Spring began slowly in the Barossa, warm and cold, but today, 28th September, the reptiles were out. On my morning walk I found the first casualty by the road, a smallish dead snake. Last spring also began badly for reptiles. more...

Turning cheap plonk into dollars is no easy task in these times of the great wine surplus so surely it cannot be long before there is an Australian entrant in the booming fad for wine spas. more...

A few weeks ago brother Richard sent me a link to a fascinating article that appeared in the New Yorker: "Annals of Science, The Truth Wears Out, Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" by Johan Lehrer, December 13th, 2010. A heading reading; "Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies", gives an idea of what this article is about but a review is outside the scope of this site so please seek out the original. more...

I hope you don't think it's too late for another of those "Best Of 2010" stories but I thought that the granting of this patent application after three years battling through the bureaucracy of the Trade Marks and Design Registration Office of the European Union deserved to be recorded: more...

In a History of Wallaroo 1860-1923 by Rex Wilshire there is perhaps the first Australian reference to the problems or at least concerns about smoke taint. more...

Cellared nicely in the cool depths of the Baltic Sea: three bottles of Veuve Clicquot. They were discovered recently in a shipwreck and looked to still be in good condition. The labels were long gone but the House of Veuve ws able to positively identify their origin from markings on the corks. It said other bottles recovered from the shipwreck probably came from the now defunct champagne house Jugiar. 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.