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andrew -> Australian Regional Blends (9/15/2013 4:18:16 PM)
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Australia has a long tradition of blending grapes and wines from various regions in order to optimize the final product. (Penfold's Grange being the classic example.) As Australia's version of Appellations (GI or Geographical Indication) has gained traction and individual GIs have established strong brand identities, there is a small trend to put the combinations on the label. Wines will say something like "Hunter Valley / McLaren Vale."
We try to have as much fidelity to labels as possible and we hate to lose information, but the Cellartracker use of these combination GIs in the Appellation field has cause more problems than are made up for the few wines that legitimately use it. Automatic mapping functions, including our own, are just as likely to find 'Hunter Valley / McLaren Vale' as find just 'Hunter Valley.' Users have the same problem especially since very popular GIs like are located in sub-regions that nobody has heard of like 'Fleurieu' and a user searching for McLaren Vale will logically pick something that seems a little more sensible and without unknown terms. We have a situation where the vast majority of wines in combination Appellations really belong in one or the other. And when I say vast majority, I mean like 99.5%.
So, these combination Appellations are going away. I have already eliminated a bunch and am slowly working through the rest wine-by-wine. In cases where there is truly a multi-region wine, it will be assigned the logical super-region like South Eastern Australia or just Australia. We will try to note in the Wiki what the origin is. I really wish we could keep this level of detail, but these combinations have just become too much of a honey trap.
If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.
A.
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