A few of the wines on JH’s list got away from us, some for good reasons, others unintentionally. This morning’s Winestar newsletter helped us refocus.

Thomas Wines Braemore Semillon 2013 – 97 points and $24 at Winestar

This is traditional Hunter Semillon, early-picked (10.8%) and full of grass and lemon extract – probably needs 20 years to show its best. If you like the style, this looks like a real bargain.

Mount Adam High Eden Chardonnay 2011 – 96 points – $26 at Winestar or Winelistaustralia – we’ve drunk this wine on 3 occasions and loved it. It’s not a big Chardonnay, but a very fine one. Still, it leans toward the stone fruit and cashew side of flavour rather than the grapefruit and lemon curd end. All good, and it’s worth going over our self-imposed limit for. A big surprise is that you can still buy the highly-fancied 2010 Mount Adam Chardy  for $29 at MyCellars.

West Cape Howe Cabernet Merlot 2011 – Everybody loves it and it’s just $15 at Winestar.  Yes, just about everybody as you see from Bert’s notes. We’re the odd lot out here because we found this too big and too obvious (14.5%), and lacking the elegance and polish we love in this style from the west. We like other WCH wines too, and all we can say in our defence is that the folks there would’ve put it out under one of their pricier labels if they thought it was that good. Try it.

De Bortoli Windy Peak Pinot Noir 2012 – 92 points from JH and 90 from the Winefront. $12 at Winestar makes it look like a real bargain. That said, we’ve yet to find an Aussie Pinot at this price level that delivers more than a very ordinary Beaujolais Villages.

Kim

The Heart Foundation’s TICK says Junk Food is good for us

I really wanted to leave the heart disease thing alone after I said my piece. Then came more ridiculous news on statins, so I had to add an update. The new US guidelines virtually mandate that everyone over 60 takes these drugs, no matter how healthy they are.

Last night I was watching 7.30 on the ABC when a report on teenage depression made me switch channels. Italian cooking on SBS was boring (when is someone going to tell Maeve O’Mara that her hair style went out in the early nineties?).

The Trick with the Killer Tick

I got stuck on a Current Affair on Channel 9 (a program I have a really low opinion of), where I saw a young woman called Jessie Reimers who’s running a petition (she has 23,000 signatures already) to stop the Heart Foundation from slapping its red TICK of Approval on just about everything that claims a low fat content.

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Separating the rewarding wines from the elusive esoterica

In later November, The Wine Companion Team publishes Halliday’s Top 100 wines, on its website and in the Australian. The team used to group them by RRP into under $20 and over $20. We’ve teased out the pick of these, not an easy task.

Price groups

This year, the folks at WC seem to have followed our lead and used street pricing – very sharp street pricing in some cases. For example, Petaluma White label Chardonnay  sells for well over $20 in most places (but our tireless team came through with an $18 special and free Spiegelau glasses). Then again, $16 wines end up in the over $20 group – the Mount Pleasant Elizabeth Hunter Valley Semillon 2006 for example.

Availability

As usual, this is a problem when you invite everybody out there to send you samples. We’ve marked a few of these in the groups below.

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It’s not as simple as it should be

We often choose the wines we review and buy the samples. We also receive samples from friends, distributors, major retailers, minor merchants and some wineries. We try to limit these samples to relevant wines that fit our model, both in terms of price and quality. We’re about finding the best value wines for you under $25 – we don’t intend to drown you in bulk reviews of everything out there. We’re looking for wines with a great quality to price ratio: a 90 point wine for $10, a 95 point wine for $20 and so on.

Homework

We know most of the wines that are good value by now, and we know most of the labels that produce really ordinary fare. Of course we keep an eye on the wine industry so we don’t miss a significant change, such as a change of owner or winemaker. And we do some homework to help us find suitable wines for review, mostly by checking other review sites such as these:

James Halliday’s Wine Companion (print and online versions)

The Winefront – Mrs Mattinson, Bennie and Walsh

The Gourmet Traveller Wine magazine crew – Peter Bourne et al

Huon Hooke

We also check the reviews of others from time to time, such as Chris Shanahan, Nick Stock, Jeremy Oliver and Tony Jordan.

We also pay some attention to wine show results or those of wine competitions or challenges. However, we take the results with a grain of salt since our wine judging system has been broken for a long time, and there’s no will to change it.

Our Scoring system

We use the same 100 point system as everybody else, for the sake of consistency, even though I argued here that 10 points were more than enough. Sadly, consistency turns out to be an empty term: Robert Parker’s 100 point system is different from James Halliday’s. Since JH is the kingpin down under, we’ll stick with his system (more or less). We push it a little harder, though, while James likes to be generous to everyone.

