This is a Special for Facebook Fans: Topers Chardonnay 2013, a lovely Cowra Chardonnay from a tiny boutique, this is a classy and polished wine that punches way above its price class. It’s a bargain at the normal $18 ticket, but we’ve negotiated a special for less than $13 a bottle – $75 per 6-pack or $150 per dozen, plus freight via standard Australia Post courier service as quoted on the website http://www.toperswines.com.au/wine/2013-chardonnay

Please use Discount Code BWU20 when you order, and it will take 30% off the $18 per bottle price.

This is a Best Wines Under $20 special offer for subscribers. We find wines and super Buys like these every week, so why not subscribe to Best Wines Under $20?

Kim Brebach

(This is a piece written by Anna Bradley for Home Heaven in December 2014 – LINK)

Wine expert Kim Brebach will surprise you with his advice on finding the best wines.

When I’m at the bottle shop searching for wine, I’ve really got no idea what to look for. I tend to always go for a brand name I know with a price tag between $20-$25 (that way I’m not breaking the bank, but don’t look like a total cheapskate!). I’ve always assumed that the more expensive the wine, the better the quality and taste – then I met Kim Brebach.

Kim is a wine expert who has tried the best wines from across the globe, and his absolute favourite Riesling costs just $21 from Dan Murphy’s. So you can understand why I just had to pick his brain…

1) What are your top three tips for buying wine?

• Go online for the widest choice.
• Buy ahead of time when the price is right, not purely when you need wine.
• Do your homework on what to buy and where to buy it.

2) Can a $20 wine be just as good as an $80 bottle?

Yes! With wine, the correlation between quality and price is not strong. Many $20 wines have won major competitions against $80 wines. Last year, for example, a $17 Robert Oatley Shiraz came equal first with a Penfold’s Grange 2008 ($785 price tag) and a $17 Pepperjack Shiraz beat a Penfold’s $170 RWT in the Visy Best Australian Shiraz Challenge.

3) Are wines seasonal in the same way as fruit and veg?

Not really, since even the cheaper ones last a year or more once they’re bottled. However, new vintage crisp white wines – like Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc – come out every year around August/ September.

4) What’s your favourite vintage wine and why?

Probably the 2012 vintage Rieslings in South Australia, which combine ripe fruit with a great deal of freshness and line and length of fine acid.

5) In your opinion, which Australian vineyards produce the best wines?

It’s probably easier to answer this question in terms of areas rather than vineyards.

• Riesling: Clare and Eden Valleys
• Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon: Margaret River
• Chardonnay: Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula
• Pinot Gris: Tasmania, New Zealand
• Semillon: Hunter Valley, Margaret River
• Pinot Noir: Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Tasmania
• Shiraz (medium-bodied): Hunter Valley, Grampians, Heathcote
• Shiraz (big and cuddly): Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley
• Cabernet (cool climate): Yarra Valley, Tasmania
• Cabernet (full-bodied): Margaret River, Coonawarra
• Cabernet Merlot: Margaret River
• Grenache & Mourvèdre: Barossa and McLaren Vale

6) Can you get good quality, international wine varieties in Australia for a fair price?

Yes and no. There are a number of specialist importers who bring these wines in, but the small volumes generally mean inflated prices compared to the US and Europe.

7) What foods are best paired with certain wines?

1. a) Champagne – Delicate seafood like crab and lobster au naturel
2. b) White wine –

• Riesling with roast chicken
• Chardonnay with schnitzel
• Pinot Gris with pork
• Sauvignon Blanc with seafood

1. c) Red wine –

• Cabernet Merlot with lamb
• Shiraz with hamburgers
• Cabernet Shiraz with steak or roast beef
• GSM (Grenache Shiraz Mourvèdre) with beef casserole
• Pinot Noir with duck

8) If you could only drink three wines for the rest of your life, what would they be?

Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne, Pewsey Vale Contours Riesling and Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes.

Kim is the founder of bestwinesunder20.com.au, a website that offers weekly round-ups of the best budget wines in Australia and where to get them! Check out the site here.

What’s your favourite wine? Do you consider price as an indicator of quality when it comes to wine?

