Wine

The warm weather signals two things ...Christmas is just around the corner, and the inevitable Battle of the Bubbles is about to hit its stride. It’s also the time when everyone starts to look at their budgets for the upcoming Christmas, and starts trying to work out how they can afford it after dropping all their cash at the nags during the spring racing season. Sparkling wine has always been seen as the celebration wine, but it’s much more than that. It’s a great aperitif

Summer is just around the corner and it gets anyone that has a wine collection, or is thinking of starting a wine collection, or heck, even just wants to be able to save a few bob and buy their wine by the carton, starts thinking about how to store the collection. Not all of us have a wine cellar, in fact what I refer to as my cellar is actually a spot under the stairs that has a three wine fridges. Wine is constantly evolving inside the bottle, it doesn’t like heat, or exce

The way I look and review a wine is probably a bit different to how you would normally consume a bottle. I get a group of people around to our house every week, and look at a wine as a group, getting feedback on the wines, across a broad and diverse range. Anything that is particularly good, I will hold onto and try again the next evening, and see how its evolved after being opened for a while. This changes the tastes, some become more expressive and others fade off to become

Its funny how wines can taste when purchased from different bottleshops. It all comes down to how it’s been treated in transport. Factors like whether the pallet sat in the sun whilst it was being unloaded, even whether the pallet was in the middle of the shipping container or against the edge with the sun beaming on it whilst it was being transported up here, all have a bearing on how the wine will taste. We recently sat down to look at the new 2015 vintage from St.Hugo Shi

I’ve often mentioned in this column that there’s a few of us that sit around a table and look at the wine samples that turn up on my doorstep, our Chateau Hangover as its sometimes called. It’s a mixed bag of people but it gives me a lot of feedback from people who all look for different things in their wine, we all have such different opinions when it comes to wine. We drop the bottle into a brown bag so there is no pre-conceived ideas about the labelling or brands or even t

Every year I write an annual “Year in review’ column, commenting on what I thought were the best red and white wines of the year, plus the best beer I had tried that year. Two years ago the white wine of the year for me was a toss-up between the ’15 De Illius Semillon and the ’15 Pewsey Vale Riesling. I ended up going with the Pewsey Vale at the time, simply because of its perfect drinking, the fact that the wine is so readily available at bottleshops, and the crazy fact tha

Australian Chardonnay is going through a bit of a purple patch at the moment. Some of the best wine writers in the world are comparing our most exciting chards to premier grand cru White Burgundy. During the 80’s chardonnay was all the rage, then suddenly everyone got bored with the same buttery, oaky “sunshine in a bottle” that we were getting. It fell from grace so quickly, entire vineyards were torn up and replanted with what was then the next big thing, sauvignon blanc.

Crikey it’s been warm the last few weeks, as I sit here writing this its 9.30am in February, and already 38 degrees outside,  and I’ve already got that uncomfortable trail of sweat running down my back, the cicadas are chirping away, and the uniform for the day has been singlets and shorts. As the summer heat hits these highs, I find my tastes change. Not just from avoiding the big hearty stews, roasts and huge thick steaks coming off the BBQ, and leaning more toward fish, p

Lots of wineries knock out a second or third tier label. Often those tiers are good value, more often they are good quaffing wines, or your Friday night drinkers, but it’s rare that they are something that you would serve at a dinner party when you’re trying to impress the Father-in-Law to be for example. At the other end there’s the wineries that might stumble onto a good patch of fruit, from their own winery or from contract growers, knock out a good couple of vintages and

It may come as a surprise to many that the first commercial planting of Shiraz in Australia wasn’t in the Barossa. It was near a place called Branxton in the Hunter region of NSW. It was planted out in 1830 by George Wyndham on a property he named “Dalwood”. He was an unconventional and headstrong man and somewhat of a radical. He was born into landed gentry in England, deciding to emigrate to Australia for life as a farmer after refusing an English Government posting, whose

