ANZAC Dinner
25 April 2013 Filed in: Cellar Notes News & Views
What better way to celebrate ANZAC Day than by organising a themed wine dinner with wines from Australia and New Zealand, and the food giving at least a nod to the Antipodes? That’s precisely what I did last weekend. Read More...
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Oz Shiraz
18 December 2012 Filed in: News & Views Cellar Notes
The winemaker looked at me: “You don’t want to taste my wine, do you?” “No,” I muttered weakly, wondering what was coming next. “But you’d kill for a cold beer?” “Yes,” I hollered. Read More...
Wine Sale Prices???
02 March 2012 Filed in: Miscellaneous News & Views
Two days ago I received a press release announcing details of a fine wine sale running simultaneously in some of Dublin’s best wine shops such as Redmond’s in Ranelagh, Thomas’s in Foxrock, 64 Wine in Glasthule, Gibney’s in Malahide and McHugh’s of Kilbarrack Rd and Malahide Rd. My eye was immediately caught by the De Bortoli Shiraz Viognier 2007 from Australia’s Yarra Valley. Over the years this wine, and its predecessors from a number of vintages, has done remarkably well in Food & Wine Magazine tastings. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it has consistently been the highest scorer in the magazine’s 15-year history. Read More...
World Gourmet Summit - Singapore
The double-decker Airbus A380 really is a big plane and you only realise how big as you wait in the departure lounge ready to board, along with hundreds of other passengers who, you tell yourself, must obviously be destined to board three or four separate flights. Not a bit of it. The plane easily swallows up a crowd that looks as if it could go a long way towards filling the Aviva Stadium. Apart from that it is pretty ordinary, much like any other plane, unless, that is, you are sequestered in luxury up front, a treat that will have to wait for the day I win the Lotto. Read More...
Best Bubbles
Confusing ‘good value’ with ‘cheap’ is a common error that we all fall prey to, with wines as much as any other consumer good. A bottle of wine at €27.99, even if it is sparkling wine, could certainly not be classed as cheap, but in the case of the Ridgeview Cavendish 2008 from England, now stocked by O’Briens, it represents superbly good value. What makes it so is the cast iron quality, the gorgeous rush of citrus flavours and the absence of any acidic harshness on the finish. Made from the classic champagne trio of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier this sparkler is a stable mate of the sparkling rosé served recently at Buckingham Place when the queen was entertaining Barack Obama. Read More...
Pure Penfolds
Tasting Penfolds wines in the company of chief winemaker Peter Gago is always a treat and I still have wonderful memories of a wine dinner he presented in Dublin at my invitation two years ago. On that occasion he arranged for a splendid quintet of reds to be shipped direct from the company’s cellars in Australia and the 100 or so wine lovers in attendance that night still talk fondly of the event. But we can’t always be so spoiled and yesterday morning, along with some colleagues, I had the enjoyable task of participating in a live webcast tasting, featuring Peter and colleagues in Adelaide, and beamed around the world to Ireland, the UK, Switzerland, Sweden, China, Thailand, Singapore… Read More...
Oz Shiraz at WGS, Singapore
01 May 2011 Filed in: Tastings Cellar Notes
James Halliday had them chuckling at yesterday’s Australian Shiraz tasting when he announced, shortly after it got underway and the first flight was being scrutinised: “I should say, I heartily disagree with some of my own tasting notes.” (These had been printed in advance on the tasting sheets.) This happens to wine tasters all the time and, far from being seen as a sign of inconsistency, it simply reinforces the fact that a tasting note reflects how a wine tasted at a particular place and time and no more than that. Tasting notes should not be treated as judgements written in stone. Wines change and so do people. Context, as they say, is everything. Read More...
