Blog

Are we cutting the mustard?

Can mustard be interesting? Only if it is liberally spread over the award winning De Bortoli’s Harry’s Hot Stick, I hear you say. Well truth being stranger than fiction, at a recent family business conference I attended in Perth, I actually became warmly absorbed in the story of the US’s oldest mustard brand Plochman’s.

Syrah in Australia?

Anthony Madigan

Australia will never fully mature as a serious fine wine contender until we get over our obsession with all things French, and run our own race. We need to stop copying and hero-worshipping everything France does. Yes of course we should benchmark our wines against all the international stars including the French because it is among the world’s best, but this is Australia, we are unique and should be focusing on our own strengths and idiosyncrasies including having the most ancient soils on earth.

Big Brother

Back in the early 1990s when Australian wineries were storming the shores of the United Kingdom, wine writers often used a neat metaphor to describe the audacious Antipodean marketing phenomenon. They described large corporates such as Southcorp, Orlando and Hardys as the ‘mother-ships’ which cut the bow wave of public interest while the thousands of others smaller Mum and Dad wineries were referred to as ‘support vessels’ – row boats if you like – which surfed in to shore on their wake. Whales and minnows might also have been an analogy.

It's not up to sommeliers, it's up to us

The recent comments from Huon Hooke about sommeliers (at date of writing the article was online www.smh.com.au, in the Executive Style section) and the robust criticism of those comments from the likes of Dan Sims, Peter Healy and Rob Walters (www.thewineguide.com.au) provide food for thought.  Hooke talks of sommeliers whose “conversation is all about the rarest, most obscure imported wines they’ve tasted lately”, while Sims talks of wine articles that “fail to inspire and engage”. The question that has them at odds, if I have it straight, is whether or not sommeliers at top restaurants are too enamoured with European wines at the expense of local wines.

The last golden goose

Politicians are a blinkered lot. In November Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett was out of the starting gates quicker than Americain, when he leapt on the unfortunate backs of 6,000 Murray Darling Basin growers grappling with an uncertain future.

Buy Australian campaign

High profile McLaren Vale winemaker Steve Pannell has started a campaign urging Australian wine drinkers to drink only local wines in January.

Paul Henry resigns

Paul Henry has resigned from Wine Australia to do his own thing. Paul has worked so hard for Australian fine wine that I thought he would stick it out to see the fruits of his labour. He’s done a magnificent job.

Treasury - what's in a name?

Foster's has changed the name of its Wine division to Treasury Wine Estates in the lead-up to the demerger of the Wine and Beer divisions next year.