Recipes TravelWine Beer CigarsWine AustraliaMmmmmm WineWine Destinations10 WineInfographic WineGlobal WineAustralian WineForwardTop wine destinations around the world. Sure to find some great wines and food!WINE snobs on a budget are the winners in the latest battle between Coles and Aldi.The supermarket giant’s liquor arm is gearing up to take on the German discounter with private label plonk, after Aldi won over drinkers with a slew of awards.A $5 bottle of red sold exclusively at Coles was yesterday named as the best wine under $20 from Australia and New Zealand at the Winestate Wine of the Year Awards.The James Busby Big & Bold Shiraz 2015 was chosen from a field of 10,000 wines by a panel of expert judges that included Australian wine industry legend Wolf Blass.It was the cheapest wine ever to win the award, and the first time a home brand took the honours.“It was a shock and there was a fair bit of mirth when it was revealed the Coles wine won,’’ Winestate publisher and head of the judging panel Peter Simic told The Australian.

“We have never seen anything like it.’’Now Coles is looking at expanding its private label wine range to compete with Aldi, which has lured wine lovers with its surprisingly high-performing budget booze. Since branching out into liquor in 2003, the German supermarket chain has grown its wine business at 10 times the industry rate.Six of its low-cost wines received gongs at last year’s Sydney International Wine Competition, including a $5 private label rose that became a customer favourite. Coles, which sells alcohol through its Liquorland, Vintage Cellars, First Choice and Liquor Market outlets, is playing catch-up. The retailer wants to grow its private label portfolio from the current 10 to 20 per cent of brands currently stocked, its head of wine sourcing Ed Ashley told Fairfax Media. It comes as rival Woolworths beefs up its private label range of everyday grocery items, with so-called “phantom products” that match Aldi’s approach of leaving the supermarket’s name off its home brands.

Woolworths chairman Gordon Cairns yesterday admitted the retailer had initially failed to take the discount chain seriously when it arrived in Australia 15 years ago.“We were somewhat lackadaisical in responding to the threat from Aldi — that is no longer the case,” Mr Cairns said during the group’s annual general meeting.But he said Woolies’ own-brand products now matched Aldi’s prices, and that it had regained its lead in fresh food after temporarily losing its mantle to Coles.Alcohol was named as one of the retailer’s top five priorities for its turnaround, with its $484-million-a-year Endeavour Drinks Group — which includes Dan Murphy’s and BWS — one of the only segments to grow its earnings in the last financial year.Chief executive Brad Banducci echoed Mr Cairns’ view of Aldi after shareholders expressed concern about Woolworths having not kept up with the competition.“We didn’t treat Aldi with the respect they deserved as a very successful global retailer,” Mr Banducci said.

“We have done a lot of work on our own brands.”He said the group initially matched its entry-level Home Brand product prices with Aldi’s prices but “it didn’t move the dial” until Woolworths began phasing out Home Brand and redesigning and expanding its Essentials brand last year.Want to gift wine like a master this holiday season? Charles Curtis, master of wine and former head of wine for Christie's, joins Lunch Break with three fine wines at three affordable price points for everyone on your list. great food and wine sitesA few years ago, Australian wines were the hottest around: Consumers couldn't get enough of those strapping shirazes with the quirky names (the Mad Hatter, the Dead Arm, the Ball Buster) and the eye-catching labels. food and wine 20 best recipes everAcross all price points, Australia was ascendant. top wine stores in chicago

Not anymore: Buyers who used to make a beeline for the Antipodean section of their local wine shops are today waltzing right past it. Depending on who's doing the counting, exports of Australian wines to the United States fell by 15 percent to 26 percent in value last year; whatever the precise figure, the arrows are all pointing sharply downward, and with retailers paring back their Aussie selections in response to the flagging demand, this year threatens more of the same. best white wine under 10 dollarsFoster's may be Australian for beer (mate); best wine affiliate programit appears that screwed is now Australian for wine.top rated wine bars nyc To be sure, vintners everywhere are struggling on account of the global economic crisis, and Australia has been hit especially hard by the gyrations in the financial markets. best wine ingredients

The Australian dollar surged to a 25-year high against the U.S. dollar last summer, which was a big headache for a wine industry heavily dependent on sales abroad. Unremittingly severe weather has also had devastating consequences. Droughts have ravaged parts of Australian wine country. The recent heat wave and wildfires in Victoria destroyed wineries and damaged a number of vineyards, with as much as 70 percent of the crop lost in some areas. good wine store hong kongBut while the Australians have been victimized by a run of bad luck, their woes are mostly self-generated; top 10 wine brands in canadathey've trashed their own brand, a point many of them now concede. The biggest problem is that Australia has made itself synonymous in the minds of many drinkers with cut-rate, generic wines. Thanks to industrial giants like Jacob's Creek and Rosemount, Australia has long been a prime source of mass-market chardonnays and shirazes.

In recent years, however, it has flooded the planet with discount juice. Much of the credit, or blame, for this can be pinned not on a conglomerate but on a family of Sicilian immigrants in New South Wales. In 2001, Filippo Casella and his son John launched a line of wines called Yellow Tail, whose colorful label featured that iconic Australian, the wallaby. The appealing packaging, combined with the decent quality of the wines and the low price ($7), proved to be a masterstroke: In just three years, Yellow Tail became the most popular imported wine in the United States, with sales of around 4 million cases annually. (Sales have nearly doubled since, and according to industry analyst Eileen Fredrikson, Yellow Tail today accounts for almost half the Australian wine purchased here.) However, what was good for Yellow Tail wasn't so great for the Australian wines as a whole. For one thing, Yellow Tail spawned a legion of imitators, and retail shelves were soon crawling with "critter" labels featuring penguins, crocodiles, and other regional fauna.

