Sweet Browns

New varieties are the name of the game for one of Australia's old-school wineries, writes TONY LOVE.

LINE UP a shelf of wines with such exotic names as vermentino, tarango, dolcetto, cienna, graciano, durif and zibibbo, and you'd think you were in a fancy European store facing uncharted waters. There's a good chance you might shy away, head back to the familiar, a bottle of chardonnay perhaps, or safe shiraz. If the producer of all those bottles happened to be Victoria's Brown Brothers, however, there might just be a moment where a fear of the unknown hovers. If there is one winemaker in Australia that might just get away with such a range - Brown Brothers is it. Partly because such wines as tarango, a light, fruit-driven red, often chilled, has now been around for 50 years. Orange muscat and flora, a late-harvested, floral sweetie for 25 years. Both are huge in Britain, too. Other oldies, crouchen and riesling, again on the sweeter side, and the dolcetto and syrah, yep, sweetish, too, with a light fizz through it, are among the top selling wines in Australia. Notice the common denominator here: sweetness tempered by a touch of chill, that obviously attracts large numbers of drinkers to these otherwise exotic-sounding varieties. Brown Brothers chief Ross Brown is at ease with the scenario. A lot of the styles he oversees have emerged from customer feedback, much via their popular cellar door at Milawa in northern Victoria, which handles 90,000 customers a year.

"That puts us in touch with customers' tastes," Brown says. "We're prepared to make styles of wines that customers ask for - those that engage your tastebuds." When it comes to the strange varietal names, it's all about trust, Brown says. "People take these on faith, now," he says. "They come to our wines for something different, not to try cabernet or shiraz. "We're surprised ourselves at how well people trial our new varieties." The wines get to drinkers after a combination of marketing nouse and clever winery practice. Latching on to a burgeoning taste for Italian white varietals like popular pinot gris/grigio styles, at around the $15 retail mark, but not liking what they saw from the Murray Valley region it depends on for its value and volume wines, the company turned to vermentino as its saviour. Trialled in a "kindergarten winery" set up to handle experiments and small-scale winemaking, this white offers plenty of interest for palates seeking more than sweetness.  The 2007 Vermentino is lovely to drink, with white fruit aromatics, light bathroom fragrance and talc texture, retained acidity, fresh, bright and friendly. Also coming soon via the same process is a bordeaux variety called carmenere, still in its infancy for Brown Brothers but showing plenty of cabernet family characteristics. And in contradiction, also from the kindergarten's small-batch process, the latest Brown Brothers Patricia range wine, a 2004 shiraz, shows that while innovation is very much part of the company's philosophy, so too is the desire to maintain wine styles that seem decidedly old school, classically oaked and a blast from the past.