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