Author: Alex Prichard

Rhythm Stick 2012 Red Robin Riesling

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

20150103_180818

As summer rolls around and the silly season kicks off I always ensure that I have a good stash of wine around the house that I can drink, share and take out and about with me without worrying about it. It might make me a bad person, but I’m not too hot on sharing my really good wine. I’ll usually crack something special on significant family occasions (only if it can be drunk before my rellies have worked their way through too many beers and reds!) but if I’m in a large group, I like to share good wine which over delivers for its price point.

I first came across Rhythm Stick Wines at least year’s (2014) Cellar Door Festival. I enjoyed the wines then and was going to buy some except that they weren’t accepting cards. I’m lucky if I have 20c on me at any one time so that was something of a deal breaker …

But when I was on the hunt for some bargain summer drinking – obviously Riesling was on my mind – and I saw that the Red Robin Clare Valley Riesling was available at Dan’s, I popped a bottle of it in my cart and placed my click & collect order.

I was really pleased when I picked it up to find that it was a 2012 Riesling. 2012 was a cracking year for Clare Valley Rieslings and it’s always good to come across one. Note to Dan’s though – really, you need to get your attitude towards vintage together – for ALL your wines. There’s a good chance I’ll buy more of this wine but no chance I’ll do it online through you since I can’t control what vintage I get. However, it’s very worth noting that you can buy direct from the producer …

My apologies for two Riesling posts back to back – however, at under $20 a bottle, this is more affordable and definitely in the every day drinking category (for those of us who can’t routinely splash $70 on a bottle of wine).

Pale gold in the glass – perhaps starting to show a little age and development.

The nose is pronounced with the distinctive rubber and kerosene characteristic that some Rieslings take on with age. There’s lemon and pineapple with a hint of both spice and flowers.

The palate is dry and citrussy with plenty of acidity and the wine shows off a really pleasant top note of honeysuckle. The wine has good length and texture. It’s very enjoyable to drink and provokes just enough thought. However, I’d avoid serving this too cold – I found that straight from the fridge the palate was a little narrow and fell short but the wine really opened up given some time out of the fridge.

As with almost all young(ish) Riesling, you need not be in a hurry to drink this.

This was purchased from Dan Murphys, $20 a bottle but you can purchase (vintage specific and even back vintage) wines direct from the winery.
Screw cap.
12.5% abv.

Loimer 2007 Langenlois Terrassen Riesling

/ Alex Prichard 4 Comments

20141221_200306

This wine was a generous gift from a friend. I swapped a baby seat for this and a bottle of Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir (not yet drunk). Based on the Riesling alone I definitely got the better end of the deal.

The friend who gave this to me is not a particularly big wine drinker. However, unlike a lot of people who get slightly freaked out by my outside the norm interest in wine – and who promptly spend a fortune on giving me things like flowers, he did the sensible thing.

It might be a bit late to be handing out wine gift buying advice now but if you are buying for a wine lover (any time of year) don’t be intimidated by what you perceive to be either their knowledge or enthusiasm and buy them something other than wine. Even wine paraphernalia can miss the mark (seriously, do you know how many corkscrews we have? more than one for every room and that includes my favourite one which lives in my handbag). But a bottle of wine will ALWAYS hit the mark.

What you need to do is set yourself a budget and head to a serious (and most likely independent) bottle shop. You need to be in a wine shop where all the staff are enthusiasts and who will know their stock – so now is the not the time to head to the local.

The chances are you already know something about what the recipient likes or doesn’t like when it comes to wine (if you really have no idea then a voucher from the bottle shop might be the best idea but you can always ask the recipient for a few favourite wine suggestions) and armed with this, the bottle shop staff should be able to point you in the right direction.

And so … my good friend arrived with two classy bottles of wine. If the second is anywhere near as good as this, I am in for a treat!

While most of us have formed an association between Austria and Grüaut;ner Veltliner, it is hardly surprising that it should also produce quality Rieslings. I can’t pretend to be familiar with aged Austrian Rieslings but any lover of aged Riesling would be happy with this wine.

