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 star...
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...
Few wineries have been to the brink and back like Evans and Tate have. Their story starts just over forty years ago when, in 1974, two mates John Evans and John Tate, and their wives Jan and Toni, find the perfect site to build their dream vineyard on the banks of the Wilyabrup River in the Margaret River region of WA. In 1975 they planted out their first vineyard, naming it Redbrook, and set abou...
Back in 2009 the lads at Winefront nominated the 2007 Yalumba Scribbler Cabernet Shiraz as their #1 in the Top 100 under $20 in the 09/10 Big Red Wine Book. By the time that Gourmet Traveller Wine had decided to jump in and give the 07 Scribbler a pretty solid 94 points, I’d already bought a few bottles and put them away in the cool dark lonely spot. Last week I finally cracked the cap of a couple...
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 ...
I’m pretty lucky with the group that sit around the tasting table with me, the range of life experiences, skills and trades are so different, it gives us all different points of view on life let alone what we are tasting on the day. We have different things we look for in a wine/beer/spirit and have different price points that we won’t go past. I find myself running things past them when I want m...