Red Wine

Thanks Mark, will keep an eye out for Zevenwacht! Need to get to SA at some stage, wine's as good a reason as any!

phil[/QUOTE]

It's a beautiful country. Other excellent wines come from the 'Jordan' and 'Eikendal' Estates, but there are so many great ones out there. We tried to sample the wines at as many places as we could without falling over, and were seldom disappointed. 'Boschendal' is fab, they also do a picnic basket there in the gardens which is a pretty cool way to chill out for a lazy South African Summer afternoon!

Mark

quote:

Am in Adelaide in Feb - will try and pick some up. Thanks for the recommendation!

phil

Phil

Try Wine Underground on Pirie Street, they might have some.

Steve

quote:

Originally posted by rodwsmith:
Try not to buy wine from supermarkets.

<<rant: ON>>


Worth every penny of its very large price tag, which is £25.

<<rant: OFF>>

Cheers

Rod

25 quid?! - they saw you coming.

Posted Mon 30 January 2006 09:57
Here's a Barossa Valley red worth committing homicide for: Rockford Basket Press Shiraz.

This wine merchant in Loughborough has it:

http://www.georgehill.co.uk/price-list.htm

I've just phoned and ordered one in a mixed case so I'm looking forward to a taster or three - thanks for the recommendation!

This merchant also has an excellent NZ Sav Blanc called Isabel which is up there with Cloudy Bay - highly recommended and very hard to obtain outside of Berry Bros. & Rudd.

Buy with confidence!

i fully agree with just about all the comments, espaxially around Barolo & ChateuNeuf - I really dont think it is worth spending less that around the £15-20 mark on either of these, otherwise you are geting a poor bottle that will be beaten by a nice £10 Rioja or similar

I have found a real bargain though - a Mexican Nebbiolo (the grape used in Barolo) from La Cetto. I normally would not go within range of a new world wine,, but had some at a tasting and have since bought several cases - great to give to friends who normally get Liebfraumilch to show how good wine can get..and the best bit....£8.99 a bottle

Really cannot recommmend it enough

http://www.albionwineshippers.co.uk

quote:

Originally posted by Nigel Cavendish:

quote:

Originally posted by rodwsmith:
Try not to buy wine from supermarkets.

<<rant: ON>>


Worth every penny of its very large price tag, which is £25.

<<rant: OFF>>

Cheers

Rod

25 quid?! - they saw you coming.

Nigel,

What's the most you have you ever paid for an item of music reproduction equipment?

If it's more than twenty quid, then - touché.

I can buy a dvd/cd player in Tesco for that. And so could you.

Everything is relative. I very much doubt that the Rockford Basket Press Shiraz mentioned above is any less than £25, which is fair enough as it's a veritable Grange-beater.

However the bloke (an amiable self-parody called - I kid you not - Rocky O'Callaghan) that makes the wine and owns the place lives in a modest two bedroom house on the property and although he couldn't exactly plead poverty I can assure you for the producer of such sought-after cult wines, rolling in it he ain't.

You may not believe it but it can actually COST £25 to make a bottle of wine.

Château d'Yquem - a moderately well known property of Sauternes in Bordeaux - has NEVER made a profit. Not once.

Each vine produces around a half a glass of wine, which they only make about every other year after harvesting every single berry individually, sending a team of expert pickers to pass through the vineyards at least seven times, at hours of the day to suit the grapes rather than the workers, and spending more on barrels than you might on a house.

You will not be able to buy a bottle of its wine for less than £150. I repeat the place has never made a profit (in fact it was sold two years ago from under the feet of its owner by the rest of the once-rich family shareholders). As our American friends might say, go figure.

You carry on drinking £3.99 piss if you want to, but I shouldn't condemn others for being more discerning if I were you. It might make you sound stupid.

Now I shall finish my glass of Chanson Père et Fils Beaune Clos de Fèves Premier Cru 2001, a wine which I should need you to pay £36 a bottle for (& although you wouldn't, there's a queue), but which for me was free because my company imports it. Such wines, I grant you, taste heaps better.

Santé

Rod

Hi Rod

Originally I thought you made some real good points. After reading your recent post I've decided that you come across as

... A jumped up Prick. I suggest if you get a buzz trying to belittle others... why not join a forum for 5 year olds.

Sorry... Just had to tell ya

Happy Chick
( A real person who feels they have no need to try to impress others. Daft as a bat, but part of the real world)

Anyway...

