Australian Wine Region Woes.  Add/Read Comments

For 12 years the Australian wine industry has been drawing and redrawing its regional boundaries. It's taken longer than expected, cost millions of dollars in legal wrangling and still has a way to go before it's finished. But is it a marketing issue or one of distinctive terroir?

The Age
"Arguments about geographical indications are dry, and it's hard for wine drinkers to get excited about them. We can only make decisions about what we buy through reading a wine label. And if that label treats an individual area as some part of an amorphous mass, without any uniqueness of wine style, are we the losers? But if the GIC gives the go-ahead to a wine region that doesn't have any great critical mass and whose economic survival may be in doubt, don't we also lose? As the GIC goes about putting the finishing touches to its wine map of Australia, there are a few last stumbling blocks - Gippsland and King Valley in particular - that question the very foundation of its decision-making process. Australian wine producers aren't used to being wrapped in red-tape and legally tied and bound. It's a new experience and an unsettling one - perhaps with good reason.