November, 14th found me at the Noon Wines cellar door in McLaren Vale to taste the new releases. Drew Noon returned to the family vineyard in 1996 and since then has built a great reputation and following for his signature, big style of wines, some of which can be over 16% alcohol. The 2008 vintage was very difficult due the heat and the shiraz suffered. This is what I learned. more...

What could be better than a glass of Heggies Eden Valley Reserve Chardonnay 2005 (14.0%), and as it turned out it came up trumps. From of course the Heggies vineyard, site I block and from the chardonnay clones Bernard 76, 95, and 96 with the winemaker being Peter Gambetta. Now this is a delicious wine with lots of interesting mid palate tastes and each glass was a joy to drink. It was matched against the Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay 2006 (13%) which most judges would rank higher than the Heggies as it was much tighter and leaner with greater length. Why then did we stop drinking it at the half way point? On the day it just seemed there were better things to do - like drink the Heggies. You know, tasting and drinking wines is all rather easy. Do you want it in your mouth and is it giving pleasure - that's all there is.. more...

First stop in London was to Harrods to view the recently renovated wine store to see if I could pinch any ideas. Innovative and neat, particularly the lighting and I will pass my thoughts on to a few retail clients. It was later, while viewing the Champagne selection that I realised the world of wine is shifting again. Most consumers and I include those with lots of money have great trouble in really deciding how good the contents are. Thus how the brand package looks has become very important in the last few decades. more...

A reader purchased these two Yalumba wines at a garage sale in Canberra. By all accounts they drank quite well. They are part of an early experiment I did in co-branding back in the mid 1970's. Co-branding is using a company's brand on a product, made exclusively for a particular retailer. In this way you can control the selling price as no competitor has that label. It is very common in retailing and in the wine business its use waxes and wanes with competitive pressures and market conditions. more...

From a land that produced Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson and more recently Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and that self promoting machine, Jamie Oliver you would expect the food scene to be very healthy. Thus I must say I was surprised when opening the new Michelin Great Britain and Ireland for 2010 to find that this is still not showing up in the results. more...

The Benevolent is a UK Drinks industry charity which began in 1886. Grants are made to the needy who have worked in the drinks business. I was invited to a fund raising pantomime titled Vinderella which turned out to be most amusing. This ran for four performances and the night I went was well supported by the wine, spirit and beer groups including retailers and their buyers, wholesalers and importers, trade publications, journalists, indeed anyone who makes a wage from this large business. more...

The weekend stories about changes to alcohol taxation are bound to turn out to be silly season nonsense. For a start they would result in a reduction in the price of alcopops. After the controversy of the past year, that is just not on for the Labor government. A second reason is that it would devastate the bulk wine industry at a time when grape growers are in great distress. The idea of taxing forms of alcohol on the basis of their alcohol content might be logical but it is not politically sensible.

If marketing is the art of selling products at higher prices than they are intrinsically worth then one of the keys is to keep supply lower than demand. Selling luxury Swiss watches is an example. From the Economist, November 12th, 2009, Salesman of the Irrational; tells the story of Jean-Claude Biver, a master of supply and demand. more...

In the wine business 50 years is too short for reflection while one hundred years spans several generations and covers a wide variety of trading conditions. Companies that are still family owned and trading after 100 years are the rare survivors and it was at this point that most of them commissioned a company history. Many great contributors to the Australian wine history, and to single out one, Alexander Kelly's Tintara, did not survive for long and we know little about them. more...

In September 2009, Glug pledged a modest, liquid sponsorship to customer JV of Canberra. Jon was heading north to seek a bounty in the northern waters of Australia. The trip sounds like a roaring success. JV was kind enough to send us this missive upon his return. Fishers read on with joy. more...

Recent research tells us that a well made bottle of French champagne when opened will release around one billion tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide. Pondering this made me realise that should all of that gas go up as one large bubble it would be 50 kilometres in diameter. Now in any day there would be on average about 800,000 to 850,000 bottles of French champagne opened globally which combined pops out as a truly big bubble, much bigger than earth.