Wine Sense now available on KOBO!

Posted on July 18, 2015 by Steve Shipley

InkIT Publishing has opened its horizons and broke with Kindle Unlimited to now offer Wine Sense: The Art of Appreciating Wine through the KOBO Online Bookstore. For those who love reading a great ePub, love the interactivity of dynamic table of contents, internal links to direct you where you want, and being able to link to external websites as referenced, then this is the reading experience for you. Beautifully formatted, with responsive design to read perfectly on any device regardless of size, and to navigate according to your desires, Wine Sense enables you to read what you want, when you want and how you want.

Wine Sense makes a handy eBook on your IOS or Android device and eReader to check out tips on the best way to buy wine, store wine, drink wine, appreciate wine and to get the most out of every wine drinking experience. To order your copy of Wine Sense: The Art of Appreciating Wine on KOBO, click any of the previous links in this post. If you are interested in Wine Sense, but want to buy it on iTunes or Kindle, then go to the page in this website entitled Ordering Wine Sense. Happy reading and happy drinking!

How much is your wine worth?

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Steve Shipley

“How much is your wine worth?” A good question and the answer is usually less than you think it is! However, in some cases, you may have a sought-after brand made in one of the best years and it can be worth much more selling it than drinking it. How can you find out how much is your wine worth?

One way to know is by studying research data bases, results of wine auctions and exchanges, and to put a great amount of time into this field of study. A simpler and more trustworthy way would be to review Wickman’s Fine Wine database of results. Wickman has been buying and selling wine for almost two decades and has achieved million of dollars in turnover for his customers. He has been tracking prices and actual sales results. I sold 500 bottles of wine through Wickman’s Fine Wines so far and have been pleased with the result. However, I had to do a bit of a level set as in some cases I spent more to purchase the wines than I was able to get selling them. But Wickman helped me understand and set the optimal price point to move the wine quickly. I have moved far greater volume through Wickman’s than Langton’s or other wine auction houses or exchanges because Wickman’s knows how much your wine is worth!

Check out Wickman’s data base and also his post on how to get the most from selling wine and the factors that influence wine sales.

And check out my previous post on the various outlets to consider if you want to sell your wine. But to find out how much is your wine worth, Wickman’s post and sales statistics for the major brands is the quickest way to do so.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, available now!
© 2015. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
SAZ in the Cellar on Facebook
Wine Pinterest Boards
Twitter: Steve Shipley @shipleyaust; InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Steve Shipley

Cellarmasters provided a bottle of the 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay to review. This is an extremely well-awarded Chardonnay as have been the previous two vintages. The 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay is a single vineyard Tasmanian Chardonnay with a bold taste. The 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay surprised me in being far fruitier than I was expecting. Its aroma is of lemon and orange peel. The taste is very fruity and alive, with the citrus almost popping off your tongue. I also taste pineapple and grapefruit along with lemon and lime. It is crisp and clean on the tongue and the 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay has a nice, moderately long finish.

With the strong citrus flavors, you could easily mistake this wine for a Sauvignon Blanc, except the 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay is richer in texture and has a better mouthfeel. Yet, for my taste, the 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay is too crisp and fruity for a Chardonnay, but then, I drink most of my Chardonnays with some age on them and either sourced from Montrachet, or in Australia from Margaret River or the Hunter Valley. This is the first Chardonnay I have ever had from Tasmania. The 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay is a lovely drop and immediately drinkable, but different from what I was expecting. Now that it has warmed up a couple of degrees, I taste watermelon and papaya. If you like an abundance of citrus and exotic fruits, you will love the 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay.

