Back in 1972, the very idea of Australian wine was regarded as comical in England, hardly a country associated with premium vintages itself. The high point of this derision came when Monty Python’s Eric Idle performed a monologue consisting largely of fictional antipodean vintages. Notable among these was the “Old Smokey 1968” which, we were informed, could be “favorably compared to a Welsh Claret.”

Fast forward to 2016 and the UK has long been established as the Australian wine industry’s top export market by volume. Although Claret – the English term for Bordeaux – is not yet produced in Wales. Burgundy expert Jasper Morris confesses to having braved a Welsh Pinot Noir. Perhaps surprisingly, he deemed it “not at all bad.”

While it wasn’t good enough to give Burgundy or New Zealand anything to worry about, it may, though, be a useful pointer to the future.

Australian sparkling wine producers, for instance, are certainly no longer sniggering at England’s performance in their own sector. In fact, English sparkling wine has impressed even the Champenois. One of the reasons most often cited for this bizarre development is – almost inevitably – those dreaded words climate change.

Morris was recently in Hong Kong to introduce the Berry Bros & Rudd <I>en primeur</I> offering from the 2014 Burgundy vintage. While passing through, he did offer his view that changes in weather patterns have certainly made a difference to the wines from that particular part of Europe.

It transpired he had recently attended a conference at which a paper on global warming was presented. It findings were based on readings taken over the course of a year in the vineyards of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, one of the greatest of the Burgundian estates.

Summarising the presentation, he said: “Across the year you can’t really tell the difference from previous averages. In spring and autumn, though, there is a clear change.

“Most obviously, the weather patterns are more erratic. You get heat spikes, unexpected hits of frost and so forth. Taken as a whole, the rainfall patterns may not be all that different, but they may be more violent. While we’ve always had hail problems – every year somebody has a hail problem – now there are much bigger storms, storms capable of wiping out the vineyards of entire villages.”

Thanks to these incidents of extreme weather, Morris says the growers “hardly ever make a full crop anymore.” As a result, now demand for the region’s better wines often greatly exceeds supply.

Other – subtler – changes have also become apparent, at least some of which benefit certain vineyard owners, according to Morris, who has been professionally involved in buying and selling Burgundy wines since 1981. He is also the author of Inside Burgundy, winner of the 2011 André Simon award for Best Wine Book of the Year.

Identifying these changes, he says: “Quality is moving up the hillside a bit. Some vineyards which weren’t that thrilling back in the nineteenth century, when people started doing classifications, are now regarded amongst the best. Chambolle Musigny Les Fuées and Les Cras, and Volnay Clos de Chenes and Taille Pieds are now much better thought of than back then or even when I first came into the business.

“I haven’t yet really perceived any great vineyards as being any worse than they were, though, but it’s something I’m watching out for.”

Another prominent figure in the world of wine with climate change on his mind is Angelo Gaja, a recent visitor to Hong Kong and Shanghai on one of his rare public appearances. He is regarded as one of the most influential figures in Italian wine, with a record of innovation stretching back to the early 1960s.

These days, he says his time is spent managing a range of problems, ranging from new vineyard pests to trying to limit soaring levels of alcohol. He too, though, has seen certain benefits accruing as a result of climate change. This, he says, is particularly the case for Piedmont’s Barbaresco wines, historically less highly esteemed than Barolo on account of the fact they were lower in alcohol.

He says: “I believe that climate change has benefitted Barbaresco. It is a champion of the elegant wines. The champion in Italy, I believe, and one of the elegant wines that always goes better with food.”

He does concede, however, that making such wines has become a great deal more complicated. He says: “In the past we never worked with a vineyard consultant. Why? Probably we were arrogant, but we knew a lot about managing vineyards from our 100 years of history.

“Now, thanks to climate change, things have changed. We currently work with seven vineyard consultants. While we don’t do everything they suggest, we do have to have a degree of consultation.

“The effect of climate change across Europe is that the growing season starts almost a month earlier, so harvest starts earlier, and the average temperature of the growing season is five to seven degrees higher. This means there is a far greater accumulation of sugar in the grapes and that increases alcohol levels.”

A number of winemakers, however, have welcomed this, arguing that naturally high alcohol levels are simply an accurate reflection of vintages. Indeed Gaja, himself, is in two minds about it.