I went to the wine merchants the weekend and bought 12 bottles of red wine. 2x pinot noir, 2 x barolla, 2 x brunello, 2 x rioja (god knows how you spell it - can't be bothered to look), and some others not yet tried.

Tried the Brunello, thought it was real nice. Still sorta prefering the Barola at the mo.

Happy Chick

So, calling someone a "jumped up prick" is better than "belittling" by reasoned argument and example in what way exactly?

I was trying to demonstrate that a wine can be worth £25 or more simply by the expedient of having cost that much to make. I insulted no-one. You did.

It's spelled "Barolo" by the way. It's on the label.

For Spanish Rioja I like the Muga wines - very nice, Torre Muga in particular.

Current house wine is Planeta's Segreta Rosso - predominantly Nero d'Avola but rounded out with some Merlot and Syrah.

Most of the Italian wine mentioned really needs a good few years to really show its quality, a Barolo in particular. When good, it is very good but outside of Piemonte it is rather over-priced imho.

Organised wine tastings are the best way to learn, not sure how or if this is possible in UK. Building a relationship with a wine merchant is just as important as one with a Naim dealer. They learn your preferences, understand your budget and with their greater knowledge steer your choices and remove the pot luck element from tasting.

Sorry Rod

Just didn't like the way you used "piss" as a description for a bottle of wine costing £3.99.

For some £3.99 is enough to pay for a bottle of wine.

Sometimes we forget how fortunate we are. So... maybe "Piss" it may taste like to you, but wine to those who are not on such a pay packet.

I'd only spend about £10 to £25 on a bottle of wine. I also find that under £5 wine is not to my tasting. But would not describe it as a bottle of piss.

Happy Chick

Aha! Well, I'm afraid I was using 'piss' in the Australian sense of the word.

There, virtually any liquid can be described as a xx of piss. A bottle of piss can be a wine of any price/quality, as in "nice drop of piss, that" and I even heard tea described as a cup of piss once.

I could point out though, in this country, I fear one cannot secure a particularly good bottle of wine for £3.99. Here's why:
Take off VAT (59p) leaves £3.40. Take off retailer margin, say 35%, (£1.19) leaves £2.21. Take off freight and insurance (7p) leaves £2.14. Take off Gordon Brown's {fixed} share (£1.26) and the EUs common customs tariff (9p) leaves 79p. Take off the cost of a cork (8p), label (5p), bottle (15p), capsule, cardboard box, pallet, shrinkwrap (10p) and that leaves 41p.

Frankly I value my liver and my taste buds too highly to let them loose on 41 pence a bottle wine, and so, by the sound of it, do you.

But if you notice, many of the above costs are fixed. Certainly the alcohol duty is.

So, if a £4 bottle of wine has 41p's worth of wine in it, then a £5 bottle might very nearly have £1.41p's worth of wine, and so on.

Life really is too short to drink cheap wine.

It used to be the case, in this country anyway, that people would boast of how LITTLE they had spent on a bottle of wine. People would flounce into a dinner-party and take delight in announcing that they had "only" payed 89 francs, or £1.99 or whatever. As if there were some kind of Machiavellian sense of achievement about it. Maybe some still do.
But if you went to a dinner party and they boasted of spending "only" 50p on the meat, you would look for the nearest pot plant and never eat there again. How weird is that?

Having finished the Burgundy, I am now on a Nebbiolo d'Alba, which is very much a poor man's Barolo, but often better value and invariably easier to drink young.

Cheers

No Piss for me tonight. I am enjoying a beautiful 1996 Rioja Baron de Ley. Cost £9.99 and worth every penny.

Spock

Ohh and that will be the Gran Reserva not the cheapo Reserva piss!

Spock

This wine is just fantastic with a nice bit of vintage cheddar.

Spock

Rod

I have sampled many glasses of what you would call "fine wine", and very nice they were too. But I would never actually buy them myself at the piss-take prices that are charged. I don't care what it costs to produce, I don't care what so-called connoisseurs say about it. There are many good tasting wines at reasonable prices, it is your loss if you are too pretentious to accept that.

Your hi-fi analogy is bizarre - like we buy an amp, use it once, throw it away and then buy another - really.

p.s.

I also understand that you have a vested interest in touting expensive wine which could call into question your credibility.

Hey Bazz

Come over for a cuppa piss and a biscuit.