A striking pale gold in the glass with a pronounced nose.

The oily, rubbery, kero characters of older Riesling dominate the nose, but there are very subtle floral characteristics, including a touch of rose water.

The palate shows off more of the floral characters, along with a slight honeyed characteristic with a ton of acidity which pulls through a crisp, tart green apple, almost sherberty finish. Definite green apple skin, with plenty of texture, lovely mouthfeel and good length. A very moreish wine that delivers plenty of interest and very much a style of Riesling that I enjoy.

Most people will detect a hint of RS (I couldn’t find any tasting notes for the 07 which specified this) but this is more than balanced by the stunning acidity. In a sentence – green apple skin with a touch of honey and rosewater.

A gift – but it is available from East End Cellars where it retails around $70.
Screwcap.
I failed to note the alcohol content of the wine but the internet suggests it’s 13.5% abv which I find surprisingly high. So don’t quote me on that one.

Carpene Malvolti 1868 Cartizze Prosecco

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

20141220_204959

Prosecco suffers from an image problem – even worse than that suffered by Cava, in my opinion. There are a lot of reasons for this – and the biggie is that because it’s a sparkling wine people immediately compare it with Champagne and Champagne it isn’t. Prosecco has a few different classifications in Italy – the most widely recognised is perhaps Prosecco di Valdobbiadene DOCG (promoted from DOC in 2009). You may also see Conigliano, Valdobbiadene-Conigliano or even Cartizze. Cartizze is a high vineyard of just over 100 hectares and is considered the granddaddy (or ‘grand cru’, if you will) of Prosecco.

Aside from being the classification, Prosecco is also the name of the grape which constitutes the bulk of what you will find in the bottle. However, to avoid ‘confusion’, the grape Prosecco was ‘renamed’ in 2009 to Glera. You will still see plenty of Australian sparkling wine made from Glera labelled … Prosecco.

Pretty pale straw in the glass, with fine, persistent bubbles. The nose is restrained but shows some fresh lemon and ripe pear. The palate is a little one dimensional – the pear is very apparent and a touch confected. Although the Carpenè Malvolti tasting notes indicate that this wine is dry you could be forgiven for thinking there’s a touch of residual sugar (RS) present. There are also floral notes and a slightly sherberty finish.

While the wine isn’t unattractive, it’s a touch short on acidity and doesn’t offer much in the way of complexity.

I’ve not been able to track down an Australian retailer for this particular wine but others from the same stable look to be around the $20 mark, which is fair, but not brilliant, value. Given the wine’s confected character, I’d recommend drinking this at afternoon tea, with a slice of lightly toasted pandoro, dusted in icing sugar. Or use it in a Bellini or Buck’s Fizz.

This wine really wasn’t my cup of tea – too much apparent sweetness (I’ve been unable to find the wine’s actual RS anywhere) and not enough savoury characters or complexity. This wine is less apéritif and far better suited to dessert than canapés.

Not readily available. This was a prize.
Cork.
11% abv.

Yalumba 2013 Old Bush Vine Grenache

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

20141008_080717

The Royal Adelaide Wine Show has wrapped up for another year and, positions on wine shows aside, I’ve been lucky enough to try a few of the medal winning wines from this year’s entries. This has been thanks to my involvement in the Wine Communicators of Australia SA Chapter committee – so I’m in the luxurious position of neither having to pay for the wines directly nor feeling beholden to any producer.

I was also lucky enough to be able to share these wines with some of my family and the reason I’ve chosen to write about the Yalumba Grenache first is that it was, easily, the wine that was the biggest hit with my small sample of enthusiastic non-industry drinkers. There was even some acknowledgement that seeing ‘Yalumba’ would be cause to skip the wine in a retail environment (I guess you can get too big!). This wine picked up the top gold medal in Class 34 – Grenache 2013 and older. This was a small class with fewer than 25 entries and more than half picking up medals. What conclusions to draw from this … I know not!

