Recipes To Share

Posts Tagged ‘blending’

Australia has produced some very popular wines over the years and has a climate conducive to producing bottles considered some of the best in the world. Other surrounding countries such as New Zealand and Fiji are now getting in on the act however and are growing their stakes in the market by experimenting with innovative wine production.

In the news recently was the high-profile contentious issue of wine producers being able to mix together red and white wine, and call the end product rosé. The traditional method of producing rosé wine involved taking the red grape skins out of the juice mixture early on in the process so that only a little of the colour ends up in the final product. However, just mixing small quantities of red wine into white is the method that has seen a massive rise in popularity recently…a result of the recession forcing cheaper production methods to be adopted.

Countries such as France, widely considered the finest wine producing country in the world, were not best pleased with this “mutilation” of rosé wine and did not agree for it to be sold in their country, or even be given as wine gifts. However, some countries, including those surrounding Australia have allowed the wine to be produced, and it is certainly paving dividends for their wine producers. A spokesman from the New Zealand alcohol authority defended his country’s move by stating that people are free to consume whichever wine they wish. The companies that produce this blended form of rosé wine do not use any trickery to try and sell it as the traditionally made variety, and there are clear differences in the pricing. The spokesman argued that if people can make milk chocolate in a thousand different ways, why can the same not be done for rosé?

Many of the Australasian countries have even embraced the full blending together of other wines as well.  In Fiji for example you can buy Sauvignon Blanc mixed with Chardonnay and Merlot blended with Cabernet Sauvignon. Fiji seem to have similar opinions to the wine makers in New Zealand and have said that they are able to blend their wine just as well as a whisky maker might blend two single malts to make a great blended drink. They state that companies all over the world, and in particular Scotland, produce some very fine blended whiskies that not only often taste superior to single malts, but that are also able to sell at more modest prices. Next they will be telling us which tableware we must use when consuming the wine, stated one official.

The natives of Fiji have really taken a liking to this new blended wine, with around 150,000 bottles sold last year alone. This might not sound like the largest figure in the world, but when you consider that the population of the country is little over 800,000, you soon realise how popular it actually is. There are plans to start exporting this fully blended wine very soon and given the fact they are able to undercut many ‘single malt’ wine produces, they are almost certain to do well.