And Canberra's best wines are...

ramblingted said :

I think the title of this thread is a bit misleading…

If previous history is anything to go by most of the regions best producers wouldn’t have entered…

I don’t know about that but I do question the results when Clonakilla, Doonkuna (who don’t exist anymore), Collector Wines and Capital Wines got pretty average scores. Those producers make some of the best wines I have had in the Canberra Region.

I also note that Clonakilla doesn’t appear to have entered their top line shiraz.

As for the whole wine elitist thing. My favorite wine at the moment is 3 for $12 at Woolies. I have drunk a $600 bottle of wine down to sub-$2 bottles and goon bags, and everything in between. A lot of my favorites are under $10 a bottle and I have a love of Canberra region reds that are about $20-30 a bottle.

OpenYourMind said :

I’ll happily admit I’m anti-elitist when it comes to wine. I guess I just get so tired of these people that prattle on with such superiority about their knowledge of wine and how big their cellar is and drop names of districts and vintages etc. Sure, wine tasting and wine tasting trips can be fun, but that snobbish element s***s me and most wine conversations are gob smackingly boring one upmanship.

Maybe OpenYourMind, you could open your mind. People with an interest aren’t always trying to be snobbish. They may just have an interest.

I think the title of this thread is a bit misleading…

If previous history is anything to go by most of the regions best producers wouldn’t have entered…

I just drink goon, I reckon people who claim to drink booze for anything other than the alcoholic content are fooling themselves.

Fran Lebowitz

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

I’ll happily admit I’m anti-elitist when it comes to wine. I guess I just get so tired of these people that prattle on with such superiority about their knowledge of wine and how big their cellar is and drop names of districts and vintages etc. Sure, wine tasting and wine tasting trips can be fun, but that snobbish element s***s me and most wine conversations are gob smackingly boring one upmanship.

Blind tasting is nothing more than a party trick, it means nothing.

The wine show system is intended to aggregate judge’s (generally people who have passed a number of exams on wine tasting) opinions on wines.

The system throws up some strange results but marketers love them in this country because bling on labels sell wines.

BTW, there’s a whole anti-elitist movement (as in the Forbes article) that claims $2 wine is as good as $50 wine. I’m all for that, if $2 wine tastes as good to you as a $50 wine then that’s what you should buy. However, I do wonder about the inherent insecurity of $2 wine drinkers who try to convince everyone that they are right and the people who can afford and appreciate $50 wines are wrong – and vice versa.

In my opinion wine is almost purely subjective anyway.
Countless blind tasting tests have demonstrated that even wine experts struggle to tell one wine from another. If you want to have a stir, invite your wine snob friends to a blind taste test and sit back sipping a beer and watch them crumble.

As an example, in one blind tasting, a temperature change between two identical wines led wine experts to not even be able to tell a Sauv Blanc from a Chardonnay.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebell/2012/07/09/is-there-really-a-taste-difference-between-cheap-and-expensive-wines/

Wow, there’s a few surprises there

Best Dry Red of Show – 2010 Hh Tumbarumba Classic, Hungerford Hill Wines – who’da thunk it?

Wonder if it’s true or just one of the frequent show aberrations?