It is disappointing though that this the show’s lone Grenache class was so small – as Grenache is a grape capable of producing really lovely wines that hold their own against our blockbuster Shirazes and Cabernets. It is food friendly, approachable and capable of ageing. In South Australia we are also privileged to have plenty of seriously old Grenache vines. Indeed, the vines that produced the grapes for this wine were planted in 1898.

So what is it like in the glass?

Appearance wise, medium intensity, and purple-ruby in colour. The nose is reasonably pronounced, showing strawberry and strawberry leaf and stem characters with a touch of tobacco and cedar.

On the palate, the stemmy/stalky notes are very much in the background to lots of fresh red fruit – strawberries and raspberries, wrapped up with a little white pepper and warm spice. Some of the cedar shows up too. What is really lovely and refreshing about this wine is that you get to experience this spice complexity and then it wraps up with another burst of fresh, juicy strawberry. The tannins are soft and the acidity is actually not too bad either which I think adds to the sensations of ripe red fruit, but it’s not over the top (which you wouldn’t expect in a Grenache anyway) meaning there’s no tartness.

Perhaps what is most pleasing about this wine is that you can pick it up for under $20. Even at a slightly higher price point this wine would represent something of a bargain, but below $20 there’s just no excuse not to give it a try.

Widely available.
Screwcap.
13.5% abv.

Another bonus: it is both vegetarian and vegan friendly.

Seghesio 2012 Sonoma County Zinfandel

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

20140916_145726

I’ve written about the Seghesio Old Vines Zin before but today we look at the entry level Sonoma County Zin. In the States, this retails at $US24, here in Australia you’re looking at the mid-$40 mark.

For me, Seghesio is a reliable Zinfandel producer. Having drunk (sorry, tasted) the a few of the wines on several occasions now they are always cracking, exemplary examples of both grape and style. If anyone ever said to me “I want to try an American Zinfandel” I’d recommend Seghesio without batting an eyelid.

Zinfandel is a Croatian grape variety (very handy piece of wine trivia that one!) and in the incomparable Wine Grapes it is listed under its snappy Croatian name … Tribidrag.  It has a few synonyms but the ones you’re most likely to encounter are Zinfandel (California) and Primitivo (Puglia, Italy).  There’s quite a twisty turny grape DNA story about how Tribidag, Primitivo and Zinfandel came to be identified as one and the same and for the purposes of today’s didactic content – let’s just content ourselves with the end conclusion.

Today, we find the grape growing in Croatia and some of the other countries of the former Yugoslavia, along with the US (principally California), Israel, Canada, Mexico, South Africa and even France. It’s becoming increasingly widespread in Australia too – once upon a time it was WA’s Cape Mentelle all the way if you wanted an Australian Zin but there are now producers seemingly everywhere (Kangarilla Rd pops to mind without even thinking too hard!).

In the glass the wine is an intense and deep purple – this is obviously a young wine! The nose is reasonably pronounced, showing lots of black berry fruits, black cherry, some warm spice and vanilla and even some fruitcake.

On the palate, there is all that black fruit again – most particularly the black cherries. There’s also the vanilla and good acidity which helps balance out all the fruit bomb sweetness. The palate is more complex than the nose – with licorice and milk chocolate showing too. The tannins are fine and soft. The length isn’t bad although the complexity drops off reasonably quickly and it becomes all about the black cherry fruit.

This wine is just a touch hot – the alcohol is definitely noticeable and given the wine’s rather linear finish it does rather stick out. These two factors (alcohol and finish) push me towards good rather than very good.

If you’re looking for an introduction to American Zinfandel this is a great start (even with the alcohol – that’s a big part of US Zins!) – especially if you can’t track down or afford the Old Vines.

Edinburgh Cellars.
Cork.
14.8% abv.

What is a Standard Drink?

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

image © Total Control

A friend is running a social media project, Total Control, as part of some university studies. The other day on both Instagram (where I first saw it) and Facebook she published the above picture of two flutes, annotated that the glass on the left contains 100mL of wine and one standard drink.

I called her out on this pretty quickly (not because I am a bad person, but because I am a pedant!).  100mL of wine is not (necessarily) one standard drink.

