by Gareth Groves
I am on record as not being the biggest fan of live twitter tastings. I have been involved in a few and too often social media has turned into anti-social media as participants ignore the people around them and stare exclusively at their smart phones. Meanwhile the virtual chat doesn’t really catch fire and the whole thing falls a bit flat.
With something as social …
Yesterday, a winemaker friend of mine from South Africa sent me a link to a fabulous blog post. It was a “Dear John” letter written by an American wine writer to Pinot Noir. Blake Gray laments to his former beloved that “I still love you, and I’ll probably always love you. But you’ve changed since we met, and I can’t ignore it anymore,” bemoaning the fact that Pinot just doesn’t taste like it use to.
by Robin Tedder MW, http://glenguin.wordpress.com/
Robin Tedder MW is the owner and winemaker at boutique winery Glenguin Estate in the Hunter Valley, Australia. Robin has just started a fantastic new blog and this is his B Times debut. We usually think of the Hunter as being one of Australia’s warmer wine regions but this is clearly not the case in July….
After …
by Dan Coward, Lion Nathan Communications & Partnerships Manager
St Hallett’s senior winemakers, Toby Barlow and Stuart Blackwell (above), are the self-proclaimed hip-hop and hip-replacement of Barossan Shiraz. And both the zimmer frame and the diamond encrusted cane get plenty of use as they sashay their way through dozens of small fermenters and about 110 different Shiraz parcels each vintage. This is the backdrop to …
By Juel Mahoney http://www.winewomansong.co.uk/
ARGH. All this talk about boring, high-alcohol, industrial Australian wines. Usually by people who believe Australia is one large hydro-dam of Chardonnay. Yes, really. When I worked in Mayfair in London, someone actually asked me whether Australia has vintages. Someone who buys a lot of wine, and frankly, should have known better.
So to avoid further embarrassment: here are five regions around Australia …
by Rebecca Gibb, www.rebeccagibb.com
It’s more than a year since the Yarra Valley was hit by bush fires raging through the region, burning vineyards and anything that laid in its path.
The impact of the fires was confined to just 4% or 154ha of vines. Unfortunately sweltering temperatures had already reduced the potential crop before the blazes hit: yields were …
by Alex Bazeley
There’s a new blogger in town at Bibendum. Alex Bazeley, an ex-Oddbins Manager now a member of our Off Trade team, recently spent a year touring the vineyards of the Southern Hemisphere…lucky chap!
When he was away he wrote the excellent blog www.winetraveller.net. Now he’s back, we are hoping he will carry on blogging and write some articles for Bibendum Times. Here’s a taster of the Wine Traveller blog all about Alex’s …
By Jo Jericho,
In a cruel trick of nature I have a head cold and cannot taste a thing except alcohol. I’m sitting in a room of 14 Coonawarra Cabernets from 1982 to 2006 and I haven’t even bothered to stick my nose in a glass. It may as well be smelling salts. I couldn’t tell.
I’m missing out on something big here, I know. When was the …
Jo handed me the bottle to taste with the words “this vintage is a stonker”.
The bottle in question was the recently released Katnook Founder’s Block Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 but I am not sure she’s right about the stonking bit. To me, stonking implies something overwhelming, a blockbuster, a wine clearly designed to impress from the very first sip; a wine …
By Jo Jerico, Wingara
Wingara Pod on Bibendum Stand
It’s coming towards the end of a long day here at the fair. I caught up with Wayne Stehbens from Katnook Estate to learn more about Coonawarra. We all know about Coonawarra Cabernet (check back tomorrow for an update on the Landmark Coonawarra Cabernet tutorial which Wayne is presenting at) …
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