Shiraz

Best of 2018

With the year nearly over its time to look take a good hard look through the bottom of the empty glass at the year that was. There’s been a few noticeable trends this year, some of which have actually lined up with my predictions from the end of last year – that rosé will continue its steady rise and broaden its flavour profile to make wines that men will happily drink during summer, and that beer...

Botham Wines

I’m a bit of a cricket tragic. I’m one of “those” people that can sit there and watch a five day test very happily. I think what I love about the game so much is that it’s one of the few, if not the only game, where everyone will sledge the opposition player, but then applaud that same player loudly for a well-played shot, or when that person rockets a near unplayable ball down the pitch and you h...

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...

Gartelmann Rylstone Petit Verdot

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...

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...

Forgotten Labels

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 t...

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