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There’s been a lot of movement in the beer sector over the last twelve months, the sale of Pirate Life and 4 Pines to CUB’s parent company AB InBev and Feral Brewing to Coca Cola (the brewers of the Yenda and Blue Moon), are probably the deals that got the most attention. However flying under the radar was the sale of Vale Brewing to the Bickford’s Group, becoming part of Bickford’s Vok Beverages arm. The deal means that Vok’s Hobo Brewing is no longer a homeless beer range

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

A few years ago Tassie’s Moorilla Estate decided to branch out, and in a massive way. The winery was established in 1958 by Italian-Australian Claudio Alcorso, and in 2001 current owner, David Walsh, established a museum (MONA) on the wineries grounds in 2001. He decided to add a micro-brewery to the site in 2004, aptly named Moo Brew, under the guiding hand of then head brewer Owen Johnston. The brewery hit the ground running with the first keg rolling out in 2005, demand h

Towards the back end of last year Lion, the brewery behind names such as James Squire, XXXX and Tooheys, launched their own e-commerce platform, called MoCU, which stands for Modern Curations Gallery, as an external retail channel for single batch/limited release beers from their range of breweries, both here and the beers they import. I think the move has been long overdue, from any of the Australian breweries, not just the Lion team. It gives FNQ, or any remote regional dr

The Lord Nelson pub is possibly Australia’s oldest hotel, and is definitely the oldest continually licensed hotel, still trading on its original site. On 29 th June 1831 Richard Phillips obtained a liquor licence for the Shipwright Arms on the corner of Kent and Argyle Streets, changing the name to the Sailor’s Return the next year after the continual trade from seafarers and dock workers. The pub has gone through a series of names and owners throughout the years until its

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.

Craft beer snobs and Hop Heads can either make or break a beer, especially with the use of modern media like Facebook. Earlier this year, in April to be exact, the team at James Boag’s Brewery released a new label simply called “Epicurean”, two beers that were created to match with food. I have to admit it was pretty hard not to have a go at them immediately as they seemed to have flooded my Facebook feed with ads, talking up how they have gone about matching beer with food,

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