It’s an annual event, and this was the 15^th time it was held. Sydney’s Quay restaurant was packed with what must’ve been close to 200 people. Tickets to this event sell out fast as you get to taste the best wines Penfolds has to offer with the some of the fanciest food around. All with a full view of the Opera House and Circular Quay.

Why was Best Wines under $20 here, given that the wines here ranged from $30 to $600? And we claim never to go to industry functions because we want to keep an arms’ length relationship with an industry that is full of really nice, passionate and generous people. We got a free seat at the table, just to make that clear.

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Jeffrey Daley is one of a group of wine lovers I’m fortunate to belong to, a group that meets for a special dinner with precious old bottles 2-3 times a year. I opened the latest issue of Gourmet Traveller Wine yesterday, and there was Jeffrey checking out some old Burgundies – his favourites.

The GTW article by Peter Forrestal describes Jeffrey as a ‘Sydney-based wine lover with a formidable cellar and a fascination (obsession) with the great wines of the world.’ All true but I know Jeffrey as an urbane, charming and generous fellow with no pretensions of any kind – he’s really down to earth and a lot of fun to spend time with.

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A subscriber wrote and asked if we’d come across this wine, which we haven’t. John wondered if we’d come across this wine, which he’d already bought a 6-pack of at Graysonline, on the basis of a strong review in Winestate. ‘Well made wine,’ John wrote. ‘Mouth puckering fruit bomb, OK if you like that style. I’ll stay with the Sicilian jobs which are food friendly.’

I was curious to see what other reviewers said about the wine, because Tash Mooney the winemaker built a huge following with her E&E Black Pepper Shiraz at Barossa Valley Estate years ago. So I had a look around, and here’s what I found:

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Our Mission is to take the Bull out of Wine

I’m not sure why James Halliday decided just now to write a post about Alex Mayyasi’s piece from last year. It kind of plays into our premise that most people including wine judges have trouble telling expensive wines from more humble ones.

James comes out punching, right from the first paragraph: ‘Alex Mayyasi’s blog is proof positive that wine bloggers are, by and large, distinguished by their abysmal lack of knowledge, whether they are blogging about some specific aspect of wine, or making sweeping judgements about wine in general.’

Killing the messenger

How ironic that James chooses to begin his riposte with a sweeping judgement about bloggers. The next paragraph is more of the same: ‘He leaps from one point to the next, and having started with the proposition that wine is bullshit and that experts cannot tell good wine from bad, comes to a conclusion that, on its face, makes everything he has written on the way through incorrect or misleading.’

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BWU$20 Hits a Wall of Silence

I was trying to broaden our sources of samples for review, so I spoke with a few fine wine distributors. Actually, I wrote to them first, by email, telling them who we were and what we were about. I mentioned that we’re keen to promote smaller wineries and independent retailers, and more.

Silence. Of the deafening kind. I couldn’t work it out – surely these guys want their wines reviewed, don’t they? OK, so we’re a bit brutal with our reviews – one subscriber wrote in that he had never seen the term AVOID! In a wine review – but any publicity is good publicity, isn’t it?

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Updated December 2014  

ANZ Grapegrower and Winemaker cites a Nielsen report which shows that , in 2013, the number of consumers who shopped online was higher than the number of those who did online banking. The surprise is that just 13% of consumers purchased wine online in the past six months, but the report found that online buyers ‘are likely to spend twice as much as those who purchase in-store.’

‘Dan Murphy’s, Woolworths Online and eBay are popular wine destinations for young consumers,’ The story goes, ‘while Cellarmasters is the most popular online purchase point for the oldest segment. Graysonline is also a popular source for men, and in fact, heavy online wine buyers skew heavily toward males. Looking at categories purchased online, wine is the least likely category to be purchased via a mobile phone.’

Schlepping grog is a waste of time

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The French and the Germans are fond of declaring top vintages in this manner, but we don’t really play that game down under. Still, 2012 in South Australia came pretty close, with Halliday writing: I cannot remember a vintage having received such hyperbolic praise right across the board, covering all regions and all varieties, as there is for 2012. Words that came up repeatedly were ‘fantastic’, ‘outstanding’, ‘sensational’, ‘best in my lifetime’, ‘perfect in every way’…

The ABC reported that ‘Australia winemakers cheered over prospect of best vintage in 20 years,’ and then quoted Halliday and Michael Hill-Smith who said: ‘Winemakers across South Australia, even in the warmer areas like McLaren Vale and the Barossa Valley, are saying the quality they’ve got out of 2012 is exceptional.’