Avoiding the pitfalls

We’d all like to avoid is the big crush in the grog shops before Christmas and New Year. Parking is a hassle, so is shopping in the crowded aisles, getting through the checkout queues, schlepping all the grog to the car and unloading it at home and schlepping it up or down to your place. It’s not just wine but spirits and beer too, and cases of beer are pretty heavy.

That’s why buying online makes sense. There’s one more reason, and it’s a big one: price. Your local retailer is rarely the one with the best deals and, in the Christmas-New Year period, retailers put on fewer specials because they know people will buy up big anyway.

Buying online

It’s the smartest way to buy your supplies for the holiday season, and you should do it ahead of time. Here’s why:

• You have a much wider range of wines and wine merchants to choose from
• You can be sure you’re buying from the retailer with the best price
• The goods are delivered to your home or front door
• If you buy enough in one order, freight is often free (see below)
• The retailers we recommend have local staff who can help you with queries or orders.

Pitfalls: if you want wine left at your front door or with a neighbour, make sure you say so on the instructions. A lot of wine is delivered by AusPost couriers, and you’ll have to collect it from the Post Office if you miss them.

Online, ahead of time

Here’s how to save a heap of money and a lot of time and inconvenience:

• Plan ahead a little and work out what you need / want
• Do your research online to find the best prices for your choice of wines
• Order what you need at least a couple of weeks ahead of Christmas.

Simple, isn’t it? Here’s a list of wine merchants we and our subscribers have had good experiences with, in terms of range, prices and service.

Pitfalls: merchants with poor service or reputations. First check our list of Online Wine merchants – the Good, Bad & Ugly   

Fancy words to bamboozle your friends with over the holiday break

Sparkling wine is the favourite province of wine wankers, and that’s one reason why sparkling wines makers outside the Champagne region of France have adopted all those fancy Champagne terms. We give you the plain English versions here, so you’ll never have to be afraid of mixing it with smart-arses at fancy receptions.

Autolysis describes the breakdown of yeast cells in the bottle once the second fermentation is completed. These lees slowly decay and release the amino-acids, enzymes and other nutrients which add notes of yeast, fresh bread and biscuits to the score of a good bubbly.

Bague Couronne. This is a great chance to show off, as most people have never heard of this term which describes the rounded lip on the top of a champagne bottle, the one that secures the crown seal during the second fermentation. The crown seal is later replaced with a fancy cork.

Blanc de Blancs describes a champagne made from white grapes, usually chardonnay.

Blanc de Noirs is a champagne made from red grapes, usually Pinot Noir and/or Pinot Meunier. Grape juice is always ‘blanc’; the colour of red wines comes from contact with grape skins.

Brut simply means dry, as opposed to demi-sec which is a bit sweet or only half dry (sec means dry too). If no sugar is added, the wine will be labelled Brut Nature.

Cépage or assemblage is the mix of grape varieties used in winemaking, another chance to show that you know your stuff especially since both words are easy to pronounce. In champagne these are Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with smaller contributions by Pinot Meunier and Pinot Gris.

Cork. If you want to make deep impression on your friends, show them how a champagne corks is made up of separate sections. The main body is called the manche and is made of agglomerated cork; the miroir at the bottom is made of 2 or 3 discs of natural cork. Champagne corks are larger than regular corks and compressed when inserted into the bottle to ensure a tight seal.

Crémant – literally more ‘creamy’. This is a style of bubbly made at lower pressure in other parts of France.

Cuvée is the French word for big vat and in champagne refers to a blend. Most champagne is blended from different parcels of wine and different years to produce a consistent ‘house style’.

Prestige Cuvée is the name for the most expensive champagne in a house’s range, usually offered in extra fancy bottles. Examples include Louis Roederer’s Cristal, Pol Roger’s Sir Winston Churchill and Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne, and of course Dom Pérignon.

Dégorgement / disgorgement. The most exciting part of champagne making: the removal of the yeast sediment (the lees) that forms after the second fermentation in the bottle. You’ve seen pictures of men rotating bottles sitting in riddling racks with their heads down, to work that sediment into the neck.

When the riddling or remuage is done, the bottle necks are plunged into a freezing liquid which traps the sediment (lees) in an ice cube that is then ejected by the pressure in the bottle when the crown seal is removed.

