Burning the taste buds of a bragging colleague

Don’t you just hate it when you have a know-it-all colleague who’s stubbornness means you’ll never ‘win’…?

I was having a nice conversation today with our VIP work experience student (that’s how I like to call him – he’s the son of the sponsor of a Very Important Group in the world of wine), who was asking me about the best wine I’ve ever tasted.

Hard question, but I’ll come to that another time. Anyway, he was actually quite interested in Australia and I expect being young he hasn’t yet been contaminated with the general snootiness of the rest of Europe to Aussie wine.

He was asking me about the drought problems when my colleague piped up mumbling about some oenologist he once met who said that Australian wine was all tainted with chemicals. I didn’t catch the whole story.

I asked: “Have you ever actually drunk any Australian wine?” To which he said: “I’ve tried to minimise any damage in that area.” Which I took to be a no. And on saying so to him, his response was: “You’re destroying the world with chemicals”, and the evidence of this is “it’s a known fact”.

Profound philosophical stuff for a Thursday afternoon. It disappoints me that despite all the good quality wine in Australia, will still can’t get ourselves respected through the wilful ignorance of our European counterparts. We’re talking about someone who works in the wine industry and it’s disturbing that there is no desire to develop the palate with other worldly adventures.

Maybe I’ll have to accept the fact that generally, Europe doesn’t care about Australian wine. The upside is that Australians don’t really give a frig about stuff from Europe either. And that’s a great thing for both consumers and producers in Australia as enjoying local wine is exactly what we should be doing.

A recent discussion on our Ozwine group forum showed that drinking habits in Australia are generally kept close to home and no-one strays too far from the back paddock. I don’t mind so much but in the interests of diversification, it would be nice to see the old world and the new get to know and appreciate each other – rather than mud-flinging chemical accusations.