The way I look and review a wine is probably a bit different to how you would normally consume a bottle. I get a group of people around to our house every week, and look at a wine as a group, getting feedback on the wines, across a broad and diverse range. Anything that is particularly good, I will hold onto and try again the next evening, and see how its evolved after being opened for a while. Th...
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...
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 fa...
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, r...
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 the...
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...