Australian wine icon Wolf Blass sees inovation as the best way out of the current australian grape glut as reported in the Australian. He has a good point. “I’ve seen five breakdowns in this country and each time we survived because we came up with innovative ideas. Our guys today wouldn’t bloody know. They only [...]
In association with a couple of colleagues I have been working on a contact kit for small wineries looking to improve their distribution. Essentially it gives you the basic tools to start a marketing campaign to key retailers nationally. It covers the how to’s of approaching these people and what they will want. If you could [...]
The month is almost over, the southern hemisphere vintage is upon us and I find I haven’t yet posted the second edition of “what’s hot”. It certainly wouldn’t be a good start to what is supposed to be a regular segment if I missed this one, although I could have just blamed March for not [...]
Australian growers have stumbled on a potential problem with recent plantings of Alberino…. it might not be Alberino. Reports have surfaced that cast doubt on whether the vine is correctly identified. DNA testing is being conducted but it hardly seems like disaster if it’s not as the wines being produced seem to be fairly good. [...]
currently I’m integrating the Global Wine Consultants site into this one, so you will see a few new pages appearing. Having a little trouble with the database upgrade so you may see some odd character anywhere there should be an asterisk. How I’m going to fix this, I don’t know? Wine wise we are also [...]
Hopefully you are enjoying the new look to the site. It’s been weeks of work and still isn’t quite finished yet. hopefully in a couple of days! If it looks odd, or something… I’d love to hear.
Just had a call from a friend in Queensland who said he had just seen Marlbourgh Sauvignon Blanc in clean skin form for under $6.00 per bottle (AUD I’m guessing).
I was in a local wine store, namely the Wine Vault, a couple of days ago, and was discussing a wine (a central Otago Pinot that tasted more like Malbec) when one of the people there asked “what is VA?” Good question, its just jargon but lets explain it. VA is an abbreviation for Volatile [...]
The Australian has figures showing an 18% rise in bulk wine shipments.
Have a quick skim throught the listings at KTB and be amazed by the large quantities of bulk wine available. The good news is that it looks like there will be less 2009 NZ wines than earlier thought, due to some adverse conditions. Hopefully stability will return although I’m not sure that $20 plus neauvou [...]
One of the more odd-ball difficulties I have encountered during my years in the wine industry, has been that of local sales. By this I mean sales within the region you produce. Now if that’s Auckland or San Francisco or anywhere in Europe this doesn’t apply. This is more for your small towns where viticulture [...]
Just been going through my site data for last month with total amazement. For some reason traffic seems to have increased roughly ten fold! The worry now is that I’ll need to upgrade my hosting package. I’ve never really wanted to have advertising on the site but the I may have to look at it [...]
I’ve finally got myself back online, just as the yet another low sweeps across the North Island. So far it doesn’t look too bad. I’ve tried some interesting wines in the last week though. Yves Couilleron’s St Joseph L’Amarybell 2006 was a fantastic Syrah for it’s price. A great example of fine grained tannin intergration [...]