Riesling

Wondering what to match with your take away food whilst all this madness is happeniig?

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

“There’s no beer left”. It was a movie moment. You know one of those scenes when there's an explosion or  something happens and there is no sound just the actor’s hard breathing, and then slowly all the sound rushes back to them? It was like that, I heard the words but I didn’t believe them….“There’s no beer left!” Probably the most dreaded sentence a man can hear, closely followed by “I’m late” and “Where is this relationship going”. For a while all I could hear was my har

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I had to pick one style of wine to enjoy for the rest of my life it would be Riesling. No, seriously, it would be Riesling, I’m almost certain that the world would be a better place if more people drank Riesling, there’s even several unconfirmed reports of Riesling curing illnesses….again, seriously. It’s one of the greatest joys in wine, and yet it’s still one of the most misunderstood wines, mainly because acidity is easily misinterpreted by our tongue and brain as swe

Many years ago the area of Mudgee fell off the wine radar for a lot of people, and for some reason it has struggled to come back. I’ve heard people say that’s because the wines coming from the region aren’t great, they are too hit and miss or they aren’t as expressive as some of the other wine regions of Australia. I think those people have had their head in the sand over the past few years as there are quite a few wineries out there, from the Mudgee area, in fact, around th

A few weeks ago, just as I was packing our camper trailer to head off for the long weekend, I received a call from Gavin Berry, Winemaker/Owner of West Cape Howe Wines in Western Australia’s Great Southern region. He was in town and wanted to swing past to show his new vintages of his fantastic wines. It was stinking hot in the shed, I was covered in sweat, had just realised I had mistakenly rewired the trailer with five core instead of seven core, leading to me having to rew