7 great bottles of wine

When I drink a great bottle of wine I like to keep the bottles around. Not sure why, but I am a bit of a bower bird. A while back my wife started telling me to get rid of the bottles because it looked like an alcoholic was living in the house. I disagreed, because I throw away the bottles that are not teh awesome and that makes me a classy drunk instead.

But I love my wife and I want to make her happy, so I figured that I could take the bottles to work to decorate my office. This was a great idea, because it is nice to occasionally glance at them and remember the nice memories associated with each drink.

From left to right we have (reviews of mine linked where I have them):

Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet Sauvignon

Penfolds RWT Shiraz (this was drank on New Years eve 6 months ago. No review because I was lazy and busy with family at the time. But the wine was a blast)

Euroa Creeks Shiraz

Mitolo GAM Shiraz

Pikkara Shiraz

Torbreck GSM

Stella’s Garden Lost Highway Project Shiraz

I think that it is a cool picture because it shows a good spread of the kind of stuff I love to drink. Yeah there is not much variety in terms of where it came from, but I only started this thing recently and statistically I am most likely to drink Shiraz

2005 Slipstream Fastback McLaren Vale Shiraz

(no winery page found)

Jeff reviewed this one a while back and I finally opened a bottle to drink over a week whenever I wanted a glass. Yeah it might be a little young but I need to sacrifice some of the young stuff to bootstrap the kind of collection where you can regularly consume 5 year old bottles of wine.

My first initial comment is that this is very drinkable wine. No nasty heat in the mouth from the alcohol and when you let it sit for a bit there is a nice smooth flavour that lets you taste the soil. I think that the drinkability comes from the fact that it has a lightness about it, probably stemming from a good balance between the sugars and tannins.

I got this from the same place Jeff did at the same price. As he points out, this is a good wine for people to try who don’t believe that Australia can do anything between Yellowtail and Grange.

On bottle shapes

Recently I have started taking more notice of the shape of bottle that wine is coming in. When I first got into wine I noticed that there were different shapes, but I assumed that this was stylistic on a very simple level. Now I realize that there is a subtle twist to the choice – Bordeaux bottle for a Bordeaux style wine, Rhone bottle for a Rhone style wine and so on. While I can appreciate that this helps to distinguish the style of wine while it sits in the shop, I have some problems with this approach.

For one, I think that this is too much of a shadow of the old world being projected onto the new world of wine. I believe that the new world have some styles all their own, and they manage to have these styles recognized without changing the bottle shape (or at least I argue that they do). I also don’t appreciate the difficulties it creates in wine storage. Some cabinets are optimized to the standard Bordeaux bottle, and having extra tall Bordeaux bottles or Rhone bottles complicates stacking, etc.

Now, given that some winemakers choose one shape over another for whatever reason (Torbreck seems to like the sloping neck and Penfolds likes the Bordeaux, for example) I also wish that there was less variety within a bottle shape. I have many variations on Bordeaux in my collection, which is somewhat strange to me. They are all 750ml bottles, why not standardize like Penfolds did on the standard size to make storage easier? I have often wondered out loud if any bottle that is not a standard Bordeaux is meant to be aged at all (I know that they are, but my point is that you would make it easier for people with many stacking systems if your age-able wine were in a standard size). Was the stack-ability a factor in Penfolds choosing the shape that they did?

P.S. Please take some salt with this post. This is random musings piped straight from my head to the blog. Not a guarantee. Checks will not be honoured. Tongue was in cheek a smidgen.

Drinking locally

A comment from Catie made me want to write about a topic that I have been thinking about for a while. She made a good point about how when you visit a wine region you probably want to experience as much as you can in the area (she points out that when she was in Australia the last thing she wanted to taste was a wine from Washington).

Yes, I was trying to be lazy and go back to what I know on that second night. But I think that it is not quite as clear cut as that. To me, there are two kinds of wine drinking when it comes to wine:

• Tasting / experimentation. This is when you open something you have never had before and don’t know what to expect. You are trying to expand your horizons, to learn new things or potentially find a new favorite.
• Enjoyment. This is when you open up something that you are confident in the taste of, because you are having a meal and want to compliment it or just unwind somewhere and have some fun. You don’t want to have a corked bottle or a surprisingly bad Merlot here, you want something that you are sure of.

I go through both periods from time to time. I recently had a big burst of experimentation (and I am still working through that a little bit. Whenever I pick up a shipment from Garagiste I start going through it again). I view wine travel as largely an exercise in experimentation and learning. You go around, taste whatever sounds interesting and see what sticks.

Tasting wine all day tires me though (I don’t like to spit wine. I just don’t. So I end up a bit tipsy and tired). After a while I find that I am done with it, and I want to drink wine for the enjoyment rather than the learning experience. After you get used to it, it is very natural to open something up for dinner and quite often you want it to be a sure thing.

This brings me to the focus of this post – the local wine phenomenon. It is interesting to me that some restaurants in Washington, even some really good ones, will only have local wines on their wine list (or a large majority). I suppose I see more of this now that I live in Washington state, where they grow wine, as opposed to when I lived in Sydney and neither drank wine often or lived in a wine growing area. Now that I am a bit more of a wine snob the local-only list is something that disappoints me. Not everybody loves the wine grown locally or feels confident in ordering it. And having a good spread of wines from all around the world means that most people can find something that they have high confidence in loving. I am sorry, but most of the time I don’t want an experiment with my meal, I want a sure thing.

This is not a Washington wine hater rant – one of the nicest bottles I have had with a meal was a bottle of DeLille D2 on my last birthday. I love a good Cab or Zin from California too. There are French wines I love and some that I don’t, and one day I will get to be able to choose these better myself rather than have it be pot luck. I have had nice Spanish wine and will try it again. Italian wine does not blow me away but I never find it disgusting either. My favorites are Shiraz or Cabernets from South Australia. This is what I started with and what I crave and I don’t apologize for it.

The thing is that the above is a broad set of wine. And I like a restaurant that has a broad selection too, because it tells me that they selected for quality and taste rather than being local. Not to be rude, but it looks like a tourist gimmick to me to only have local wines. If you make the wine list for a restaurant and you are reading this, remember that tastes are diverse, but the output of most appellations is not.