I’m sick of Malbec. It’s all one seems to hear about these days. “Malbec is such a great wine!” “Wow, what an awesome value!” “I just love how super fruity it is!”

Argentinean Malbec is becoming the next Australian Shiraz. About five to ten years ago, Australian Shiraz occupied the exact same place in which Malbec currently resides – it was the star of value-priced wines, the red that people unthinkingly chose for any event. It was blindly quaffed and generally enjoyed for its unchallenging, fruity appeal and palate-placating quality. With few notable exceptions, the vast majority of Shirazes around the $20 mark were practically indistinguishable from each other. At the higher end, a few benchmark wines (d’Arenberg’s The Dead Arm, Torbreck’s The Struie, Yalumba’s Octavius, Penfolds RWT) began garnering serious attention (read: scoring high points) with wine big wigs, so naturally the Parker and Spectator lemmings rushed out and flooded their cellars with the stuff.

This rise in popularity corresponded with an increasing use of Shiraz as a marketing ploy. Shiraz saturated the markets: for a while, walking down the Australian aisle in a wine shop was akin to strolling through a zoo of neon animals with cutesy-pie names. Yellow Tail became a household word, a veritable synonym for any indistinguishable cheap Aussie Shiraz. The style of these wines was consolidated as fruity to the point of jamminess, with an overblown alcohol level (over 14%) and so much cloying vanilla scent from American oak influence that the wines seemed positively sweet. These qualities made for a wine style that was more like juice than booze – and therefore more readily enjoyed by people unfamiliar with and/or not used to drinking wine. Though higher-end Shiraz usually retained a fair degree of individuality, the lower end became a melting pot of banality.

Thus the Australian wine industry effectively – and permanently – branded itself with the mark of its homogeneous Shiraz.

Argentinean Malbec is headed down this same path. About four or five years ago – incidentally, right around the time that people started getting sick of Aussie Shiraz – Malbec began to receive more attention. At the beginning of the 21st century, Malbec was relatively unknown; you might have been able to find a few at the local wine shop, but no more than half a dozen at best. Half a decade has brought a wholesale change, and now Malbec is almost a brand name – just like Shiraz. It is used to attract that same crowd of casual drinkers to wine. The style of the $20 Malbec is also homogenizing, and I’ve found it increasingly difficult to find any wines that really stand out from this swelling crowd. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Malbec is also somewhat similar to Shiraz in taste: it’s big, bold and fruity, with increasingly liberal inclusions of oak influence. People will start getting sick of Malbec within the next couple years – but by then the Argentinean wine industry will have entrenched the grape so firmly within its infrastructure that it will take years for the crowd to notice anything else.

I’m not against countries promoting their “signature” grapes. Contrarily, I enjoy it, as it sets useful benchmarks of style for wine drinkers and also confers a degree of reliability that is not unwelcome. However, I believe that when this promotion gets out of control, the “Shiraz Effect” proves more detrimental than useful. It polarizes the industry towards homogeneity, effectively shooting itself in the foot by convincing people that there is only one wine on offer from a given country. As sales for other varieties dwindle, winemakers respond by tearing up more of their other varieties and planting row after row of only one single variety – and all of Australia’s lovely GSMs and Rieslings, or Argentina’s beautiful Torrontes and Cabernets, are completely overlooked.

I attended an Australian wine tasting a couple years ago that was wholly designed to introduce people to a broader range of Aussie wines and showcase how diverse their wine portfolio actually is. Essentially, they were trying to do damage control and counteract some of the giddy marketing that led consumers and wine professionals alike to equate their country with only one grape. I was very impressed with the wines at this tasting, as they offered concrete proof that Australia has far more to offer than just its Shiraz. However, for the casual drinker, Australia is still synonymous with Shiraz, and I doubt if that country will ever fully recover from this stigma. I’m certain that the exact same thing is occurring with Argentina and its Malbec.

Perhaps “stigma” is too strong of a word. I must consider that casual wine drinkers are just fine with knowing that Australia = Shiraz, Argentina = Malbec, and leaving it at that. Certainly most people do not know, nor care to know, much more about wine than this, and there is nothing wrong with that. Furthermore, everyone needs a starting point into wine, and if these novice-friendly, over-marketed wines are able to stir some interest in the grape within people who would have otherwise just bought another case of Bud Light Lime then I cannot fault the wines for that.

Furthermore, I suppose that from a business perspective, Malbec has helped transform Argentina’s relatively small export market into an extremely profitable global industry. Many winemakers will not care that they are only growing one grape as long as they are selling all the wine made from it. Malbec grows well in Argentina; why not exploit this?

My biggest concern is with diversity, or rather, the lack thereof. I like having choices. Lots of choices. This is especially true in the wine world. I know that for a novice, having to grapple with the baffling array of wines on the market is a seemingly overwhelming task. I know this, because I was once that novice (and I’m still that novice, in many respects). But taking away such a large part of this choice, while making it easier in the short term, only causes the future wine lover to grow bored more quickly. At the zenith of the Shiraz craze I began overlooking the Australian section completely when shopping for wine, even though I knew there could have been hidden gems just waiting to be discovered. I will soon start doing the same with the Argentinean section. The reason for this is simple: while I know these countries produce other wines that just their signature grapes, the likelihood of finding a good example of those other wines is noticeably reduced. The Shiraz Effect also causes wine stores to stuff their shelves with bottle after bottle of that one signature grape variety, because they know it will sell. Though the last few years have seen Argentina increase its plantings of “other” varieties significantly, the average consumer will not really see the effects of this at the retail level – or they just won’t pay attention to it, because Argentina = Malbec, and that’s that.

The Shiraz Effect causes polarization at all levels, and I’m just not ok with that. Argentina could harbour the next Burgundy, and Australia has already proven that it can make a mean Cabernet in the Coonawarra region, but these wines are rarely noticed by anyone other than wine geeks and wine professionals (and geeky wine professionals), when they should be enjoyed by everyone.

Of course, I’m also speaking from the perspective of someone living in Alberta, which is rather far away from even the relatively close wine regions of BC, Oregon, and California. The diversity of wine imported into this province is always going to be significantly less than the wines on offer in or near the world’s major wine regions. So, if you live in Mendoza or the Barossa Valley, you’re probably drinking a far greater range of your country’s wines than I am; much of what I’ve said is not applicable to you.

But I’m stuck on the prairies, and while I am still able to seek out those hidden gems from your country, it sure isn’t that easy. And if someone pours me another glass of Malbec, I’m going to snap.