Wine retailing, like the rest of the retailing world, is going through a bit of a seismic shift from bricks & mortar to clicks & order, which some might characterize as more of a stampede. In the past year or so, the Aussie consumer has awakened to the benefits (mainly price but also selection) of buying online thanks in a large part to the whinging of Gerry Harvey (Harvey Norman) & his retailing mates.

I recently returned from an extended trip to the States that took me to both California and Pennsylvania. The two states offered up a world of difference in terms of what, where and how (which may also leave you with many whys) you can buy wines.

Pennsylvania is the most archaic and depressing experience as it is still 100% owned and operated by a State government agency called the LCB (Liquor Control Board). It is a thriving, billion dollar piece of Communism right in the heart of the land of democratic freedom that, as much as it strives to be better (creating so-called ‘Premium’ wine centres) is very much the McDonalds of wine. No matter what store you visit, the wine selection is always the same, ordered from a centrally controlled and managed Politburo list.

California, on the other hand, is the vinous version of free love, with not just excellent wine stores dotting the landscape but everybody and his mother (supermarkets, dairies, bodegas, delis) stocking the stuff and completely free to make their own varied selections from whatever corner of the world that may tickle their fancy.

…So succinctly said the late André Tchelistcheff, the pint-sized (all 150 centimetres of him) dean of American winemakers, and those words, to many winemakers, still ring true today. Other grape varieties have bad raps (Viognier translated from Latin means ‘road to hell’) but Pinot Noir is the proverbial Holy Grail and Hell for lots of winemakers, making them jump through a series of hoops in the vineyard and the winery, vintage after vintage, teasing and tantalizing and torturing them and giving them hope that they are iterating closer and closer to that ephemeral, mysterious elegance that eludes so many. It is a bastard grape - from start (propagation – there are over 1,000 clones versus 12 for Cab Sav) to finish (wine making and ageing) and holds a disproportionate level of importance and reputation in the Australian wine scene given its relatively tiny position, amounting to less than 1% of wine crushed each year.

OK…I feel a wee bit better after blowing off some steam in last month’s wine rant – I actually had a bar owner say he needed some words with me, I guess I must have struck a cord. So here comes my second volley…

Retail Wine Prices

I strive very hard to support small independent wine merchants and I would hazard a guess that at least 90% of the wine I buy comes from them. They are repositories of great wine knowledge; they almost always have interesting, small producer wines on offer; and they somehow are able to do it at a very fair price. But every so often I am forced to venture over to the dark side of the retail wine world (the Big Fellas) and it irritates me to no end.

There is always a lot of rabid, foam-at-the-mouth ranting going on at the King’s Tribune (and rightly so) but I have been pretty quiet – until now. I have decided, for this month’s wine column, I wanted to start getting a few issues off my chest, so let the whining begin…

Restaurant and Bar Wine Prices

If everyone did not already know, Australia (and the rest of the world for that matter) is floating in, literally, an ocean of wine. That is bad news for the many wineries that are enduring some very tough times; the good news is that the average wine sipper has never had a better choice of a decent drop to drink, at a more than pleasurable price – agreed?

As part of the recent Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, a tasting called Return to Terroir was held at Fed Square, where over 60 of the world’s leading biodynamic vintners gathered to pour and talk about their wines. Return to Terroir is an organisation of 176 wine makers that span the globe.

I have written about biodynamics before and it seems to be a wine topic that, without fail, polarizes the crowd. You are either a believer, a practising zealot or you think it is a bunch of hippy shit and the whole lot of them are away with the fairies.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the New Zealand in a Glass public and trade tasting in Melbourne recently. These events are fantastic for several reasons: first, you get to taste a wide variety of wines (87 wineries pouring over 430 wines). Second, you get to taste a wide variety of wine styles (e.g., getting many takes on what a Chardonnay or Pinot Noir can taste like by different winemakers). Third, you get to meet and talk to the winemaker, which almost always adds some dimension or insight to the wine tasting experience. You get to hear the wine’s narrative, so to speak, which can propel your understanding of a wine a step or two up the knowledge ladder.

A belated Happy New Year’s to all our King’s Tribune readers and I hope you have successfully navigated the treacherous holiday season unscathed. We start 2011 with a bit of a kerfuffle in the Australian wine world. Stephen Pannell, an excellent and much respected wine maker from McLaren Vale, very publicly proposed an idea that from January 2011 Australian wine punters should drink only Australian wine. He openly expressed his frustration that everywhere he seemed to turn, whether it be in the press, the web or actual wine events or the industry, people were choosing and promoting, at least to his eyes and ears, imported wines. Pannell said to Decanter magazine “Australian wine is not travelling well even in our own market. There’s almost a cultural cringe about our wines but we should have pride in them. It’s hypocritical to eat local and then drink Chianti”. I have met Stephen Pannell and to say he is a man with some strong opinions is clearly an understatement.

In case you missed it, November 30th 2010 was Rose Revolution Day, where more than 30 global rose drink fests took place, with all sorts of social media (Twitter, Facebook) involvement to promote and discuss the merits of (hopefully) well made rosé.