I must apologize to Cellarmasters, as the 2011 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay is out of stock, similar to the 2011 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz that I reviewed earlier. I need to do my reviews as soon as receiving the wines. (Unfortunately, I was sick and waited until my palate was better.) But like the 2011 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz which is out of stock, if you want another good Chardonnay, check out Cellarmasters fine selection of Chardonnays to find a suitable replacement. They do carry the 2012 Riversdale Estate Crater Chardonnay which should be just as good.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, available now!
© 2014. Steve Shipley. All rights reserved.
SAZ in the Cellar on Facebook
Wine Pinterest Boards
Twitter: Steve Shipley @shipleyaust; InkIT Publishing @inkitpub

2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Steve Shipley

About one month ago, Cellarmasters sent me several wines to review. I have been extremely busy and am just getting around to reviewing the first wine this evening, which is the 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz. Fifteen years ago, I used to drink far more big Barossa Shiraz, but over the last decade have come to appreciate slightly less alcoholic content Shiraz and more from the Hunter Valley. I also tend to drink my Shiraz after it has been in the cellar for a decade or more. Yet immediately upon opening the 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz, I could tell it was going to be a great wine. The nose was full of refined fruit. It is not often I use the term ‘elegant’ when nosing a wine (even though I sometimes do when tasting it), but the 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz smells elegant. It immediately increased my desire to get this wine decanted as soon as possible and to drink it.

The 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz sits beautifully on the palate and has has a long and very pleasant finish. I love wines that not only taste good, but feel good on the palate and provide the extra enjoyment of finishing far after swallowing. And the 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz certainly provides that! I like the tactile feeling of a good wine as much or more than the flavor.

The color of the 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz is a vibrant red. The taste is of dark fruits / berries, plum and spice. As refined as this wine is, I would have had a hard time picking it as a Barossa Shiraz in a blind tasting.

For a young wine, the 2012 Krondorf Growers Barossa Shiraz is immediately drinkable. It will not cellar long (3 – 5 years?), but it does not have to as you can buy it and drink it immediately. This wine was such good value though, that Cellarmasters has already sold out of it. However, the next vintage should be outstanding also and you can still look for other great Shiraz that Cellarmasters still has in stock.

Australia’s First Families of Wine

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Steve Shipley

I love reading about wine family history for several reasons: the first is the inspiration I get from understanding how families sacrificed to survive and in spite of their financial troubles, they never gave up on the pursuit of making better and better wine, regardless of the cost or the hardships; the second is the intrigue and suspense on seeing if the next generation will embrace and participate in the family business. My first entree into reading about first families of wine was Mondovino by Jonathan Nossiter, who wrote about the European first families of wine and some of the difficulties they had passing the legacy from generation to generation. This was followed by reading The Rewards of Patience by Andrew Caillard which retells the history of Penfolds, and then by reading the great biography of Maurice O’Shea in Wine Hunter by Campbell Mattinson. And now I am reading heart & soul: Australian’s First Families of Wine by Graeme Lofts. All of these books are thrilling and inspirational as they talk about wine and the business of wine.

I have used the terms ‘first families of wine’ a bit loosely so far in that Penfolds can no longer be considered a family-run business as they sold out to the large corporate and are now part of TWE (Treasury Wine Estates). In Loft’s book, heart & soul, he describes 12 Australian family-owned wineries, which have had at least 20 vintages, ownership of vineyards for more than 50 years of the highest quality, and at least two and preferably three generations of family owning the business. These 12 wineries are truly Australia’s First Families of Wine (AFFW). This was an initiative launched in 2009 and represent a great glimpse into the best in wine and wine history that Australia has to offer.

