To the average wine consumer, selecting a red wine from a bottle shop shelf or a restaurant wine list can be a daunting experience. After all, it can be an expensive treat, but get it wrong and you’ll feel as though you’ve just put a lighter to a $50 or even $100 note! Some reds…
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When friends come over for dinner, what do you serve first, the expensive hero wine or the cheaper support act? It’s an age-old dilemma when you’re serving two bottles of red with the main meal on Saturday night. Is it better to warm up the palate with the cheapie and impress with the expensive wine,…
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Whether we care to admit it or not, the Australian mainland doesn’t have too many wine-producing regions that are ideally suited to making the Burgundian classic Pinot Noir. After all, it’s a finicky grape that is highly susceptible to rot and disease and doesn’t do well in warm or wet climates. For this reason, many…
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With the shifting sands of consumer preferences, cool climate wines, once relegated to the obscurity of the back corner of the bottle shop, are finding themselves increasingly front and centre on the wine buyer’s radar. From the Macedon Ranges and Pyrenees in Victoria, to Great Southern in Western Australia, Orange and Hilltops in NSW and…
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There are plenty of jokes about Tasmania being “backwards” and twenty years behind the rest of the country, but when it comes to wine, there is a lot that the mainlanders could learn from the oenologists over on the Apple Isle. For a region first colonised by Europeans in the early 19th century, the state…
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Whether we’re creatures of habit looking to break the shackles or open-minded adventurers searching for the next dose of inspiration, there are times when our palates crave something new and different when it’s time for a pre-dinner tipple. Across the globe there are over 100,000 wineries and in excess of 10,000 different types of wine,…
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When we think of pinot noir, I suspect that most of us drift towards wines from Burgundy in France, Oregon in the USA or Central Otago in New Zealand’s southern isle, but there are a number of Australian districts that are producing stunning examples of the style and creating what is almost a cult following…
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In a modern world in which economies of scale, efficiency in production, and maximisation of yield are so often the underlying aims of the corporate wineries, it’s refreshing to hear stories of success amongst the smaller scale battlers like Vaughn Dell and Linda Morice of Sinapius. They’re a bold new breed of winemaker who defy…
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Josef Chromy When a wine wins a major award, I’m like a moth drawn to a flouro light and in what must be a form of FOMO, I find myself compelled to track down a bottle to find out what all the fuss is about. So, when I found out that the Josef Chromy 2017…
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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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