Cabernet Sauvignon
Real World Tastings
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...
St Hugo The Unspoken Promise 2014
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 wh...
Provenance is overlooked
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 wi...
Cellarmasters “Red Wine of the Year”
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 brow...
I AM GEORGE
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 Aus...
Best of 2017
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. ...
De Bortoli Cask appeal
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, cha...
Voyager Estate
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 ...