Chardonnay

Stuck at home and thinking about the possibility of starting a cellar when this COVID is over?

About 350kms west of Sydney, and 35kms south of Orange, nestled in the foothills of Mount Canobolas sits the vineyards for Angullong Wines. It's one of the largest vineyards in the area with a total of 220 hectares or 550 acres under vine. The property has been in the Crossing family since 1950 and has been run as a successful sheep and cattle station prior to diversifying into grape growing and winemaking in 1998. The wines that are produced from the fruit off these vines i

Chateau Tanunda is one of those names that have been synonymous with wine in Australia, especially the Barossa. Constructed in the late 1880’s by some of the first winemaker’s in the Barossa, its vineyards are home to some of the oldest plantings in the Barossa, dating back to the 1840’s, and its Chateau is Australia’s largest and oldest wine Chateau. Built 40 metres into a Tanunda hillside to provide a stable temperature for the maturing of barrels by more than 100 local far

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

With the year nearly over its time to look take a good hard look through the bottom of the empty glass at the year that was. There’s been a few noticeable trends this year, some of which have actually lined up with my predictions from the end of last year – that rosé will continue its steady rise and broaden its flavour profile to make wines that men will happily drink during summer, and that beer brewers would start to return to forgotten or uncool styles, Gose beer has sky

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

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

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.

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

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

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

There are people that I meet that think being a wine judge is the best job in the world, the ones that automatically ask “how do I get that job?” Some out there think that tasting your way through a hundred or more wines in a day is some kind of booze induced hazy heaven, but those people need to be put straight, as my dentist, GP and long suffering family will attest, it isn’t all a bed of roses, or rosés as the case may be. I recently judged at the Cairns Wine Show Awards,

I’ve got pretty average hand writing, very, it’s a cross between printing and running writing that just looks wrong on the paper at the best of times. So you could well imagine the difficulty I’ve had trying to decipher my tasting notes after I had spent the day chatting with 30 something winemakers, all with about ten different wines to try. It’s become more hieroglyphics than handwriting, I’m somewhat positive that there’s a line there that mentions “the latex not breathing

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

About four years ago I was invited to a tasting for a new label that was just hitting the market called “Snake + Herring”. Truth be told after that tasting, I never thought I’d be buying wines from the label. The wines we tried on the day, a Cabernet and a Pinot, needed more depth and polish to them, they were too lean in the mouth, or they were too gritty and rugged. You could see where they were headed but it just wasn’t doing it for me, especially not at the $25 RRP. They

There is a type of wine that is in every wine drinker’s home, but there’s no real formal name for them, some call them “quaffers”, others call them their “go to wine”, I’ve even heard of them called “soldiers”, the dependable bottles that do all the ground work. These are those mid-week bottles that you have with pizza, or the ones that you take to a mates place on Saturday night for the BBQ. They are the ones that you roll out with the spaghetti on Tuesday, where you’ve adde

Seppelt is one of Australia’s oldest wineries, with the original idea and foundations for the brand being laid in 1851 when Joseph Seppelt established Seppeltsfield in the Barossa Valley.  Seppeltsfield eventually expanded to purchase Best’s Great Western winery in Victoria, which was founded by Joseph Best in 1865. It was Best who paid the local gold miners to dig the 3 kilometres of underground tunnels, known as the Drives, which became the cellars for the winery. Eventuall

Back in 2007 Apple released the first iPhone , a product that took the world by storm. The Melbourne Storm won not only the minor premiership but also the grand Finals when they defeated, or should I say embarrassed, Manly 34-8. And over in WA’s Geographe Bay, the area that leads into the Margret River area, the Towner family were setting up a little winery called Flametree Wines were opening their doors, and immediately set about creating award winning wines. The winery fir

I’m often asked what the best value wine is, and it often has me stumped. It’s the idea of value that gets me, for example I hardly ever go past $15 for an everyday wine. These are wines that may have an RRP of $24-$29, wines that are 95 points but have a real world price point of $15 -$20. I go to around $30-$50 for something that I want to put away, I can find great value in different labels at that price point as you start to gain wines with more complexity in that price b

I seem to be on a bit of Yarra roll at the moment, there must be something in the water down there as the wineries just keep knocking out great wine after great wine. Giant Steps is one of those wineries that’s always reliable, and always knocking out award winning wines. Whether it be in any of the three brands, Giant Steps, Innocent Bystander or Mea Culpa. And that’s in no small part to hard work and effort put in by the owner and founder of Giant Steps, Phil Sexton and hi