Tasting note 2/17… this one should be easy, fresh from watching Tony Abbott (thankfully) implode, I’ve gone to the masses and called for ‘collective thoughts’ on this wine. I started with the impeccably resourced (and talented) winemaking team at MVW, can’t get any closer to the source than these guys… the ‘man’ on the ground…

Even if this tasted like shit, we’d still be happy to have made this wine… and we’re only half joking. It’s just such a cool variety to say you make, especially for an old bloke like me who’s grasping at whatever he can to keep relevant in the post-Madonna Material World. Who even knew they…

Nero D’Avola Touriga Sagrantino Montepulciano Shiraz…surprisingly easy to say. Two 5 varietal wines in a row… must be the time of the year when winemakers pretend to be artists and come up with these concoctions under the guise of ‘intrigue’, ‘complexity’, ‘layers’ and any other assortment of blah. It’s a particularly tough one to write…

My mate Dean loves his Rosé, he even refers to it as if it was the flower, so after nailing the ess&see Grenache no.1 and 2 he needed only the slightest of prods to have a crack at growing the fruit for everyone’s favourite label. V12 of this was a cracker, the style, the creative,…

  It’s a Chameleon, a cool reptile that, besides the changing colour trick, also has the ability to independently rotate its eyes to focus simultaneously on different objects. This would be an easily justified link if we’d blended two batches together and said something about how we kept them separate, waiting for the right time…

If this wine was a bloke, he’d be drifting along in life, somewhere in his late 30s before waking up one morning busted and finally asking himself how the flaming f88k did he end up here? Who was he, how did he come to be… there are unmistakable characteristics of origin and gene, the tattooed…

I read in one of Jancis’s books that Vermentino ‘seems to benefit from proximity to the sea,’ which got me off on a tangent trying to think of who and what doesn’t enjoy the ocean? Mild steel is probably not much of a fan, nor are your car windscreen wipers… people of English pedigree can…

  Obviously Starfish have 5 legs (or arms?) and the Pentagon is named for its 5 sides. On the Periodic Table of Elements, Boron sits in the 5 box and it didn’t take me long to work through the 5 known senses that are thought to add up to perception. Moving a little further on…

I asked my Executive Assistant (I don’t actually have one, but if I did she’d be head to toe Burberry for the record) to get me some background on Frontignac, as other than Moscato and Rockford’s glugger, I know as much about its origins as I do Bonobos….actually I know heaps about Bonobos so that’s…

If we had a dollar for every time we’ve been behind the 5OS bar and copped the “is your Rosé dry, I only like dry Rosé” question/statement, we’d all be surfing a lot more and writing tasting notes a lot less. V14 we thought, for giggles more than anything, we should test out the conviction…