It was friday night, and I was in the mood to crack open something spiffy. Looking over the contents of my latest shipment, I needed to sort through what I had and make a choice. This might sound like a ball breaking thing to do, but I actually enjoy looking over my meagre collection and umming and ahhing over it to decide what to drink.
My system has been evolving. I now have a spreadsheet that details how much I paid for the wine, the year and how many bottles I have. Then I can filter by year and look for something that I have multiples of and is in the price range I want to drink. On friday it was something older than 2005 and around the $20 mark. And this is how I happened on the Euroa Creeks Shiraz.
What a surprise – this was one of the best tasting wines that I have tried for a while. It really reminded me of the Rosemount GSM wines that Jeff and I love so much – a great combination of fruit and soil. Very easy to drink and went down well with the hunk of meat that I had cooked to eat with it.
The interesting thing about wine is that there is an objective and subjective component to it, and I think that many people do not realize that. Some people think that it is 100% subjective, and that there is no difference between $200 wine and $5 wine. This is just not my experience – well made wine is made by people who know what they are doing and have spent money to acquire the knowledge that they have. The chemical balance in the wine makes a huge difference in how things taste, and this is part of what the experienced reviewers can taste.
The other end of the spectrum is people who put a huge emphasis on ratings. Psychologically it is easy to discern a difference in taste because somebody told you that you are drinking super expensive stuff. The reality is that everybody has different tastes, and these tastes affect how much you will enjoy a wine. Ratings alone are not the best way to pick what to drink, because the taste might be out of whack.
The reason I am rambling on about this crap is because I believe Euroa Creeks Shiraz to be one of those wines that is both well made and suited to my taste, and therefore it hit a sweet spot for me. The wine came already highly recommended (90 pts from Tanzer’s) which means that objectively it is pretty good, but it is also much to my tastes so that makes it a big winner. If you can find it, drink it. But good luck finding it – the winery is very small (hence no webpage that I could find) and only 200-300 cases come out each year.