In fact, one standard drink in Australia is not (necessarily) one standard drink anywhere else.  And … guess what? A standard drink has (almost certainly) nothing to do with how much you’re poured in a bar or restaurant.

Confused? I doubt you’re alone.

In fact, if we look at the Australian Government’s official guidelines on calculating standard drinks we are treated to the following …

“Volume of Container in Litres multiplied by the percentage of alcohol volume multiplied by 0.789, equals the number of standard drinks”.

0.789 is the specific gravity of ethyl alcohol and in Australia a ‘standard drink’ (or unit) is defined as 10g of ethyl alcohol.

So if you’re calculating the number of standard drinks in your schooner of beer (a schooner in South Australia is 285mL) and you happen to know the beer you’re drinking is 4.5% abv (you’re drinking a Coopers Pale, right?) then why … it’s just:

0.789 * .285 * 4.5

You can do that in your head, right?  The answer is 1.01 standard drinks.

With beer, this is (relatively) easy because beer is usually served in standardised sizes.

However, wine is a different ball game altogether.  Wine glass sizes are NOT standardised.  Sure, many venues have glasses with pouring lines on them but unless you ask you won’t know what that volume is (and even sometimes once you do ask you’ll be none the wiser).  So 100mL of a wine at 13.5% abv will indeed give you that one standard drink (well 1.07 …).  But you’re more likely to have been poured in the region of 150mL (.15*.789*13.5  = 1.6) and if you’ve got a bottle of wine on the table and you’re pouring it yourself?  You’ve got buckleys.

Once you’ve nailed your .789 times tables, you’re best off not travelling.  While the UK has standardised servings for wine (125mL, 175mL, 250mL and multiples of 175mL thereafter) the UK unit of alcohol is 10mL.

And guess what – alcohol isn’t water – there’s no cosy one-to-one relationship between volume and mass.  10mL of water will indeed be 10g of water.  10mL of alcohol?  7.9 grams.  And Australia’s 10g of alcohol comes in at 12.7mL.

But wait! There’s more!

Your bottle of wine will announce it’s 13.5% abv … but is it?  Our wine labelling laws here in Australia allow a whopping 1.5% abv difference*.  That’s not a tolerance of 1.5% but a whole actual 1.5 percentage points.  Your 13.5% abv bottle of wine might actually be 15%!

And how does that affect the maths?

.1 * .789 * 15 = 1.2

But if it’s only 12% abv …

.1 * .789 * 12 = .95

I’m a great believer that there’s no point in complaining about things if you can’t posit some possible solutions.  So, what to do?

Normally, I’d say the first thing to look at is education – but anyone who’s just read through the above is most likely reaching for a drink!

Things should be more simple.

Firstly, I believe that defining a standard drink by mass rather than volume is unnecessarily confusing.  And not only do the concepts need to be easy to understand but the maths needs to be simpler too.  Defining a standard drink as 10mL of alcohol kills both those birds with one stone. You have 100mL of a wine that’s 13.5% abv?  Guess what – that’s 1.35 standard drinks.

The follow on from this is that serving sizes in bars need to be standardised.

Finally, I believe our labelling laws are letting us down.  I’m happy to bet that most punters don’t realise there’s so much flexibility with alcohol labelling. I see no reason why the tolerance for table wine should be different to that for fortifieds or spirits and I see no reason why it can’t be a tighter and more properly defined tolerance (that is, plus or minus a percentage of what you are claiming – and that tolerance is flat, across the board).  While I’m not au fait with the technologies used by the wine industry to measure alcohol concentration I’m sure we can do better (and, in fact, we do do better because many of our export markets have much tighter requirements).

And then we have to back this up with education.

Unfortunately, I can see that these ideas do start to place extra burden across almost all sectors of the industry.  Whether or not that burden is justified, I don’t know.

Personally, I think the most critical part of any alcohol education campaign is the importance of alcohol free days (the dreaded AFD).  This is something that is really easy for people to understand – no maths involved.

One AFD a week is good, and two is better.