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This is how Max starts a recent piece titled Take some time over your wine in the Australian’s Executive Living section:

WHAT a difference a day makes. I tasted half a dozen new Australian grenaches recently, all from the Barossa and McLaren Vale in South Australia, all from the very good 2012 vintage. And then I tasted them again, 24 hours later, from the same bottles, so each had had a little exposure to air in the intervening time. And they all tasted different – some a little bit, some quite a lot.

OK, this is not exactly big news. Just about everybody who’s not part of the ludicrous wine judging circus in our country agrees that judging long lines of wines on enormous benches is a dumb idea. Still, it’s good to read it once in a while.

At BWU$20, we assess wines in the same settings you drink wine in: before and over dinner, in restaurants, at picnics and barbeques, with family and friends. The only difference is that we open several bottles to make sure we have some left for a couple of days. The change can be dramatic or barely noticeable. As Max points out: when a wine doesn’t change much over a couple of days in the open bottle, it’s an indicator of longevity.

Some wines open up like a peacock’s tail feathers – The Wynns Siding Cabernet 2012 was a recent example of that. Others just fall apart. Max mentions the Yalumba Bush Vine Grenache 2012, which struck us as pretty simple and gutless on opening. Over the next couple of days, we go back to the open wines (reds and whites) and see how they’ve developed.

Another difference is that we focus on drinkability and character. If a wine has both in spades, we don’t mind a few technical faults. Wines like that tend to work well with flavoursome food. By contrast, wine judges jump on faults, and mark wines down for them. That explains why so many bland and boring wines make it through to a podium finish: our judges reward technical perfection, not character or drinkability.

KIM

Marlborough Men: still trashing their biggest brand

This weekend, Dan Murphy and 1^st Choice both had Stoneleigh Sauvignon Blanc on special for less than $9 a bottle. I’ve made no bones about our low opinion about these cheap Kiwis, but I kind of suggested in our Friday bargain Alert that you probably couldn’t go wrong at this price. Then I  thought I’d better grab a bottle of this wine to make sure that was good advice.

Dan Murphy had none left on Saturday morning, such had been the rush on Friday when the deal was pushed out on the web. 1^st Choice had a few bottles left so we grabbed one to try on Saturday night. It was rubbish, industrial concoction written all over it: fake hints of tangy gooseberry, harsh acid softened by residual sugar that reminded us of saccharin, and a finish that just went to mush.

Looking for what others said about this wine, we found our own review of the 2012 Stoneleigh, which said: ‘A standard bearer for the oceans of awful Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc being dumped on our shores. This wine gives us a brief a hint of the variety on the nose, before descending into a wishy washy mess on the palate that lacks class and structure and style. Dreadful stuff even at this price.’

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PLUS CA CHANGE

‘Is it a conscious decision by some wine writers to give over-inflated scores? In some cases I believe that it is. Their peers may laugh at them, but why should they care? The people who make and sell wine will be eternally grateful, especially in the current economic climate, when expensive wine is difficult to shift. Consumers want guidance, which is why high scores sell bottles. It’s only a guess, but I think we are going to see a lot more 100 pointers in the future. Whether the wines truly deserve it is another matter.’  Tim Atkin MW

My friend Jeffrey sent me an email this week about a wine dinner he enjoyed at the new Rockpool in Sydney, which he says looks and feels like a funeral parlour. One of the wines served by the importers who hosted the dinner was a 2010 Pontet-Canet, a fifth growth from Pauillac that has been improved dramatically since Alfred Tesseron took over in 1997.

Now this is way out of BWU$20 territory, but Pontet-Canet 2010 gets 100 points from Robert Parker, and it’s half the price of the 100 point Grange 2008 which got the same perfect score from the Parker camp. A genuine bargain, clearly. I mean we’re in rarified territory here, among greats like Château Latour, Le Pin, Cheval Blanc and Petrus who also got perfect scores, and well ahead of Lafite, La Mission Haut-Brion, Ausone and Mouton Rothschild on 98 points. P-C 2009 also scored 100.

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