Mark Hanes is a provocative wine writer and this makes The Hanes Wines Review a pleasure to read. In his May/June newsletter, he urges his readers to seek out the wines of Western Australia, which was like music to our ears. We are great admirers of wines from Margaret River, having had palate-tingling Chardonnays and Cab Shirazes from that region. Hanes definitely has more to say, but he some very interesting observations at the beginning of his article. He writes:

" Australia is a big country and it can take awhile to get a handle on what the regions are and what differences, if any, exist among them. To Hanes, the biggest initial obstacle to achieving this knowledge remains how the basic wine regions are outlined.

"First of all, they are waaaaay too large to be useful in any meaningful way. Wine is said to come from the Australian states, i.e., South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria or Western Australia. And some from Tasmania too, why not. All of these regions encompass so many varied sub-regions that it is really impossible to speak of the character of "South Australian" wines as one would of wines from Burgundy or Tuscany.

" The underlying problem is that across wine producing nations there exists an unevenness in basic regional category levels (something which plagues Californian wines at times too). Many are just too overly broad. Basic inexpensive wines (think Rosemount or the like) get labelled as 'South Australia' Shiraz or maybe a tad more specific 'Southeastern Australia' Shiraz. But this really means very little because the ultimate sources which fall under this labelling umbrella are so varied that you don't truly get any more specific sense of what the character of the wine is than if the label just said 'Australian' Shiraz. At all price points, inexpensive to expensive, you get much more useful specificity on European labels, even if they remain general regional designations such as Nahe, Rioja, Dão, Bordeaux, etc."

Very interesting! For more, follow this link and read with a Margaret River wine: http://www.haneswinereview.com/articles/0605rant.html