Great Australian white wines — theguardian.com

Innocent Bystander Willing Participant Chardonnay, Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia 2012 (£11.99, Tesco) There are still a lot of wine drinkers who are, as one merchant put it to me, “badly scarred” by their encounters with the big, badass Australian chardonnays of yore. Never mind that, of all the many improvements in Australian wine in the past decade or two, it’s the quality and diversity of the whites that is perhaps the most eye-catching; a lot of people still flinch at the memory of all that oaky clumsiness. It hasn’t helped that prices for Australian wines, thanks largely to exchange rates, are much higher than they used to be, with quality generally starting around a tenner. For the curious or convert, however, this Victorian is a beautifully judged and balanced example of the coolly exhilarating modern style.

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