Cabernet Sauvignon

Every week a group of us get together, the number changes each week depending on availability but the group ranges from wine judges to teachers and welders, solicitors and bankers and stay at home mums. All of us have different views on what we look for in a wine, how much of a wine we would consume in a sitting, how long we would keep it open in the fridge for or how much we would pay for a wine.  It gives me a great real-world view of where these wines sit, combined with th

what makes a premium wine "premium"

I’ve often remarked in these columns how marketing departments dictate what wines the winery make. Sometimes I think they get it wrong, the marketers are aiming for a certain segment and just miss it. It’s either a touch too soon, too late or the final product they are aiming for just didn’t line up with what was available for the winemakers to work with. But every now and again they get it right, their timing with the winemakers, the fruit that was in the vineyards and the

Is there life after working for the big names of wine making, after all the trophies and media about your big name wines? You bet there is, and unsurprisingly it involves making more trophy winning wines. John Duval had a stellar career at Penfolds, including a 16 year long stint as the Chief Winemaker, responsible for the crafting of Penfolds world renowned Grange. Under his guidance, Penfolds were propelled to world-wide fame taking out Winemaker of the Year at the Intern

Drinking healthy? The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, however every time I look at the news there seems to be some new link with health and alcohol, a glass of wine here or a gin there and suddenly we all live to a ripe old age. It’s all rather hard to believe, but I slept through most of my high school biology classes. I personally think that the key here, as with anything in life, is moderation. But if you still want to be able to have a couple with friends, like most of u

Growing up on his family’s farm in NSW’s Griffith, John Casella wanted more than just to run the little winery with a hand turned wine press. Over half a century later, Casella now oversees Casella Family Brands (CFB), a vinous empire that sells hundreds of bottles of wine around the world every minute of the day. In fact in the time it takes you to read this article, wine drinkers around the globe will have consumed several thousand glasses of his family’s range, heading t

In 2014, the family behind one of Australia’s most successful wine brands, , purchased the famous Barossa winery Peter Lehmann Wines from Swiss based The Hess Group. It followed the death of Peter Lehmann in 2013, who had founded the winery in 1979. It continues the rise and rise of Casella Family Brands, who produced their first bottle of wine in 1969 at their Farm 1471 near Griffith in NSW, with their first full vintage being crafted in 1971. The Casella family recognised

I’m a bit of a cricket tragic. I’m one of “those” people that can sit there and watch a five day test very happily. I think what I love about the game so much is that it’s one of the few, if not the only game, where everyone will sledge the opposition player, but then applaud that same player loudly for a well-played shot, or when that person rockets a near unplayable ball down the pitch and you hear that rattle of stumps. Some of my happiest Christmas’s have all been about

I often remark on here about how when we taste wine around at our regular “Wet Wednesday” sessions that its quite different from how we judge a wine, or beers for that fact, at competitions.  At a Wine Show you are taking a sip of the wine, aerating it a bit, and spitting, you’re looking at colour, flavour profiles, tannin and acid structure, mouthfeel and finish to name just a few points. Jotting down your notes and moving on to the next wine, in some cases you may have up t

Last year St. Hugo released the first annual release in their decade long “Legacy Collection”, a collection of super premium wines that will vary from year to year in varieties, blends etc. The Legacy Collection pays homage to the rich and compelling stories of the Gramp family, particularly Hugo Gramp who was killed in the Kyeema air crash in 1938. Not only did the crash take the life of Gramp when the DC-2 he was travelling in crashed into the side of Mt Dandenong whilst h

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

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

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

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

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

50 years, it’s a long time to be in business. Most local companies don’t manage it, in fact a heck of a lot of national companies don’t manage it either. Those stats are worse when you look at wineries, especially ones that pop up in, what are thought of, as unusual spots. It’s hard for new wineries to get the label out there, and it only takes a couple of bad growing years for the profits to start going south, and the inevitable call from the Receivers and Liquidators. Vas

Iconic…..its a word that gets bandied about a heck of a lot, often it’s used simply because someone wants to say something nice about a block of flats or an ageing building, and calls them “iconic”. But it’s a word that probably sits quite well when you throw out names like “Wirra Wirra” or “Greg Trott”, the man responsible for resurrecting Wirra Wirra from being a lost and abandoned winery to the, dare I say it, iconic institution it is today. Wirra Wirra Vineyards was ori