He says: “Initially, I believed the increase in alcohol was good for those wines that, in the past, needed to be chapitalized (have sugar added before or during fermentation) to raise the alcohol levels. In Burgundy, for instance, they now chapitalize far less. In Bordeaux, though, they have to be careful as, in Merlot, the alcohol level can reach as high as 15 percent.”

In the New World, they have devised a solution to the alcohol problem. It’s a technique that Morris archly describes as “post fermentation irrigation” – adding water. In terms of a more sophisticated approach, techniques such as reverse osmosis and spinning cones – which use centrifugal force to separate the flavour elements of the wine from some of the alcohol – are also frequently adopted.

Obviously largely unimpressed by such approaches, Morris says: “In California spinning cones have become quite important. While it says ‘unfined, unfiltered’ on the bottle, it’s actually been centrifuged to death. To date, this is not an issue in Burgundy, but we need to be watchful. I think we need to be on the lookout for more viticultural techniques.”

A more pressing concern for Gaja is that climate change has introduced new pests to many vineyards. His particular worry is the arrival of Drosophila Suzuki, a fly native to Japan that can infest grapes in the early stages of ripening, thus posing a serious threat to the harvest.

Morris, though, is somewhat sceptical about the reality of the problem. He says: “That was a significant threat in 2014, but it didn’t show in 2015. It may just be that, every so often, you get a particular beast that just comes through.”

For buyers, the dilemma with Bordeaux is always whether to buy en primeur (before bottling) or to wait until the vintage is actually released. This, though, isn’t an issue when it comes to Burgundy. Supply is limited and, if you want wines from a particular favourite vineyard, <I>en primeur </I>orders are the only way to secure them. The good news for buyers this year, though, is that prices are somewhat down, a consequence of the currently rather weak euro.

Morris say: “Prices from the growers to us are between the same and five percent up, but we have gained a solid 10 percent on the exchange rate. Burgundy is still expensive, but it’s a move in the right direction.

“In truth, Burgundians aren’t trying to gouge out ever higher prices. In fact, they are not comfortable with the levels they are at. They just need some wine in the cellars and then they can bring the prices down. It’s because they’ve had so many miserably short crops which are the real root of the problem.”

Once again, then, it’s the weather that’s to blame. And if it warms up much more, what then does the future hold? Prospects, according to Morris, are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, England and northeast France may become more viable for red grapes. For some of the world’s great whites, though, the outlook is gloomier.

Painting something of a dismal picture, Morris says: “It may well be that, eventually, Pinot Noir will migrate further north. Then we’ll make sparkling wines in England and still wines in champagne. If global warming continues, though, perhaps that will even stop Chablis tasting anything like Chablis.”

It was a tense moment. Martin Lynch, the brand ambassador for Teeling Irish Whiskey, was sitting down at a lunch gathering where he intended to introduce the spirit to the press. Addressing a Scottish magazine editor sat apposite, Lynch joked: “I hope we’re not going to have any trouble with you. You will, of course, concede that the Irish invented whiskey?” “I will,” she said, “as long as you concede that we perfected it…”

It is undeniably true that Ireland’s production of whiskey predates that of Scotland – with the two commencing at opposite ends of the 15th century. It is equally undeniable that, over the last century or so, Scotch whisky has largely eclipsed its Irish counterpart.

At one point, until Scotland began to produce and export blended whiskies in the 1860s, Irish whiskey was the world’s best-selling spirit. The varieties produced legally under licence from the early 17th century were also internationally seen as being of far better quality than Scotch.

It was, however, too good to last. Civil unrest in the 19th and early 20th centuries took its toll on the industry, with prohibition all but finishing it off in the US, its biggest export market. While the Scots maintained their presence by supplying bootleggers, the Irish distillers largely demurred. Sadly, their exports were never able to recover their previous levels.

The Irish disitillers also stuck stubbornly to using only traditional pot stills, rather than the more efficient column stills that became current in the 1820s. This is despite the fact that the man who perfected the column still was Aeneas Coffey, a full-blooded Irishman.

At one time, it was estimated that Ireland had more than 1,000 active distilleries, albeit not all of them legal. By the mid-1950s, this had dropped to just five. By the mid-1970s, there were just two – both owned by Irish distillers.

Not that this monopoly would have been immediately apparent, given the multiplicity of brands that were on offer. The New Middleton distillery in County Cork produced a wide variety, all of which were widely available in Ireland. These included Powers, dating back to 1791, Tullamore Dew (1829), and Paddy (1879), although its brand name wasn’t introduced until 1912.