* Food Standard 2.7.1, July 2014.

 

 

Delta Pinot Noir 2010

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

20140611_205120

I think that this wine appeared on a Decanter list of wines. I’m no longer sure which one but I do love lists and so often with the Decanter lists they feature wines that are either unavailable here in Australia or so expensive that they might as well be unavailable.

This Delta Pinot Noir from New Zealand’s Marlborough region is widely available and comes in at about $25 a bottle. Delta is a relatively young winery – founded in 2000 – and it produces two Pinot Noirs (both available in Australia) as well as … a Sauvignon Blanc. The business is a joint venture between a Kiwi winemaker and an English wine distributor. In its short existence, the wines of Delta have been well reviewed.

As you may know, I don’t typically buy a lot of New Zealand wine, and I certainly can’t profess to be an expert on Marlborough Pinot Noir. I also find that the $20-$30 price point for Pinot is a really tough bracket. And not tough because there is so much competition but tough because I generally find it underwhelming. While I love discovering wines that over-deliver, I find this very rarely the case with cheaper Pinot and I suspect that because I expect disappointment, I find it.

So … how does the Delta Pinot Noir perform in the glass?

It is medium to pale in intensity and garnet in colour. The nose shows raspberry and strawberry, with a hint of smokiness and stalk and ever so slight spiciness.

The palate is very fruit forward (something very common with many ‘new world’ Pinot Noirs) and shows off red cherry much more than the berry fruit of the nose. There are some soft tannins providing structure and while there’s some good acidity, the flavour profile drops off quite quickly.

In this instance, disappointment is way too strong a word. This is a tidy wine which delivers very typical Pinot characteristics and does have some structure. Is $25 too much to pay for it? Well, if you are in the market for a Pinot then, no, it’s probably not – but can you find more exciting wines at the same (or even less) cost? Why, yes.

But would I be rushing out and buying it again? To be honest – no. In my overall wine world view, this doesn’t deliver at the price. I would be interested to try out Delta’s Hatters Hill Pinot – it’s almost exactly the same price but is the winery’s flagship wine.

Dan Murphy’s (online order).
Screwcap.
13.2% abv.

Kaesler The Bogan Shiraz 2007

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

1401606191

Reviews of expensive wines sometimes seem a dime a dozen. When you head to industry events, the big guns are always cracked out – which is fab, don’t get me wrong! – but at the same time not indicative of how most people really drink. And, sadly, it’s also not indicative of how I drink. In some ways, I wish money were no object when it came to wine, but actually I enjoy seeking out wines which over perform.

And this is some kind of justification for now writing about a wine which, if you head out to buy it, will be difficult to track down and will set you back around $50. Sorry for that.

Over the years, I’ve worked for quite a few different companies in my ‘proper’ job and the quality (or dearth) of Christmas gifts has always been an interesting insight into management pysche. One small company gave us all a whole case of wine one Christmas, one company gave us nothing, and one gave us this wine, a bottle of 2007 Kaesler ‘The Bogan’* Shiraz from the Barossa Valley.

Kaesler is a privately owned winery in the Barossa, and the first vines were planted in 1893. It releases wines in three ‘series’: Stonehorse, Estate and Limited Release. The Bogan falls under the Estate banner and its Shiraz grapes come, in part, from a vineyard over 100 years old. It’s a carefully crafted wine, built to age, and one that, at just seven years of age, you’d expect to be something of a baby.

And in the glass it looked like a baby: very intense and a deep, inky purple. The nose was pronounced, complex and showing slightly more development. Licorice and tar were first off the rank, backed up by blackberry, chocolate and tobacco and there was something ever so slightly green and stalky.

In the mouth we’re talking about a lot of black fruit – lots of blackberry, with anise, licorice and a hint of black pepper. Good acidity and tannins that are slightly grippy and chewy provide excellent structure and mean that you needn’t be in a hurry to drink any spare bottles you have lying around. While the alcohol is apparent it is not intrusive or particularly unbalanced and the wine has a lovely, complex length.