The jolly fat bloke with the white beard and the red suit has gone, the smoke from the New Year’s fireworks has passed, so it means that I’m due for a Best of 2017. I get to see so many different labels and brands over a year, it makes it very difficult to pick a best of anything, however I’ve gone back over my jumbled mess of notes and come up with I thought were the best that I tried this year. Selections are made on quality, real world price (not RRP) and, over the last f

Over the last few months, especially over the Christmas and New Years break I’ve noticed something amongst our friends, it’s the idea of “forgotten labels”. And by that I simply mean the idea that there are some wine labels out there that some of us swerve past, as we’ve had a bad experience or that we somehow associate with being sub-par. Those labels that we say “geeze I used to drink that all the time”. Once I noticed that we do it, I became aware that I do it myself, ev

Australia has lead the way in many inventions over the years. From Spray-On Skin, the winged keel, the black box flight recorder, the ute even the humble Hills hoist and petrol lawn mower, the list is as long as my kids Santa wish list. But there is one thing that is having a massive resurgence in Northern Hemisphere, that Australia can lay claim to: the bag-in-a-box. Whether you call it goon, chateau cardboard, bladder or schoolies handbag or cask, it was a go to for many d

Since its creation in 1991, Voyager Estate has gone on to become one of Australia’s leading wineries. Set just a few kilometres from the Margaret River coastline, in Western Australia, the winery has gone onto win an incredible amount of awards over the years, both here and abroad, and has cemented its place in most cellars by gaining a Langton’s “Excellent” classification, the yardstick by which wineries in Australia are measured. The estate was created by Michael Wright, w

Sometimes it’s very hard for me to work out how wineries make money, especially the ones that decided to make excellent wines, but hold them back for aging. Not just for special or cellar aged releases, like a lot of wineries do, but they age their wines as their standard practice. Tucked away in Mudgee, north-west of Sydney and over the Great Dividing Range, lies Huntington Estate, a winery that bamboozles me as to how they can keep operating when they choose to release the

I don’t drink a lot of Sauvignon Blanc, I struggle a bit with its flavour profile most are just too sweet, some too acidic, and some just down right smell like a tom-cat has taken a wee on a passionfruit vine. However with the weather warming I thought it would be a good opportunity to go back and look at one of the few Savvies that I will happily reach for, the Shaw + Smith Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc, a wine that has consistently been Australia’s best home-grown savvy si

The name Seabrook Wines will ring a bell for a lot of wine drinkers, or those with long memories at the least, having been part of the Australian wine landscape since 1878 when the family started WJ Seabrook and Son. Since then they have been involved in many forms - wine brokers, wine judges, exporters or negociants (the French term for a wine merchant who uses the fruit of smaller growers and winemakers and sells the result under their own name). In 2005 the fifth generati

Just over thirty years ago a little winery in South Australia’s McLaren Vale, decided to take the extraordinary step of planting out a large portion of their vineyards with traditional Italian varieties. The family owned Coriole vineyards were founded in 1967 by Hugh and Molly Lloyd, on a site with vines that were planted just after World War I, and home to several original farmhouses that were built in 1860. The winery is probably best known for their block buster Shiraz. 

A few years ago, 2006 to be precise, Yalumba released a wine crafted by their winemaker Peter Gambetta. It was a cabernet sauvignon with the fruit coming from a cigar shaped parcel of vines inside Yalumba’s Menzies estate in Coonawarra. Unsurprisingly the wine was named Menzies The Cigar, which over the subsequent years dropped the Menzies part off the label to become The Cigar to avoid confusion with one of Yalumba’s flagship wines, the Menzies Cabernet Sauvignon. The 2006

This time of the year shows everything that’s great about living in North Queensland, 30ish degree days, clear skies and lower humidity. It does bring with it our cooler nights, well cooler for us anyway. One of the best things about that cool change is the ability to sit back at night with a glass of fortified, sitting back late at night with a cheese board and having a chinwag with a few mates. The category of ‘fortified wine” includes Sherry, Port, Muscat, Tokay and Vermo