While these stories and each family is unique, they have similarities in the most important areas to regarding making the very best wines possible. By reading heart & soul and the other books mentioned above, I have come to believe, in general, that family-owned wineries make better wines than corporate-owned wineries. Of course you will be able identify some great wines made in corporate-owned wineries, but I am more and more inclined to drink wine from Australia’s first families of wine if given the choice. Loft’s book makes this abundantly clear, and here are the reasons why:

Australia’s first families of wine care more about making the very best wine possible than about being a commercial success; they never cut corners to get a better-valued commercial outcome – it is all about making the finest wine possible
Each new generation is given the opportunity to work elsewhere, learn from the best other first families of wine around the world and bring that back home
Each new generation starts early in learning winemaking and this cumulatively increases the knowledge and capabilities of the family-owned winemaking and wine marketing teams to do a better job than the large corporate-owned wineries are able to do
They have all faced crisis and hardships often across generations, yet have survived and done what was required to survive
They continue to experiment, exchange ideas with others, and help the wine industry as a whole, contributing and benefiting more than corporate-owned wineries

Australia’s first families of wine have achieved commercial success as a by-product of producing the best wines available, no matter what the cost. They do not try to optimize short-term profit if it will get in the way of producing the best wine possible. If you want to be inspired about how to run a business, any business, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from heart & soul and the other books mentioned. If you want insights into the passion, the pursuit of quality, literally the ‘heart & soul’ of what goes into making and appreciating a good wine, then you should pick up a copy of heart & soul and get reading!

1998 Keith Tulloch The Kester Shiraz Review

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Steve Shipley

My apologies for not having written many posts recently. Having finished and published Wine Sense followed by a large trip to the US and immediately taking on some concentrated consulting work, my ‘retirement’ has been anything but! But I have missed writing and especially writing about wine!

Living in the iconic Hunter Valley wine region two hours north of Sydney, we have a choice of about 150 wineries to visit. From the 30 or so we have visited, we have six or seven we buy from regularly, while continuing to expand and purchase from others. We have made the point to try a new winery or two every month. One recent new entry was Keith Tulloch Wines on Hermitage Road. What a great winery! We were fortunate to have Keith Tulloch, owner and winemaker host our tasting for several hours and what a treat it was. We bought several styles of Semillon and Shiraz and some Rose. Their wines for the money are tremendous value. And the facilities are amazing, including the Muse Cafe, one of the very few hatted regional NSW restaurants. You could spend the entire day at Keith Tulloch Wines tasting, eating and just admiring the scenery. And if you are fortunate to get a few minutes with Keith, he will provide you a real wine education! I also love that it is a true family winery. When we visited, Keith was working and his wife and son were working the cellar door.

The wines I bought when there recently though will be a long time in the cellar; they are mostly ready to drink now, but I am certain all will improve a good deal given some time lying down. Fortunately my father-in-law had a vintage Keith Tulloch wine, the very first vintage of the 1998 The Kester in his cellar which he gifted to me as a Christmas present. I opened it this afternoon with great anticipation as I would any 15 year old Hunter Shiraz – and it did not disappoint! This is a beautiful Hunter Shiraz and you can while you can feel the heat of 14.4% alcohol, it is delivered with a smooth velvety mouthfeel. The fruit is powerful, and delivered with medium weight and texture. I pick up plum and boysenberry flavors, plus good spicy overtures. And the finish lasts a long, long time. As good as this wine is, I might be dipping into the 2011 The Kester and The Doctor Shiraz sooner than I thought!

We are having this wine tonight with a New York Strip steak and chips with a side salad. We tend to use a lot of spice when cooking steaks, so the 1998 Keith Tulloch The Kester Shiraz will be a great match!

Great value in a $15 bottle!

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Steve Shipley

There are many good bottles of wine to be had for $15. My book Wine Sense focuses on how to ‘buy wine’ instead of ‘being sold wine.’ Once you know how to taste and have the confidence you know what you like, you can get some great values. Over the years, I spend about double what I should have on wine until I learned to believe in my own palate.

One of the best $15 bottles I have had in a long time is the 2010 De Bertoli Deen Master Blend Vat 184. It is a blend of Pinot Verdot, Shiraz and Durif. It has a great mouthfeel, well textured and almost too easy to swallow! It is 13.5% alcohol and lays nicely on the palate. It has great fruit flavors with tastes of chocolate and mocha. It is a wonderful wine to drink on its own or with food. It would work well with game, roast chicken, some pastas, and tonight we are having it with pizza. This wine has been awarded two Gold medals and one Silver medal, so I am not the only one who really likes this wine!

