Australians are loving our sauvignon blanc wines...well, many Australians, but clearly most of those wines don't impress Graeme Phillips, a wine writer for The Mercury newspaper in Hobart.

In a recent column, Phillips said one in every three bottles of white wine sold in Australia is a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand's Marlborough region. Nothing wrong with that comment, but he then went on to describe "many" of our sauvignon blancs selling in Australia as "cheap and over-cropped savvies (that) are indeed simple and frivolous".

He told his readers sauvignon blanc means different things to different people.

"Fresh and fruity for some becomes green, sweaty and weedy for others, while many experts dismiss the variety out of hand as too simple and frivolous to worry about."

He said, despite the so-called experts, plantings in Australia have increased from 2700ha in 2000 to 7100ha in 2010, with the harvest more than tripling from 21,500 to 71,900 tonnes.

"However there's a lot more to sauvignon blanc than a happy-hour drop," he wrote.

"An increasing number of winemakers are pushing fuller, richer, more structured and age-worthy styles by fermenting and/or maturing their wines in oak, using wild yeast ferments, leaving the wine for a time on lees and so on, techniques more usually associated with chardonnay, and producing wines which, in terms of depth and complexity, give chardonnay a run for its money."

Here is Phillips' full article: http://tinyurl.com/3hqlxjh