Will WA ever rival Pessac-Léognan?

The last Saturday of November saw a most unusual encounter between the so-called Old and New Worlds in the company of Domaine de Chevalier's Olivier Bernard (on the right of the picture) and Nigel Gallop of the Fraser Gallop Estate in Western Australia's Margaret River.

All things being relative, Australia's soils, probably the oldest in the world, can look back on 500 million years of history, but this particular patch has been planted with vines only since the early 1960s. With its Cabernet-based blends it shot to fame indecently quickly, begging immediate comparison with Bordeaux not only on the basis...