Dom Pérignon was a monk at the Abbey of Hautvillers.  Contrary to legend, he didn’t invent sparkling wine – British physician Christopher Merret is now credited with its invention. Dom Pérignon introduced the practice of blending, along with corks and stronger glass bottles to stop the frequent explosions. Dom Pérignon champagne was first marketed by Moët & Chandon in 1935.

Dosage. All the sugar in the Champagne is turned into alcohol during the fermentation, and a small amount of liquid sugar – liqueur de tirage – is usually added at the very end of the process to soften the wine. Most white wine has a few grams per litre of sugar, which you can’t taste.

Jeroboam is the name for a double magnum of champagne. There are many bigger bottles as you can see from the chart below. They’re marketing gimmicks – single bottles or magnums are best.

Lees Aging. Quality sparkling wines are sometimes aged on lees for years, which gives the wines more complexity. Occasionally these wines are not disgorged until they’re offered for sale, and are labelled RD for Recently Disgorged or récemment dégorgé.

Méthode Champenoise is the old name for champagne making used in other countries, banned by the European Union in 1985 as a concession to protecting the Champagne appellation.

Mousse is the head on a sparkling wine. The mousse and the bead can tell you a lot about the wine in the glass: a good champagne has a vigorous mousse that lingers and a fine bead that ‘persists’. Cheap fizz produces courser bubbles and bead, and neither last long.

Muselet is the name of the wire cage that holds the cork secure. To open a bottle, remove the top section of the foil around the cork, then pull out the noose on the wire cage and turn it counter clockwise about half a dozen times. Now clutch the neck of the bottle and the cork with your thumb on the top as you rotate the bottle gentle with your other hand. Holding it at 45 degrees.

Rosé Champagne is a pink version made by the blending of a little red wine with normally made white wine. Taché describes a paler version of the same thing.

Saignée means ‘bleeding’. It’s another chance to show off: this is a process of making rosé champagne in which colour is derived from skin contact rather than by blending some red wine.

Second Fermentation. A small amount of sugar and yeast – liqueur d’expédition – is added before the bottle is sealed, which causes another fermentation inside the bottle.  The CO2 gas formed by the fermentation cannot escape and dissolves into the wine, creating champagne’s bubbles.

Cheap sparkling wine is made using the Tank Method, or Charmat Method after its inventor, a less expensive way of making sparkling wine where the second fermentation takes place in a pressurized tank rather than in a bottle. The wine is filtered under pressure and bottled.

Transfer Method: After the second fermentation in the bottle and a short period of sur lie aging (but before riddling), the wine is transferred—with sediment—to a pressurized tank, filtered under pressure and bottled.

Vintage and Non-Vintage (NV). Most champagnes are blends of different vintages to make up a consistent house style. Single vintage champagnes are usually special bottlings from good years sold at a higher price.

The full catalogue of terms

A great rundown on how champagne is made

Have Fun

Kim

In the minds of many, wine brings with it all kinds of rules and no-nos, fancy etiquette and arcane procedures. However, wine is just an alcoholic drink, and we like to keep things simple at BWU$20. So we’ve shot down some persistent urban myths, which will make wine much easier to enjoy.

• You have to know a lot about wine to appreciate it

You only need to like the smell and taste of wine to enjoy it.

• Screw Caps have made wine faults a problem of the past

Screw caps have only solved faults related to cork taint.

• Once you open a bottle of wine, you must finish it or it will go off

White wine wine keeps well in the fridge for days, and reds will last a couple of days in a cool place with the screw cap on. That said, some really cheap wines can fall apart more quickly.

• You can’t buy good wine for less than $10

We’ve built a website on the premise that you can – here’s the shortlist

• You must drink red wine with meat, white wine with fish

It’s just a rule of thumb, not a law. If you like red wine with fish and white wine with steak, go right ahead. If someone has a go at you, tell them that the chateaux in the Sauternes serve their sweet wines with pâté de foie gras and blue vein cheeses. In Champagne, they serve bubbles with everything.

• Wine tastes better with age

Depends on the type of wine, and on your taste. Most people like their whites young and crisp, and most wine buffs keep their reds too long. Most red wines today are made for early drinking (2 – 5 years), but Grange needs a few decades to hit its stride. Rieslings, Semillons and Chardonnays all fill out and soften given more time.

• Red wine is best served at room temperature

Correct, as long as room temperature is around 18 degrees Celsius.

