Australia's trendiest white wine

Viognier is the 'it' white wine in Australia today. Heaps of winemakers across the country are planting and making examples of this white grape, and you see them in bottle shops and on restaurant wine lists everywhere.

Why so trendy?
Well, for a start, it's got heaps of flavour: wine made from viognier usually smells of really ripe apricots, even dried apricots, and cream and honey and sometimes, bizarrely, musk sticks. But even though it's got all these rich, even sweet-smelling, flavours, it's a dry wine, which makes it a good wine for drinking with exotically flavoured but savoury food. Chicken and fish cooked with Middle Eastern spices are particularly fab to eat with viognier. Try fish fillets crumbed in falafel mixture and pan-fried. They're terrific with a cold glass of viognier.

Viognier is a grapevine well-suited to the mostly warm, sunny Australian grape-growing conditions. The viognier grape needs quite a bit of sunshine to get fully ripe, and it's only when it's fully ripe that it develops those exotic, spicy flavours.

Shiraz-viognier is also an amazingly trendy wine style. Why? Well, contrary to what you might think, if you add a little (say five per cent) of white viognier grapes to fermenting red shiraz grapes, it doesn't dilute the blend but instead (thanks to what's called co-pigmentation compounds in the viognier grapes) makes the resulting purple-red wine darker and more aromatic. In some ways, adding a splash of viognier turns ordinary-tasting shiraz into a more interesting drink.

TIP: A lot of people have trouble pronouncing viognier, so here's a foolproof way of remembering how to say it so you don't look like a dill the next time you ask for a bottle...

Think of yourself as a kindly farmer who's just caught some pesky kids stealing apples from your orchard. You give them a gentle scolding, then smile and say, 'Be on your way'. Or, in the case of viognier, vee-on-knee-ay.

Source: Max Allen, Better Homes and Gardens TV