By far the biggest brand – and the world’s best-selling Irish whiskey – was Jameson. Established in 1810 (by another Scot), it remains the world’s most popular Irish whiskey, although confusion remains about the exact date of its introduction.

The Bushmills Distillery in Northern Ireland’s County Antrim is also slightly disingenuous about the date of its establishment. It currently cites a licence to distill issued in 1608 by England’s King James I (Scotland’s James VI) as the basis to its claim to be the world’s oldest distillery.

In fact that original distillery’s buildings were destroyed many years ago, with the Bushmills company not established until 1784. Today, it produces both the Bushmills and Black Bush brand whiskeys.

In the international heyday of the prefabricated Irish pub – examples of which are still more than in evidence in Hong Kong and most major cities on the Chinese mainland – Jameson and Bushmills were typically the only Irish whiskey brands to be seen behind the bar. Others were, at best, an occasional sighting. As a result, Martin Lynch argues, the world sees Irish whiskey very much in Jameson’s image – a smooth triple-distilled spirit which many lovers of Scottish single malts, for example, would consider to be bland.

Now that idea of just what an Irish whiskey ought to be is being challenged. In fact, the Irish Distillers’ monopoly began to fracture in 1987, the year when John Teeling, an Irish businessman, established the Cooley Distillery in County Louth. This saw him introducing a number of new brands, all distilled only twice, on the grounds that too much flavour was lost to the third distillation.

Today, Cooley’s brands, include Kilbeggan and The Tyrconnell, the latter a single malt. Collectively, they have started to change the world’s view of Irish whiskey.

Other factors have also changed the face of the Irish whiskey sector. Back in 1988, Pernod Ricard acquired Irish Distillers and, in 2005, Diageo bought Bushmills from them. Today, Pernod Ricard continues to make and market Jameson.

Since that time, the number of working distilleries in Ireland has risen to 12, with two of them opening last year. Planning permission has now been granted for several more.

Since 1990, international sales have been growing at around 20 percent per annum, making Irish whiskey – albeit from a modest base – the fastest growing spirit category in the world. Around four and a half million cases were produced in 2008, with that figure projected to triple by 2018.

In the face of this, it is perhaps surprising that Diageo, which had built up the Bushmills brand over the previous decade, exchanged it in 2015 with the owners of Jose Cuervo. In return, it received that 50 percent stake of the Don Julio tequila brand that it didn’t already own..

Another big international spirits brand entered the Irish whiskey market in 2011 when Beam Suntory bought the Cooley and Kilbeggan distilleries from the Teeling family. Despite this, the Teelings were far from finished with the whiskey business, a sector where the family has considerable history.

Their family connection dates back to 1782 when a Walter Teeling established a distillery in Dublin. Fast forwards almost 250 years and, last year, two of his descendants – Jack and Stephen, John Teeling’s sons, opened the first new distillery in Dublin since 1976. That was the  year when Irish Distillers closed the last two, moving the production of Jameson to the New Midleton Distillery.

At present, the spirits distilled at the new Teeling distillery – set very close to the location of Walter Teeling’s original operation – are still rather too young to be released. Despite this, a Teeling Whiskey brand was formally introduced in 2012 and has bottled a range of Irish whiskeys from a number of undisclosed distlleries.

These have attracted considerable interest from whisk(e)y aficionados all around the world. As a result, the brand is now being launched across Hong Kong and parts of greater China by Summergate Fine Wines and Spirits.

Overall, Teeling Irish whiskeys go against the grain of the Jameson model, with the company describing itself as an “independent Irish whiskey company dedicated to bringing choice and breadth back to the Irish whiskey category through small batch releases of interesting and flavoursome bottlings.” Ultimately, though, the company’s stated goal is to “revive the independent spirit of Dublin.”

To date, the range consists of three single malts – a 15-year-old, a 21-year-old and one released without an age statement. It also offers a single grain, and a Small Batch Blend matured in barrels previously reserved for and containing rum.

Its Small Batch Blend won Double Gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2015. Another winner is its Single Grain, matured in Californian red wine barrels. This took the World’s Best Grain Award at the 2014 World Whiskies Awards.