We stop where we do because scores much lower than 90 don’t excite consumers or wine writers. Huon Hooke is the exception, at times listing bargains of the week with points scores as low as 85.

An essential adjunct to the number scores are the prices of wines, at least for us consumers. A $10 wine that scores 91 is a serious bargain, while a $50 wine that scores 91 would not get a BUY recommendation from us. In the context of our website, the relationship between score and price is crucial.

Kim

It’s official: forget about cholesterol and LDL

A couple of weeks ago, we changed the subject and engaged with the debate started by the ABC’s catalyst program on cholesterol and heart disease and statin drugs. Once a month I attend a book club evening at my friend Andrew’s place, where we discuss fine literature and drink fine wine.

Fine wine attracts medicine men, and at the meeting last Wednesday we had a robust debate about the cholesterol and statin story until the wines induced more mellow feelings.  I really want to get away from this subject now, but the story just gets worse and worse – see NEWSFLASH below.

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More proof that price is no guide to quality? Or is it the judging?

You decide. This year’s outright winner of the 2013 VISY Great Australian Shiraz Challenge is Pepperjack Shiraz 2012, a commercial red made by Saltram (part of TWE) that is on regular discount for less than $20. It’s usually a great big steak and eggs Barossa Shiraz, fairly typical of the obvious reds that tend to win at wine shows because they stand out like dogs’ balls. The 2012 is only 14.5% but this line often runs into 15 or more.

The under $25 category winner is the 2012 Ingoldby Shiraz, an even more commercial drop with no great pretensions that rarely rises to even modest heights and is often discounted to $10 a bottle. The ultra reliable Campbell Mattinson at the Winefront gives it 88 points.

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Wine magazine, advertising platform or tourist guide?

We’ve subscribed to the Wine Companion website for a while, and we buy James Halliday’s indispensable tome every year. Just recently, the WC magazine began turning up in our letterbox. I marvelled at such generosity until I took a look inside the mag and saw all the ads. You have to work hard to find the articles in between them, and then it’s hard to tell real articles from ‘features.’

The current mag has a ‘celebration feature’ on sparkling wine that is 25 pages long. It starts with details on the Champagne region, and continues with a feature page on each of 13 houses, followed by more pages featuring some of our local makers of sparkling wine. It’s all very congenial, très douce et charmant if you know what I mean, but it looks a lot like a cocktail party where everyone is terribly nice to everyone else because it’s such a perfect day out on the terrace, and the sun is so golden and the breeze is like silk on your skin and …

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The good people at ALDI Australia were kind enough to send me some samples of their wines. As one of the country’s leading retailers, this German supermarket chain has come a long way in the 10 years it’s been operating down under. Over 210 ALDI stores now sell liquor, including a good selection of wines – check the full list here .

On August 1 this year, ALDI also set up an online shop that will deliver to the eastern states at this point. ALDI’s range is pretty limited at present but is expanding. At BWU$20, we’ve made pretty clear that we think we need much more diversity in the wine retail business, that’s why we’re talking about ALDI.

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Lindemans – Death By a Thousand Cuts is one of our pieces that chronicles how corporations have crippled our best wine brands. One of Australia’s greatest wine companies is now making Low Calorie Confections and Fairy Floss, and it seems to be run by people whose brains are filled with the latter stuff.

This week I saw this article in the SM Herald by Eli Greenblat: Lindeman’s splashes out on sunshine campaign, which reminded me of that wonderful doco called Chateau Chunder screened by the ABC some months ago – here’s our take on that story. So I’m reading this piece by Eli, and I’m thinking: Jacobs Creek and others did this idea to death decades ago … they’ve got to be joking.

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That’s the promise made on the cover of Gourmet Traveller Wine this month, and it’s large a promise the tasting team kept. Savvy has had a lot of bad PR, much of it deserved. I added my two bob’s worth in a piece called Marlborough Men and the death of Sauvignon Blanc – How greedy Kiwis trashed their best brand

Being a purist, I said ‘I don’t see a place for tropical fruit and passionfruit in Sauvignon Blanc, nor sugar snaps and green peas. Hold the boiled veggies, please. The fruit characters I look for in a SB or SB-Semillon blends are herbaceous, not fruity: tangy gooseberry, freshly cut grass, hints of lantana and cats pee, backed by minerally, flinty acid. Not that awful sweet & sour lemon acid.’

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