(see above)

Steve

quote:

Originally posted by Nigel Cavendish:
I also understand that you have a vested interest in touting expensive wine which could call into question your credibility.

Your loss is greater IMO, but of course it's all personal opinion. I can ignore your attack on my integrity / credibility as you call it by virtue of the fact that I sell plenty of cheap wine too. And I know how much it costs to produce.

I have mentioned the company I work for (Bollinger) but I have actually been painstakingly careful never to recommend one of my company's wines as better than their competition for precisely the reasons you sneeringly allude to.
In fact the point of my original post in this thread was that people mentioning specific wines as being "good" is in some ways worse than useless. Wine is such a matter of personal taste that one person liking it is no greater a recommendation than suggesting everyone should buy, say, a Robbie Williams album simply because lots of other people already have.

My hi-fi analogy is that spending more than is absolutely necessary to accomplish a task, whether it is wine, musical reproduction, car possession or anything else, is a matter of taste.
That wine is fleeting is supremely irrelevant.

So is first class travel, a good seat at the opera and a whole pile of other things. Yet people still pay extra for these. Perhaps of course everyone is more pretentious than you.

It was your patronising "they saw you coming" comment that started this off remember.

I enjoy many inexpensive wines, it is only by so doing so that it is possible to appreciate the others. If you've tasted fine wines and don't like them, then that's your financial gain, but it doesn't excuse telling others who don't share your taste that they've been ripped off.

Rod,

My wife and I treated ourselves to a bottle of NV Bollie about a week ago. I have to say that it was, in my opinion, the best bottle of NV we've ever drunk. I was completely blown away by it. It was very nearly as good as some nice vintage ones I've drunk in the past. The only probelm is that I can't quite work out how I can justify getting some more!!

Keep up the good work!

Yum yum........

Kevin

Regardless of the quality vs taste discussions on this thread, there are some good reasons why good wine can be bought for under a fiver.

1/Economy of scale. The larger a producer's yield, the less it costs to make.

2/Production. If producers use modern methods and equipment, it is not so labour intensive, etc.

3/Some producers are little more than middle men buying grapes and wine from other producers to blend together and market as their own.
Therefore they are not burdened by the cost of labour, irrigation, etc.

Many growers at the premium end can't sell all of their grapes/wine or it does not meet their quality demands so these guys will then either market this under a different name,(usually at circa 50% less than the expensive stuff, or sell to the blenders. This is common practice with companies like Latour and Mouton Rothschild for example.

Therefore, it is possible that some of the wine sold under the £5 mark could contain grapes found in bottles sold at 5 times this.

Conversely, the reasons for some high priced bottles are:

1/Yield. The producer only owns a small parcel of land, so the output is low.

2/Reputation. Many people will pay incredibly high prices for wine on the strength of past glories or hype. The irony here is that in the case of most expensive wine,(particularly 1st growth French wine), it's not really palatable until it's been aged for 5-10 years+.

3/Time. Most premium wine is aged and stored for a length of time far greater than that at the "economy" end before it's released for sale. The consumer has to pay for this tender care at the till.Champagne and Port are two good examples.

3/The buying public. California is a good example of a country that has a lot of growers producing little and most of this is snapped up by restaurants. They've probably already made their profits so what little is left over is put out to the domestic consumer and the export market for which they charge more. Because supply is limited, the prices are driven upwards.

It is truly a matter of taste at the end of the day but I don't think it's true to say that quality can be bought.

Kevin, cheers

Of course, you have but thirteen days to wait until the next very valid excuse to treat your wife to another bottle.

quote:

Of course, you have but thirteen days to wait until the next very valid excuse to treat your wife to another bottle.

Now there's a thought!!!

I realise that I didn't phrase my first post very well - the Bollinger was (insert usual 'to my taste' disclaimer)better than any NV I've drunk, and better by some margin than most of the vintage Champagnes I've tried (which, whilst not exhaustive does include a few). What must the vintage be like (he asks himself with every intention of finding out in the near future if he has anything to do with it).....

quote:

Wine is such a matter of personal taste that one person liking it is no greater a recommendation than suggesting everyone should buy, say, a Robbie Williams album simply because lots of other people already have.

Well we got there eventually...

Your selective quoting is somewhat at variance with your original "saw you coming" comment.

I have no wish to be part of a "we" that includes you, frankly. You accused me of not having credibility if you remember.

We have been drinking chilled bottles of this little beauty recently. Fabulous.