Now rosé has been a wee bit of a conundrum for me in my wine drinking life. When I first started to learn about wine and take some serious level of interest, rosé seemed to be a bit of a bastard son. It was neither a white nor a red wine and not considered by the wine cognoscenti of the time to be worthy of any discussion, unless of course you were referring to champagne. Couple that with my first exposure to rosé being the mass marketed, sickly sweet brand Mateus - from which I got violently ill (though to be fair to Mateus it was really something I ate) which did indeed cement in my mind a very bad not so rosé-y memory.

I have got a good mate Brad Hickey, ex-sommelier from New York City, who lives in McLaren Vale and is part of the team at Thorpe Wines. He and I have been bantering back and forth about doing a special wine dinner featuring various wines from my need-to-be-drunk-cellar so we picked a date, he shouted me a plane ticket and voilà - it happened. Not to miss such a great opportunity, I padded the trip with a few extra days and made a preliminary detour to the Barossa and Eden Valleys.

As I mentioned in my last article, the Artisans of Barossa tasting tour paid a visit to Melbourne on Tuesday, September 14th. If any Tribune readers were there, then you were privileged to be treated to some of the best and most seriously interesting juice to be coming out of the Barossa, Eden and Clare Valleys today - bar none.

At this time of year (or it seems almost any time of year) Melbourne is awash in a plethora of food and wine events that beg for your attention. In just the past month or so we have witnessed the rollout of the Gourmet Traveller Food and Wine Awards, the Age Good Food Guide Awards, the Taste of Melbourne Festival, Tasmania Unbottled and the Coonawarra Wine Roadshows. I find the majority of these events to be fairly well run, offer excellent value for money and an almost limitless opportunity to learn.

I was fortunate recently to have the chance to get a wonderful refresher course and status update on some New Zealand wines.

The occasion was the Hot Red Hawke’s Bay Australian Roadshow, which landed in Melbourne and Sydney in late July, with a cornucopia of artisan Kiwi wine makers in attendance to discuss and sample their work. New Zealand does not make a lot of red wine on a relative basis (total New Zealand wine production does not even equal the output of the Barossa Valley alone) and what they do make does not always make its way to Australia (a good percentage of the wineries at the show were looking for Australian distributors) so it was a rare and privileged opportunity to re-acquaint my vinous palate and friendships.

It may be a wee bit early to call it a definite trend, but I believe that Chardonnay is on its way back as a preferred white wine of consumption.

Chardonnay has always been one of my favourites and it has never really gone away as it is one, if not the, white grape that makes the white wine world go round.

I have recently started working at Armadale Cellars, one of the great independent wine stores in the Melbourne region (see November 2009 article for a detailed list of the other folk doing great wine work).

Whether or not you believe in climate change, many people (including winemakers and viticulturists) whose livelihood directly relies on Mother Nature have to, at a minimum, hedge their bets in some way, shape or form.

I had the great pleasure recently of spending time in two of Australia’s most wonderful wine regions – Margaret River and the Mornington Peninsula. Wonderful for a number of reasons, but the combination of fantastic food and wine scenes, magical scenery and awesome Aussie beaches and surf is hard to beat.

I have a general theory that the world can be divided into two types of folks (a gross generalization but let it slide): those that like everything to be essentially the same, or in other words no surprises, and those that totally crave and love surprises - the unique, the one of, even the weird.

Though it has most definitely not felt like Spring lately, my editor Jane asked if I could write an article on the sparkly stuff which I hope will slam Winter up side the head and let the right weather through the door.

Second labels are about as old as wine making itself.

There are a variety of reasons for wineries to produce a second label, but a couple of the primary ones are to make some money on young vines that may be considered too young for the flagship wine; and to offer the consumer a chance to try a winemaker’s wine style without having to break the bank buying the platinum top tier label.

With my imminent move to Melbourne I have been confronted with the sorry state of affairs called Australian Customs. They are stubbornly sticking to their guns (i.e., stupid policy) and threatening to charge such an outrageous tariff on my wine cellar that I will either leave most of it in New Zealand or have a big drink up.

I was reading a wine column in a magazine recently, where the author was whinging about being served his wine in a nice glass. The writer was a Master of Wine, a title that is not handed out willy-nilly; it is a moniker that requires years of hard study to successfully pass multitudes of exams.

Almost 90% of wine made in New Zealand is sealed with a screwcap, which is the fastest uptake and most extensive use of screwcaps of any winemaking region in the world. But is that a good thing?

I have been to two very interesting wine tastings in the past month; they both focused on Cabernet Sauvignon, but offered 2 very different perspectives on this great grape variety.

If you have not seen the movie Sideways yet, you should. It does a great piss take of the hoity-toity world of wine, but one amazing feature of the film was the main character, Miles, trashing Merlot and effusively praising Pinot Noir.

First off, for those of you who did not know, Shiraz and Syrah are the same grape but given different names, mostly for marketing purposes. That said they do produce distinctly different styles of wine depending upon the climate and soil they are grown in.

One of the things that has been happening in the wine world that I find fun & interesting is that the New World wine makers are experimenting with some different Old World grapes.