With some exceptions over the years, De Bertoli does not make great wines (they are best known for their stickie dessert wine, Noble One), but they do consistently make great value wines. And they have blended the best features of three varietals into a very nice wine, the Vat 184.

De Bertoli is also one of the select members of Australia’s First Families of Wine, and continue to make wine as a multi-generational family. When writing this post, I was not able to connect to their website, but it is ‘http://www.debortoli.com.au/.’

Try the Vat 184 – I expect you will enjoy it greatly and find it to be very good value!

Minnesota Meritage – seriously!

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Steve Shipley

We had a fun day visiting our first ever winery in Minnesota; a great little gem of a place in Cannon Falls called Cannon River Winery. I must admit that I was hesitant as to what we would find of wine in Minnesota, but it was a pleasent surprise.

I will be writing a series of posts on the wine industry in Minnesota. Cannon River Winery is owned by friends of my parents and (I) having just written a wine book, my parents wanted me to visit their friend’s winery. Cannon River Winery is only about a 40 minute drive out of the Twin Cities, mostly south on US 52. Cannon Falls is a quaint small Midwestern town with a lot of character and the winery and cellar door right in the heart of the city with the vineyards being outside.

We learned a great deal today about the challenges of making wine in Minnesoata. It would appear Minnesota would be similar to a lot of cold wine growing regions, but it is not. I always knew that the Twin Cities had the highest variation of temperature from coldest to warmest seasonally, but I also found out that the daily variations can be extremely large. Therefore, they needed to craft grapes that could deal with the local climate and both extreme hot and cold temperatures. There is a vitaculture unit associated with the University of Minnesota that has been working for the last 30 years to create cross-bred varietals to deal with the extreme temperature fluctuations. Therefore, there exist a number of unique grape varietals specific to the region and growers need to be approved by a state industry association. These local grapes all start with the ‘MN’ designation.

The Minnesota winemakers need to be gifted blending several varietals into a pleasent drinking wine to provide the right balance and integration of flavors and textures. This is no easy feat when trying to use only local grapes! Sometimes using a bit of Shiraz or some other grape from another region can be the final piece in the puzzle to making a drinkable wine.

We tried about 15 different wines, including dry and sweet reds and whites, dessert wines and an apple wine and honey wine, and ended up buying four bottles to take along and share with our friends over the next few days. The winemaker also spent an hour with us tasting the wines direct from the vats containing the recently harvested grapes. These wines are still cloudy since they are unfiltered, but showed great promise and will be better than last year’s vintage. Some of the wines were still on skins.

So there is a Minnesota Meritage which is a blend of several different grapes and quite different from Hermitage or Australian Shiraz; however, it is a very drinkable blend with a slightly sweeter taste.

I was not expecting much from Minnesota wines, but was positively surprised and going to try some more. While not on par with the best Europe, Napa or Australia has to offer, they are very drinkable and at very reasonable prices. If you want a great day out from the Twin Cities, you should definitely try Cannon River Winery!

I need to do some further research, but will be discussing the Minnesota varietals and the history of Minnesota wine making in the next several posts.

Update on Vino DeCanto wine preserver

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Steve Shipley

During the last month, I have written my assessment, mostly negative, about the newly launched Vino DeCanto wine preserver. But through the benefits of social media (the founder and designer was alerted to my blog posts on the product) and the credit of the company, the founder reached out to me to try to really understand my experiences and how to improve them. In fact, he spent two hours driving each way today to visit me and several more to review the experiences I have had with the product. We used my Vino DeCanto, tested it and compared it to new newer models he brought with him. I learned a lot about the process of making the Vino DeCanto, a number of the engineering and manufacturing challenges they have faced and what they are doing about them. Most importantly, I learned a lot about the character of the company and how far they are willing to attend to, invest in, and address customer concerns to be able to deliver a high-quality product.

