After a somewhat restless three hour skip across the country, we arrived in Melbourne this morning for an eagerly-awaited holiday – not even the brisk eight degrees above zero that was waiting for us as we got off the plane at half five was able to dampen our spirits. Naively, when I booked our flights [...]
“Holy hogsheads Batman! A wine from back home!” Wines with novelty names are always very hit-and-miss with me. Most of the time they’re well off the mark because more thought (and subsequently, money) has been put into the marketing than the actual winemaking, but this new blip on my radar puts in a heroic effort [...]
Looked at as part of a regional tasting for a West Australian lifestyle mag, this wine certainly divided the panel. And by “divided the panel”, I mean I was outnumbered three to one and found myself as the only one willing to back it. C’est la vie! For starters: what a nose! Full of intense [...]
Since stumbling across a keenly-priced bottle of this years ago, this South Australian shiraz-viognier has been a permanent blip on my drinking radar, so it was nice to see it shine in a recent masked tasting of shiraz. Colloquially speaking, the wine came up smelling like roses, but according to my hard-to-read tasting notes: aromas [...]
While Punt Road today is now a fixture in cosmopolitan Melbourne, back in the 1850s, the quiet dirt road was home to some of Victoria’s first commercial vineyards. Today, these vineyards have been relocated to the Yarra Valley but the wines still bear the Punt Road name. Stylistically, this is right up my pinot alley: [...]
The third pinot release from this Hunter Valley winery using fruit sourced from the Tamar Valley in Tasmania. There’s a whack of cedar and an abundance of spice on the nose, but when revisited the day after, the oak influence had largely dissipated, leaving in its wake plenty of cherry and strawberry remnants. On first [...]
This wine is a bit of a mystery – there’s no mention of a “Jacko’s Blend” on the Geoff Merrill website, but there is a regular 2003 McLaren Vale Shiraz that could certainly fit the profile of the wine described as the Jacko’s Blend at a shiraz tasting last week. None the less, very easy-to-like [...]