• Cheese and red wine are the perfect match

Hard cheeses tend to go better with big or aged white wines, camembert and brie go better with a rich Pinot Gris, and blue cheese goes well with dessert wines.

• Red wines must always be decanted

Most red wines don’t throw a crust anymore, so decanting just helps to aerate the wine. That can be helpful with young reds.

• You need a cellar to store wine for any length of time

A room or garage not subject to sudden changes in temperature will do if you store the wine in insulated cardboard boxes – see our Rough Guide to Cellaring Wine.  

Let’s not get hung up in two many rules – wine is a very adaptable drink.

Kim

Wine is a Fashion Business

Our wine show system is supposed to set and maintain standards for quality and style our winemakers can shoot for. It hasn’t done that. Instead, our show system has reflected the dominant judges and fashions at various times. Consistency of judging has always been a challenge, more on that subject here:  Australian Wine Shows have a bright future? Not if past performance is anything to go by. 

Consistency of style has been just as elusive. Take Chardonnay as an example: In the eighties, the judges gave the gongs to rich, blousy, buttery Jane Mansfield styles, in the nineties they seemed to favour less fruit and more coconut oak, and in the naughties they switched to grapefruit cocktails of Twiggy proportions.

The Old World is no better

Even the most regulated wine area in the world has changed its style dramatically. Bordeaux once made a very well defined style of red wine the Brits called Claret. It was elegant, stylish and racy like a Jaguar E-type. If you ordered a Bordeaux red, you knew what to expect. Along came Robert Parker with his millions of blind followers, wielding power over the wine business like Oprah Winfrey did over book publishing.

What did the custodians of the great Bordeaux chateaux do? They rolled over like dogs who like their tummies tickled, pretty well all of them, and ended up making the kinds of wines Parker raved about: big, rich, ripe, fleshy monsters of 15% alcohol. These wines are hard to recognise as Bordeaux reds, because high alcohol blots out a wine’s finer features the same way that too much bodyweight blurs the facial features of a human.

We’re old school but keep our minds open

We’ve seen the same trend in Sauvignon Blanc, where reviewers used to prize freshly mown grass, hints of lantana, cats’ pee and the tangy flavours of gooseberry. Now they seem happy with passionfruit and guava. Are we talking about the same wine style?

We’re old school at BWU$20, trained in the old traditions, and we’ll fight for maintaining meaningful styles. The whole business of wine appreciation, tasting and reviewing is hard enough, but it gets much harder when people keep messing with benchmarks.

We use alcohol as a rough guide to the style within the style. As an example, Chardonnay can be lean and acid and restrained or rich, ripe, peachy, buttery and blousy. 12 – 13% will tell you that the bottle you’re thinking of buying is in the twiggy spectrum, while 13.5 to 14% will suggest more generous proportions.

Same goes for reds: Shiraz from the Barossa or McLaren Vale tends to run to 14.5 to 15% alcohol these days, while a cooler climate Shiraz from the Yarra Valley makes do with 13%. The expression of the grape variety will be quite different, with the South Australian contender serving up ripe plum jam and the Victorian sour cherries.

For an overview of Australia’s major grape varieties and wine styles, GO HERE

Cutting through the BS that surrounds Wine

Most people just want to know enough about wine to enjoy it more, and to avoid wasting money on bad wine, yet most wine appreciation and education assumes you have varying amounts of knowledge. This section is designed for people who know nothing about wine and have no plans to become experts on the subject.

At BWU$20, we cut through the jargon and the bull that surrounds wine. We’re real people with real thirsts and real appetites. We like simple, tasty food even enjoy beer on a regular basis. Wine goes with food, and some wines go better with some foods than others. That’s a good starting point: when you have your regular meal with friends and/or family, ask them what they like or dislike about the wine you’ve brought along.

Drinking and Thinking, Comparing and Sharing

You might end up with 4 or 5 friends who’d like to know a bit more about wine, or you can do it at home with your partner and kids when they’re old enough. Have regular meals together and taste different wines, talk about them, enjoy them. If you have a regular meal with a group of friends, ask everyone top bring a Chardonnay or Shiraz and talk about the differences in style. Or you can make it wines from a region like the Hunter Valley or the Barossa.

