The guest speaker at the Institute of Masters of Wine Conference in Bordeaux this year was Sir John Hegarty, creative director for the U.K. firm, Bartle Bootle Hegarty. Sir John is an industry advertising heavyweight. Here are some quotes from a summary of his address, 'The wine business viewed from the outside' as reported by John Abbott, Decanter, June 28th. more...

Only on matters of great importance does Richard (now back in Canberra) ring the home crew in the Barossa. Last week we heard about a very cheap white purchased from Aldi and last night another update that the red at $1.60 a bottle is very good. Hang on, $1.60 a bottle? more...

New to me are the wines of Mac Forbes though I have been noticing good reviews so we began with a Mac Forbes Yarra Valley Chardonnay 2008 12% which was spot on; approaching chardonnay in an appealing way with simple winery treatment and letting the vibrant fruit sing away. Three people consumed the wine with ease and its interest grew which is always a good sign and I ended up noting the wine as outstanding. The idea of making our chardonnays modelled on French White Burgundies has caused confusion and has lead us down the wrong path. more...

Should you ask the sommelier for advice or blaze ahead with your own guess work after detailed study of the wine list? There is no easy answer but here goes. more...

Over the years I have moved to the view that tasting notes are not particularly helpful. How can you describe a wine in a way that imparts helpful information to a potential purchaser? To partly overcome this problem most wine writers include a score with the description. Unfortunately in our view and often argued here, scoring has become so corrupted that great wines score marginally above average wines. more...

Shown are some recent Woolworths and Coles catalogues from my letter-box.
A few years ago I could tell a Woolworths liquor advertisement from a Coles but since Tony Leon left the Woolworths subsidiary Dan Murphy to later run Coles liquor they now mirror each other very closely. more...

How we have marketed, promoted and advertised wine in Australian is under researched. One area of interest would be to research the record left by the wine label. The State Library of Victoria houses the important Troedel Collection, 20 or so large books which contain posters, labels, cards, certificates, ephemera, lithographs and much else being the record... more...

The standout figure in the Lloyds Banking Group results yesterday was the £24,000 million of loans the bank judged it will never get back from customers. Every second of every day in 2009, Lloyds was writing off another £760 as clients queued up to say they could not honour their debts. Even lending at Royal Bank of Scotland was souring at the rate of only £441 a second. more...