It wasn’t the company’s only triumph at the World Whiskies Awards – the NAS Single Malt won Best Irish Single Malt, while the 21-year-old Vintage Reserve single malt won a 2013 Gold Award from The Spirits Business. None of these whiskeys are chill filtered and they are all bottled at a ratio of 46 percent alcohol by volume.

The Teeling whiskeys are certainly recognizably Irish with their smoothness and that particular touch of sweetness. They also have a depth of flavour which sets them apart from the better known Irish whiskey exports. They are not, however, the only spirits from the Emerald Isle worth seeking out.

Particularly recommended are the Midleton Old Pot Still range, Kilbeggan and Green Spot – although production of the latter is limited to 6,000 bottles per year and it is difficult to obtain outside Ireland. Then there is Redbreast, again made with a traditional Irish mixture of malted and unmalted barley and well worth tracking down.

Among the single malts, Connemara is notable for its peatiness – Irish whiskeys are generally assumed to eschew peat although this is not always the case – while the Tyrconnell is also widely acclaimed. Both come courtesy of the Cooley Distillery.

With the emergence of new distilleries and new brands, Irish whiskey has once again become a category to watch. Expect to see some new names appearing on back bar whisk(e)y shelves – and not only in the more ersatz Irish pubs.

While Chile may not be the world’s biggest wine producing country, it is certainly the longest. Stretching out over more the 4,300 kilometres north to south – almost four times the length of Italy – Chile boasts all the variety of terroir you would expect from such an immense expanse.

Perhaps this is why interest in the country’s wines has increased quite so significantly in both Hong Kong and China over recent years. Of course, this was also helped by Chile becoming only the second country to have its wines exempted from mainland import taxes. The first to be so privileged was New Zealand.

Most of the mainland’s Chilean imports, however, have been at the cheap and cheerful end of the market. Chile is actually China’s biggest supplier of bulk wine, as well as its third largest supplier of bottled wines.

It is also Hong Kong’s fifth largest supplier of wine by value and its fourth largest by volume. Tellingly, most of what is consumed in either jurisdiction costs somewhat less than either HK$ or RMB100 per bottle.

The challenge now is to persuade wine lovers that they should be considering Chile’s higher end wines, as well as being prepared to pay a premium for them. Higher quality bottles are certainly available and, fortunately, those in the know are only too happy to endorse them.

Debra Meiburg, Asia’s first Master of Wine, is one such luminary. She says: “I feel that, with Chile, I can never keep up. It’s a race to stay up to date as the country is really finding its feet in terms of wine and discovering phenomenal winemakers.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, another advocate is Julio Alonso Ducci, Asia Director of Wines of Chile, the Chilean wine industry’s trade promotion body. He says: “Our history of winemaking dates back to the 16th century and Chile’s vines also escaped unscathed from the phylloxera outbreaks that hit the US and Europe, ensuring they produced an exceptional purity of fruit, balance and intensity.”

All true. Well up to a point. Wine has indeed been made in Chile since the arrival of the conquistadors back in the 1540s. The major Bordeaux varieties, the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Merlot, the Carmenere and the Cabernet Franc, however, only arrived in the 18th century. It wasn’t until the 19th century, though, that true wine making expertise reached the country.

While Chile’s vineyards benefitted from being spared the phylloxera blight that affected much of the rest of the world, the real boost to the country came quite a bit later later. Unable to find work in those devastated vineyards back home in Europe, a significant number of notable French winemakers began making their way to Chile, bringing with them many generations of expertise.

There has been a good deal of mythologizing regarding the purity of Chilean grapes. This has largely been based on the fact that Chile’s vines, unlike those of France, didn’t have to be grafted on to American rootstock to fight off phylloxera. The reality is, though, that the improvement in the quality of Chilean wine – something that actually began in the late 20th century – is more directly attributable to the progress that had been made in the understanding of the terroir and the investment in technology.

As any French winemaker will tell you, the vine is there to communicate with the terroir. Accordingly, in Chile, more and more viable areas are being identified and planted with just the right grape varieties.

Two years ago, Meiburg visited Chile and she believes that this process has transformed the country’s wine map beyond recognition. She said: “Chile benefits from a combination of both the coastal and Andean influences, from north to south, as well as the perfect climatic conditions for producing naturally crafted, premium cool climate wines.”

New vineyards are now being planted all along the Pacific coast to the west of the country. Over in the east, meanwhile, more vineyards are being planted further and further up in the mountains as part of a bid to produce more high-altitude wines.

