Australian wine is making a comeback in its second largest export market, the United States, new research shows. Recent market intelligence shows more premium Australian wine is being sold at higher price-points of AU$15-19.00 (up 23 per cent) and AU$20-plus (growing more than 4.6%) in the US.
Post-festival wine sales from marquees in the town square could be axed from next year’s Toast Martinborough amid fallout from the boozy weekend event. Allan’s Party Bus operator Allan Marshall says vineyards were selling bottles of “take home” wine to “staggering” drunks in The Square after Sunday’s festival so they could keep drinking. He believes their action breached the Sale of Liquor Act, which makes it illegal to sell alcohol to anyone who is drunk, reports The Dominion Post.
How can Champagne help the trade through the tough times? That’s the question Harpers will be addressing at its third annual Champagne Summit, taking place on February 28, 2012 at a new venue for the event. London’s Chiswell Street Dining Rooms will play host to the one day summit, which has been designed to show the industry how Champagne can keep its place in an ever-competitive sparkling market and the importance of maintaining its image in the UK, reports Harpers Wine & Spirit.
As France’s wine tastes shift away from bombast toward more balanced efforts, let’s imagine we could reduce that trend to a single wine from a single place. This wouldn’t be a wine made to floor you, overpower you or incite some rapturous state. It wouldn’t be a “great” wine, a high-scoring wine. On the contrary, it would be a wine that symbolises the waning years of point-score piety, a wine for which profundity is an option but not an expectation, a wine whose sole purpose is to charm. To me right now that place, that wine is Beaujolais, writes Patrick Comiskey in the LA Times.
Unlike a young wine, Dan Swincer, 30, is showing maturity and depth beyond his years. The winemaker from Orlando Wines was crowned the 2011 Wine Society Young Winemaker of the Year on Friday night. Dan won the highly contended title with his Orlando 2008 Gramps Botrytis Semillon and 2007 JC Barossa Steingarten Riesling, which were judged against nine wines from Australia and New Zealand. He was honoured at a gala function held on the rooftop of Sydney’s Darling Harbour’s Coast Restaurant, reports The Barossa & Light Herald.
Unlike a young wine, Dan Swincer, 30, is showing maturity and depth beyond his years. The winemaker from Orlando Wines was crowned the 2011 Wine Society Young Winemaker of the Year on Friday night. Dan won the highly contended title with his Orlando 2008 Gramps Botrytis Semillon and 2007 JC Barossa Steingarten Riesling, which were judged against nine wines from Australia and New Zealand. He was honoured at a gala function held on the rooftop of Sydney’s Darling Harbour’s Coast Restaurant, reports The Barossa & Light Herald.
Yallingup may be better known for its surf than its wine but little known producer Cape Naturaliste Vineyard’s red wine has been named one of the world’s best. The small producer’s Torpedo Rocks Cabernet Merlot 2009 has won the London International Wine Fair trophy for best red wine from a single vineyard at the International Wine and Spirit Competition awards. Owner Craig Brent-White said it was a major coup for the “most western vineyard in Australia”, reports The West Australian.
Working for an advertising agency in Sydney in the 1960s, Marion von Adlerstein remembers a time when long client lunches were still de rigueur and afternoons finished with drinks in the boardroom. The drinks served were mostly beer, spirits or fortified wines such as sherry. Wine was still regarded as ”a little bit of plonk” and if you ordered champagne at a bar, you received an Australian sparkling such as Great Western. All that changed for von Adlerstein when she met the man who would become her second husband, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
With the euphoria of the Rugby World Cup finally ebbing, please excuse an indulgent retrospective analogy. In New Zealand’s world of wine there are a handful of stars that have an international reputation, a number that hover beneath the radar of critical acclaim, and then there’s the rest who do a fine job but have yet to establish themselves as major players. That reliable, unflashy but always dependable “lock of ages” Brad Thorn is a perfect example of someone who you’d always love to have in your team because he just gets on with it and does the business, writes John Hawkesby in The New Zealand Herald.
Grossly intoxicated young women, some incontinent and smeared in their own blood, are a symptom of Toast Martinborough wine festival’s “feral” drinking culture, police warn. They say some wineries appear to have breached liquor licensing laws by continuing to serve people who were clearly intoxicated. One vineyard encouraged festival-goers to scull full glasses of wine, reports The Dominion Post.