At the same time, Yellow Tail's success prompted rival Australian brands to focus even more of their efforts on the budget category. As a result, consumers came to equate Australia with wines that were flavorful but also cheap and frivolous, a perception that became a major liability when those same consumers got interested in more serious stuff; rather than looking to Oz, they turned to Spain, Italy, and France. Sales of inexpensive Australian wines ($12 and under) are still fairly robust, but Australia's dominance in the bargain bins is being challenged now by low-cost producers in countries like Argentina (whose exports to the United States jumped 31 percent last year), Chile, and South Africa. Among industry insiders, it is widely agreed that Australia no longer has a competitive advantage in this segment of the market and that the emphasis on value wines has been a colossal blunder. Paul Henry of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corp., a government-sponsored marketing organization, recently told Reuters that the days in which Australia led the world in its "ability to produce large volumes of compellingly branded easy-drinking wine" were over.

The consensus is that Australia needs to reintroduce itself to consumers—to acquaint them with the quality of Australian terroir and with the country's enormous viticultural diversity. The hope is that this will help persuade them to pony up for pricier wines. However, premium Australian wines are suffering, too. According to Nielsen, while overall sales of wines costing $15 and more are up 2 percent in the last year, Australian wines in that category have declined 17 percent. The market for the costliest Australian wines has essentially collapsed. Chuck Hayward of the Jug Shop, a San Francisco retailer with one of the best Australian selections in the country, says his sales of Australian wines costing $40 and up are off 50 percent. Another merchant, Daniel Posner of Grapes the Wine Co. in White Plains, N.Y., reports a similar fall and says he has cut his Australian inventory by half in recent months—from 135 different wines down to 70. But then, the problem for top-shelf Australian wines isn't price so much as taste.

In the last decade, ultraripe, high-alcohol, extravagantly oaked shirazes from the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, regions close to Adelaide, came to dominate the luxury end of the Australian wine market in the United States. It is a rendering of shiraz that Robert Parker happens to adore, and the huge scores that his publication, the Wine Advocate, awarded many of the wines made them wildly popular, which encouraged producers to pump out more and more of these purple people-eaters (the ever-decorous Australians refer to them as "leg spreaders") and retailers and importers to load up on them. But consumers have now soured on this genre. Hayward thinks it is a case of fruit-bomb fatigue—that people ultimately found the wines to be overbearing and tiresome. It didn't help that a lot of these wines seemed to share the same basic profile—sweet, jammy fruit, strong oak influences—and were more or less indistinguishable from one another. It has also been suggested that many of the hulking shirazes were simply overrated.

Whatever the case, pricey Australian wines are now the lepers of the fine-wine market, and many oenophiles appear to have written off Australia entirely. "It is a nightmarish situation," says Posner. It is certainly an unfortunate one, because Australia is capable of producing sensational wines, a point convincingly demonstrated at a Penfolds tasting I attended in New York last fall. Penfolds is Australia's best-known winery and makes its most famous wine, Penfolds Grange, a shiraz that has long been considered among the pre-eminent liquid collectibles. The lunch included the 2002, 1991, and 1990 Grange, all of which were terrific, as well as the 1990 vintage of the Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon, another benchmark Australian wine. They also served the Penfolds 1962 Bin 60A Cabernet-Shiraz and the 1967 Bin 7 Cabernet-Shiraz, two celebrated rarities. Although both were now a little creaky, they were still superb, with as much complexity and nuance as you could hope to find in a wine. While Penfolds is itself one of the major Australian brands and is owned by an even bigger brand, the Foster's Group (yes, that Foster's), it continues to turn out an impressive portfolio.

The Grange is a hefty investment—$250 to $400 a bottle, depending on the vintage—and the Bin 707 isn't cheap, either, selling for around $90 to $100. But Penfolds produces a number of less-expensive bottlings, including one of the wine world's best-kept secrets: the St. Henri Shiraz. Made without any new oak (it can be done!), the St. Henri is a delicious shiraz that can age for decades and easily holds its own against wines from France's Northern Rhone Valley (syrah's heartland). It goes for around $50 a bottle and should ideally be kept in the cellar for at least a few years; if curiosity pulls the cork, you should decant it for several hours before serving. Not every Australian wine is big and red: The country also produces excellent dry rieslings. Look for examples from Grosset, Frankland Estate, and Kilikanoon as well as the Penfolds Bin 51 Riesling ($17) and a favorite of mine, the Leeuwin Estate Art Series Riesling ($21). Leeuwin, which is in the Margaret River district of Western Australia and also produces well-regarded chardonnays, cabernets, and shirazes, is represented in the United States by Old Bridge Cellars, one of several importers putting an accent on regional diversity and finesse-driven winemaking.

While I definitely prefer elegance over power, I find that some of the more restrained Australian wines lack personality; it is almost as if they've had the character leached out of them. Harnessed exuberance is exactly what I want from Australian wines, but achieving that state of equilibrium is evidently not easy. That said, there are some good wines being imported by Old Bridge, as well as the Australian Premium Wine Collection, Epicurean Wines, and Southern Starz. Surprisingly, some of the best Australian wines I've tasted recently are the handiwork of a pair of Americans, Aspen-based sommelier Richard Betts and his friend Dennis Scholl, an art collector and oenophile. Betts & Scholl, as their label is known, is producing wine in France, California, and Australia. Teaming up with winemaker Christian Canute, one of the leading talents in the Barossa Valley, Betts & Scholl puts out two exemplary grenaches, the O.G. ($29) and the Chronique ($49). These are big but balanced wines, full of sunshine and warmth and with a terrific herbal kick that evokes thoughts of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.