As I stated earlier, the product works and does an exceptional job preserving wine, even when I tried it on a fragile wine. My concerns were more around the operational aspects of the Vino DeCanto, such as filling the glass, moving the container, cleaning the container, the drip factor and so on. This product is still being worked on and improvements have been noted and in progress. Five key ones I found out about today include:

using a different process to manufacture the glass container to provide far greater consistency in diameter and perfect circumference (by using an expensive mold instead of the previous glass tube cutting process). Even slight variations created significant impact on the ease of dispensing wine with ease or difficulty dispensing wine and these variations will be greatly reduced, if not removed entirely
offering a stand to solidify and ease filling and dispensing wine
altering the size and weight of the sealing ball to better control pressure while dispensing wine and reducing drip lag time
slightly modified use of O-ring placement for better movement and wine preservation
different texturing of the material in some parts to improve wine preservation with minimal potential for defect

All five of these known improvements will significantly improve the use of the device and continue to improve wine durability. I also learned about five tricks for more easily using and cleaning the device. Vino DeCanto has now created a one-page Tips and Operational Guide where none existed before and also is in the process of making a YouTube video to show others these suggestions for easier use. Looking back, it might be easy to say the company should have waited another six months to work through these improvements, but it has really been through the device’s use in wine bars and through a few select early-on customers such as myself that they have been able to quickly identify and make the improvements necessary. They were almost too close to the problems to identify them as being potential issues for others.

They replaced my earlier device with a newer one and also provided another new one to continue to test and help them work through ongoing areas for improvement. We are going to put both devices through their paces over the next month and continue help provide further suggestions on how to make the Vino DeCanto better. Tonight, I have poured a bottle of 1995 Leasingham Classic Clare Shiraz into the Vino DeCanto and dispensed a glass. The new device I received today worked far better than my previous one in terms of the consistent dispensing of the wine and to just the amount I intended in the glass. Now the wine will sit for a month to really test out how well it is preserved. At least I have been able to verify one of my previous major operational issues was resolved.

The company reached out, in fact, went out of their way to listen to what I had to say, took my and other customer’s suggestions on board and rectified the previous product by replacing it for me. I learned a lot about the character and the passion behind the man who made this device and the company he is building and it is all good. I am going to give this device another chance and continue to work with them to help make sure this is a quality product for those who need wine preservation, but are not interested or willing to go with the argon gas method.

Well done and thank you to Vino DeCanto for listening to your customers and persistently continuing to improve your product.

Vino DeCanto wine preserver not suitable for use

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Steve Shipley

12 days ago, I provided a review on the Vino Decano wine preserver and gave it a mixed review. After another trial and use, I conclude it is not suitable for use. First and foremost with only a quarter of the bottle left in storage over the last 12 days, I could tell the wine had deteriorated slightly in quality. While it did a much better job over about 3.5 weeks than a manual pump would do, it is inferior to what an argon gas replacements is capable of. I was told they had tested and preserved wine for up to 14 months, but I find this hard to believe.

Operationally, it continued to disappoint. I was very cautious, yet still had problems determining how fast and how far to push the plunger; more importantly, I had wine dripping from the spout onto the counter for the next 30 seconds as it was settling back into the container. And to get all the wine out of the container, I had to completely disassemble the device and pour about 65 – 70 ml of wine into the glass. It is heavy to use and move about and was more effort to clean clean than I anticipated.

Unless future models are designed better and are easier to operate, I just cannot recommend this device as a wine preserver. The $229 I spent on it was a waste of money. I would continue to use a manual vacuum pump or consider using the Coravin or WineSave to preserve a good bottle of wine. My initial intrigue and the promise of this wine preserver has faded. The Vino DeCanto is a disappointment. I am back to using my manual pump and WineSave until my Coravin arrives!