This week I have been

tasting Bacchus. It's a grape variety, a German breed that's a cross between riesling, sylvaner and muller-thurgau. Aromatic white variety, in other words. It was much planted in England, and I was tasting it at the International Cool Climate Wine Symposium in Brighton (England). I rather like it - perfumed, but dry, the sort of wine you'd have on a summer's afternoon, or with some smoked trout or salmon, as a relaxed nibble. I say "was planted", because it was one of the early planted varieties. Chardonnay and pinot noir are now more common.I've been surprised by English wines. There's been much talk about them and their future in the symposium, along with discussion about climate change, winemaking techniques, vineyard soils, and so on. You think wine is 'natural' and can make itself? Forgot that. As one of the key presenters said: "Wine is not natural. It does not grow in bottles on trees." In other words, human intervention is essential. Everyone thinks the real future of English wine is sparkling wine, and an English sparkling wine won the international challenge a few years ago. I tasted some really interesting ones: fresh, zingy. Most are made with chardonnay and sometimes with pinot noir.Since we'd come from a week in Champagne, it was a bit hard to get a handle of them. I like the yeast notes in champagne, the complexity of them. The English wine writer Oz Clarke introduced a whole bracket of wines, and the single most useful tip I got from the eloquent Clarke was to look for the aromas of English flowers, like elderflower and hedgerow.By Australian stardards, it's a very small industry in England, with 2000 ha under vines, and 502 commercial vineyards and 133 wineries. (Victoria alone has about 800 wineries, and 600 cellar doors.) Lots of small enterprises in England and Wales, all planted by intense and committed people. It's an industry set to grow, and as people get to know their patch of earth better, as they grow their vines better, and particularly as the vines get older, I expect the wines to become much better. They will develop their own style, and will be identifiably English. Just as Tasmanian wines, for example, developed their own style. (The dirty word in the English wine industry begins with F: French. French wines remain a kind of benchmark standard, a shadow over English wines.)I gave a paper at the symposium on wine tourism, using Victorian experiences, talking first about Rutherglen. In the session I spoke at, there were papers on wine tourism in Texas (Texas? USA? Yes indeed), Georgia (not the USA), and Lebanon. Four very different stories. What was very clear as we all spoke was that wine tourism is a considerable part of regional development since it has so many companions - restaurants, cafes, hotels, and so on.