Yes, this is a delicious wine with a good future ahead of it. Would I rush out and pay $50 a bottle for it? I’m on the fence here, but I’m very grateful that there is another bottle in the cellar that I can revisit in a couple of years.

Corporate gift.
Cork.
15.5% abv.

* For non-Australian readers, ‘bogan’ is Australian vernacular for an ‘uncouth or unsophisticated person’.  It is, naturally, derogatory.

Kooyong Clonale Chardonnay 2013

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

1401880392

Once upon a time I drank very little Chardonnay – no idea why, but I suspect I’d jumped on the ABC bandwagon without even thinking about it. And it is true that once upon a time, much Australian Chardonnay was over oaked and one dimensional – especially the stuff that was exported. I don’t recall drinking an Australian Chardy while living in the UK – but very serviceable Chablis and white Burgundy was available for almost knock down prices, so I didn’t need to seek out the classier Australian efforts.

A couple of years ago I took part in the Negociants Working with Wine program in which one masterclass focussed on Chardonnay. One of the panellists was Sandro Mosele of Port Phillip Estate and Kooyong. I can’t recall (and I am too lazy to get off the sofa and find notes from two years ago!) if we tried the Clonale at that tasting but the event certainly put the Kooyong wines on my radar.

Since then, for me, the Clonale Chardonnay has been one of those very reliable, almost go-to wines. It is reasonably widely available and you do see it on the odd wine list. At around $25 per bottle retail it also falls into my ‘weekday drinking’ price bracket. I do realise that my tolerance for spending on wine far exceeds that of many people – but don’t worry as this wine is definitely good enough to be special occasion material.

In the glass the wine is a pale gold in colour and while oak does rather dominate the nose, there is some spice along with lemon and lime.

Don’t be put off by the oak on the nose though as on the palate there is a lot more fresh fruit evident. Lemon, lime and green apples, along with a touch of ripe pear and the oak sneaks in later. There’s good acidity and excellent structure: the palate develops really beautifully and the wine has good length.

While I do think that $25 a bottle is a more than fair price for this wine, its reliability gives it some extra bonus points. Even if you think you don’t like oaked Chardonnay this is a wine worth checking out – especially if you can just cadge a glass from a friend’s bottle!

$25 from Dan Murphy’s.
Screwcap.
13.5% abv.

Art Wine Tempranillo 2010

/ Alex Prichard Leave a comment

20140602_212242.jpg

I am a junky for the weird and wonderful (when it comes to grapes, in many other aspects of my life I’m decidedly pedestrian) and I’m pretty sure the first time I came across Art Wine was the Graciano. If I recall correctly, I used that wine for a spot of corporate training where it was very well received.

Graciano is a grape that hails from Rioja, where it plays second fiddle, and then some, in the quantity stakes to Tempranillo.

I am quite a fan of Spain (go out and buy the latest edition of James Halliday’s Wine Companion Magazine to read about my adventures in Rioja) and I think there’s plenty of good wine being made in South Australia from grapes of Spanish origin. The wines produced here are quite different in character to those which originate on the Iberian peninsula, but they are delicious (and often very approachable) wines.

The Art Wine Tempranillo definitely falls into this category. You won’t be mistaking it for a Rioja (well, I wasn’t) but it is a lovely, moreish wine. This wine lasted three days in our household and my tasting notes were written on day 2. I thoroughly enjoyed it on all three days … and of course by day three I was disappointed that there was little more than a glass left in the bottle.

In the glass, the wine is very dense and purple in colour, just tending to ruby.

The nose is reasonably pronounced and red fruit dominated: think red cherry and raspberry jam, but there is something savoury lingering in the background.

The palate reflects this with some added complexity. There’s good acidity and soft tannins, and while there is a ton of fresh black and red fruit, it is balanced by earthy notes and a decided savoury finish. One the second day the alcohol was slightly more apparent but the wine was still well balanced.

A really lovely wine and one which I would buy again without hesitation.

$26 from Cellarbrations, Flagstaff Hill.
Screwcap.
14.0% abv.