Category: Wine Blogs & Reviews

Organic wines – Pig in the House

Right up there on the list of discredited old wives’ tales (is that a politically incorrect term these days?) is the one I occasionally hear from friends at dinner parties, that they prefer to drink organic wines because “they don’t give me a hangover”. It’s a furphy of the ilk of the other famous dinner…
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Travis Schultz Wine Review Capel Vale

Capel Vale

It’s been more than a few years since I’ve made the sojourn across our continent to visit the wineries of the west. We are blessed in Australia to have so many wine districts around the country that offer 5-star cellar doors and also turn out world-class wines. It’s a shame that for those of us…
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Golden Grove Wines

When I heard that Golden Grove’s 2018 Barbera won champion wine, and their 2019 Vermentino a gold medal, at the Courier Mail Queensland Wine Awards earlier this year, I couldn’t help but make a beeline for my laptop to get online and order a few bottles. After all, there’s nothing better than discovering a new…
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Altolandon Mil Historias Garnacha 2017

Altolandon Mil Historias Garnacha 2017

Ask any sommelier what styles and varietals of wines are seeing sales growth, and you’ll normally be told that it’s all about rosé, Mediterranean varietals and organics. Some venues have seen rosé sales increase by as much as 40% while orders for sauvignon blanc (especially the highly aromatic styles) have declined as consumers are developing…
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Gwyn Olsen: Art or Oenology?

Head winemaker at Peppertree wines in the Hunter Valley produces a drop arguably more art than oenology….. There’s a place for tradition and respect for time-honoured winemaking practices, but in this day and age, consumers increasingly expect something fresh, different and cool before they will part with their hard-earned. And this drift towards wines that…
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Wine Aeration Travis Schultz

Aeration of Wines

Those of us who have a tendency to “lose” wines in the cellar would be well familiar with the happy situation of “finding” a well-aged bottle of red amongst more recent vintages and dusting off the label to reveal a birth date much further back in history than we expected. Though opening these elder statesmen…
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Torbreck Hillside Vineyard Shiraz and Roussanne 2018

Roussanne Shiraz – Torbreck

I’ve always found the wines of the Rhone region fascinating, if not charming. And particularly those of the Southern Rhone where the winemakers of the Côtes du Rhône villages set an exacting standard using Châteauneuf-du-Pape as their role model. In the region, the wines are typically richer, spicier and higher in alcohol than other parts…
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Napa Valley Chardonnay Travis Schultz

Napa Cellars

The Australian wine industry is increasingly focusing its attention on overseas markets, and for good reason. A low Aussie dollar, improving economic conditions abroad and a perception that Australian wines are of high quality makes it almost inevitable that domestic wineries are looking abroad to market their wares. And amongst our most important trading partners…
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Duperrey Champagne

Australians love their fizz; so much so that according to the 2018 data, we are the seventh-largest market for Champagne in the world. And at 8.38 million bottles imported in the year, that’s the second-highest amount of champenoise that we’ve ever consumed. And while the global market for French bubbles has only inched forward in…
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Wild Earth Pinot Noir 2017

Wild Earth Pinot

As the days lengthen and Spring takes grip, red wine drinkers often find themselves shelving the heavy cabernet and shiraz that added warmth over winter in favour of lighter styles like gamay, chianti and pinot noir. At my place, any red with a degree of translucence takes priority as the mercury climbs and the humidity…
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