increases as you go north. It is generally quite a hot place, the heat being moderated by the presence of the oceans, prevailing winds, and topography (especially altitude). Whereas in Europe, wines are generally produced in the warmer areas of a temperate continent, in Australia, grapes thrive in the temperate areas of a hot continent. That’s where most of the 20 Million population are as well.

A little history of questionable accuracy
Early colonists were producing wine from imported European vines in the late 18th century, although they weren’t particularly good at it. Over the course of the next century, Australian wine production improved considerably, greatly assisted by an influx of Lutheran dissidents from Germany, who both added Riesling vines and, more importantly, were thrifty, hard-working and frugal farmers. Many of the most well-known names in the Australian wine industry (e.g. Henschke, Glaetzer, Lehmann, Max Schubert, father of Penfold’s Grange), in particular in the Barossa area, originate from this influx.

A less-convivial import for Australian wine production was the Phylloxera louse, which on its world tour devastated vineyards in Victoria in the late 19th century. Fortunately (considering that this little !^&#@ almost entirely wiped out European vines), South Australia and New South Wales were spared - being a big, arid and relatively empty country has some advantages when it comes to disease control – and consequently now have some of the oldest and most ‘authentic’ (not grafted) vines on the planet.

Although occasionally punctuating the wine world stage with astounding wines, Australian largely kept their wines to themselves, suffering cycles of domestic boom and bust and a rather unflattering Monty Python sketch