When is a wine a hollow log?

Grapes and Lager were kind enough to send us this great little video: The Mystery of Cow Bombie

Several months ago, Cow Bombie Margaret River Shiraz 2012 won a trophy for best red at the Margaret River show. This is a wine that costs $11 at Dan’s, so we grabbed a bottle to see if this was the bargain of the year, and this what we wrote:

‘Another trophy falls off the mantelpiece, despite the cute label. Cow Bombie is the name given to one of the biggest breaks off the Margaret River coast line so perhaps it’s fitting that his is one of those big, chunky, four-square Shiraz reds that lack refinement of any kind, along with charm, interest and enjoyment. 85 points. AVOID.

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Which wine merchants can you trust?

We get a lot of mail from subscribers who ask us about various online merchants. We prefer to buy from real wine merchants who live and breathe wine, who have real shopfronts and have added an online business to keep up with the times and make them more competitive.

Favourite merchants – for range, prices, shipping, service, websites

Kemenys Sydney – $10 per case, free for 4 cases or more. Beer is an option here.

Winedirect Adelaide – free freight to most places. Selected range of South Australian wines

MyCellars Adelaide – free freight for BWU$20 subscribers on any qty. also free over $250

Winestar Melbourne. Huge range, free freight to 97% of Australia

Winelistaustralia Melbourne – huge range, free shipping on orders over $250

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ABC’s Catalyst shows real Ticker

If you love wine, you’ll most likely love good food as well. Since most good food is rich, do you worry about its effect on your health? All that saturated fat in beef cheeks, the duck fat in the confits, and those triple cream soft cheeses you love?

Pour yourself a glass of wine and put some of your favourite cheese on a plate, then sit back and read the skinny on the fat story. ABC’s catalyst ran a story about cholesterol last year –  THE HEART OF THE MATTER – that the didn’t surprise some of us one bit. If you missed the Catalyst report, that’s too bad because the ABC gave into pressure from the establishment and pulled the programs off iView.

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We were going to tease out the best wines under $25 from this list, but we decided it was time to have some fun as well. You see, Jukes is a master exponent of hyperbole; he just loves going over the top both in the colour and volume of his descriptions – check what he wrote about the 2010 St Henri (and this is less than half of it):

‘… the whole experience is almost transcendental. Epic and thrilling I couldn’t spit it out.  I couldn’t whiplash it out of my mouth even if I was crashed into at speed while waiting for a red light to change.  Weirdly it wasn’t swallowed either – it was subsumed into my soul.  20++ (100++).’

Matthew Jukes is the Tom Wolfe (The Bonfires of the Vanities) of wine writers. ‘Wolf writes Big and Tall Prose,’ says James Wood in the New Yorker, ‘big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability

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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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