You can expand the horizons by asking one of the group to do a bit prep on the subject and share it with the others. Members of your group can take it in turns. A variation on the theme is for one of the group to collect $10 from the others to buy the best wine $50 can buy, and share it at the next meal. You can use our Best Wine lists as guidance for these exercises.

Comparative tastings are easier than tasting wines in isolation. Grab a Chardonnay, a Riesling, a Sauvignon Blanc, a Semillon and a Pinot Gris. Talk about the differences in the colour, the smell and the taste of the wines. Try to describe what you smell and taste, try to describe the differences.

What’s next?

Over the months, you’ll notice that you’re actually thinking about the wine you’re drinking, and taking a little more time with them. What you’re doing is developing your sense of taste or your ‘palate’ (physically your mouth and your tongue). Your palate will also tell you about the weight and shape of the wine you’re dealing with, from delicate, lean and elegant to big, rich, robust and heavy.

The best way to develop your sense of taste and wine appreciation is to taste different wines over time. One simple way to learn more is to become a regular with your friends at a wine bar with an interesting list and a helpful wine waiter, or at a bistro with a good wine selection and a wine waiter you can ask to show you interesting wines.

If you like the idea of going to simple wine tastings, start with the free ones put on by wine merchants on Saturdays. Get on the mailing lists of independent merchants in your area, and you’ll soon discover that there are plenty of good, interesting and even some exotic boutique wines in Australia that won’t break the bank. Our Best Wine Lists are a good start.

The easy way forward

It’s when you start looking for easy-to-digest wine education that the trouble starts. Most wine books in your library assume some knowledge on your part, and it’s the same with most wine websites. It can seem like a club, where you’re supposed to know the rules before you can join but no one can tell you what they are.

At BWU$20, we’ve tracked down the best sites for excellent no-nonsense education on wine, and we’ve grouped them below for easy access.

Wine Basics – A Beginner’s Guide to Drinking Wine – the Wine Folly

There are links to dozens of useful tutorials and guides on this page – here are a few samples:

Learn How to Taste Wine & Develop Your Palate – using a simple 4-step system of LOOK, SMELL, TASTE and CONCLUSION. Perfect for novices.

At some point you may want to join a class, and the Australian Wine Society runs classes for all levels of wine lovers, from beginners to regulars. There’s a modest $50 joining fee, and many benefits as well.

How to Open a Bottle of Wine

Why Wine Serving Temperature Matters

Learn with the 9 major wine styles – this is a simple but comprehensive rundown on major wine styles and their characteristics.

5 Guidelines to Food and Wine Pairing – a very simple guide to matching food and wine

The Wine Folly has many more resources for learning about wine. The site makes money from its gorgeous prints and accessories. You can also download large infographics and wine region maps for free.

Sweet Wines 101 – a guide to sweet wine styles and a look at how they’re made.

Wine 101: 10 Tips for Attending a Wine Tasting – a really practical guide to making the most out of wine tasting events. From WineSpectator.

How to Store Wine 101: 7 Basics You Need to Know – Tips on keeping your fine wines at their best without spending a lot

Harvest 101: The Basics of Crush Season – Learn what goes on in the vineyard and winery during each stage of the annual harvest for wine grapes.

It’s called rough because it covers the basic wine styles and varieties in Australia. Many of our wines deviate from this style guide – Pinot Grigio and Pinot Gris are the worst at present, followed by Sauvignon Blanc. Also bear in mind that the characteristics of most wines change depending on where they’re made; this rough guide focuses on these varieties made in Australia. Please check our slightly less rough guide to Winestyles and Varieties as well.

Kim

A short overview of Australia’s main grape varieties and wine styles

The Eyes Have it

A wine can tell you a fair bit about itself just from the way it looks:

The colour of a wine is a good indicator of age – with whites, the lighter and brighter, the younger the wine tends to be. The darker the colour, the older it’s likely to be. Young reds should be deep purple to dark red. The more brown tinges you see, the older the wine is likely to be.

Colour is less of a guide to wine style. In whites, a brass to golden colour may suggest a bigger, oak matured white such as Chardonnay or Fume Blanc. In reds, a light, transparent colour may indicate a Pinot Noir or Grenache.

You can also tell something about the alcohol content of a wine by checking the ‘legs’ on the side of the glass. The more pronounced they are, the higher the alcohol (glycerol) as a rule.

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