These change ever more of the appellations recognized under Chile’s Denominacion de Origen or D.O. system producing very impressive wines. Most notable among these are Colchagua Valley, Loncomilla, Cachapoal Andes, Aconcagua Valley, Leyda-San Antonion, Casablanca Valley, Alto Maipo, Maipo Valley and Apalta Valley.

With grapes and terroir now being more scientifically matched, it is possible to look beyond Carmenere – which has become to Chile what Malbec is to Argentina – and to the potential of many more different grapes. Along the coast Syrah wines, which recall the Rhône rather than Australia, are being made, while Pinot Noir is also doing well. A Rhône influence is also apparent in the Central Valley areas, where Grenache and Mourvedre are being grown, alongside old vine specimens of Carignan and Malbec.

Pais probably came to the country with the conquistadors and it was once Chile’s most widely-planted red grape. That distinction now belongs to Cabernet Sauvignon, while the still ubiquitous Pais is typically made into undistinguished jug wines. Some producers, though, are now attempting to make wines of a higher quality from the old Pais vines.

Syrah is rapidly expanding its vineyard acreage, but Carmenere remains the country’s signature grape. This, though, is mostly because, although originally from Bordeaux, it is now only infrequently planted in it home territory.

Chile is the only country to have made nurturing Carmenere a specialty and this happened mostly by accident. The grape was thought to be Merlot until 1994 when subsequent laboratory analysis identified it as a quite different variety. Since that time, Chilean wine makers have accorded it a quite special status.

Chile is also now producing more interesting white wines than the somewhat generic Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs to be found on so many supermarket shelves. The clue as to where the qualities can, as ever, be found when considering the comparative prices.

Meiburg recently hosted a tasting of Chilean red wines, beginning with a very enjoyable 2013 Gran Reserva Chardonnay from Vina Carmen’s vineyards in the Casablanca Valley. Another pleasantly surprising wine from the same region was the 2014 Quintay Q Grand Reserve Pinot Noir from Paula Cardenas, a winemaker who clearly took her inspiration from Burgundy. Perhaps not surprisingly, she is a firm believer in biodynamics.

There was only one Syrah wine in the tasting and it proved a little disappointing. By way of compensation, a Santa Rita Pehuen Carmenere from the Apalta Valley – with 10 percent Syrah in the blend – was judged very fine indeed.

It also demonstrated that, although we are repeatedly told that most New World wines are bottled ready-to-drink, many of the good ones actually repay keeping. The wine in question, for instance, was a 2008, and arguably not yet at its peak.

The trailblazer for premium Chilean wine, of course, has to have been Montes. This was established as recently as 1987 by Aurelio Montes and his partners. Its Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon was a game changing wine for Chile, setting new standards for the industry.

Inevitably, it now has a number of close competitors. Despite this, though, the Montes Alpha wines – including Carmenere, Malbec, Merlot, Syrah and Pinot Noir, as well as Cabernet Sauvignon – remain unmistakably aristocratic by comparison.

While there were no Montes Alpha wines on offer at Meiburg’s tasting, there was an opportunity to taste Montes’ Taita red from the Colchagua Valley – a surprising 2009 vintage which Meiburg described perfectly accurately as  “bling in a bottle.”

This wine represents Montes’s attempt to once again raise the bar. To this end, it is a blend of 85 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, together with a “winemaker’s selection” of other grapes, all varying as deemed optimum for each vintage.

This, along with the Santa Rita Carmenere, represented the high points of the tasting. As with the Carmenere, it is also a wine that will surely repay handsomely with longer term cellaring.

So how are the Chileans hoping to get the message out about their more rarefied offerings? Sensibly, they seem to have concluded that, as they have real quality to promote, the best way to do it is through education.

To this end, Wines of Chile in partnership with the Asia Wine Service & Education Center (AWSEC), is now offering a structured course in Chilean wine appreciation, with sessions being held in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

This is the first, and so far, only programme of its kind to be devoted to Chilean wines in China and Hong Kong. The course covers Chilean wine history, as well as information about the regions, grape varieties and the styles of the wines. For those truly taken with the subject, AWSEC will actually organise winery tours to Chile.

If nothing else, this certainly shows that Chilean wine producers are very serious about the China market. You can, however, enjoy a glass or two of the country’s finest without taking a single class.