Online guide to Aussie wine
Being someone who works from home I’d have to admit that my tendency to be easily-distracted is not always conducive to being productive.
Some wine information websites are notoriously dull, so it’s always a pleasure to land on a good one. www.wineaustralia.com is the promotional website of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation and it's a wealth of information.
The quiz: ‘Discover your Regional Heroes: Australia’s Wine Tasting Challenge’ is a very neat way to get you thinking about the different styles of wines that are made in varying Australian wine regions.
For instance, select ‘Hunter Semillon’ and you are presented with a wine glass and a series of floating descriptors to choose from.
In this case you can pick from ‘minty’, ‘lanolin’, ‘toast’, ‘subtle’, ‘lemongrass’ ‘violets’ and ‘dark fruit’ amongst a few others. Eight are correct and the others are dummies. I scored 88 out of a possible 100 on the first attempt.
Once you’re done, it tells you which of the descriptors you’ve picked were incorrect as well as giving you more information on the wine style and the sort of foods you might want to drink with it.
For the ultra-competitive, it also gives you the opportunity to have another go. I came up trumps with a perfect score on the second attempt!
It covers a host of styles and, though it may sound a bit frivolous, it’s actually pretty informative.
I took the opportunity to compare a Grampian Shiraz with a Heathcote Shiraz. Both are made in the Victoria region of south east Australia but deliver quite different wine experiences.
I learnt that Heathcote was considerably ‘hotter’ as an area and that the wines are renowned for their dense, mouth-filling flavours.
By comparison, Grampian Shiraz is more floral and feminine yet retains dark fruit richness.
It’s pretty easy to get sucked in. I am just a click away from learning about the area’s specific micro-climate, the soils and the fact that it is a comparatively new winemaking area.
A few minutes later, I find myself lightly-educated on The Grampians’ (or Great Western, as it was previously known) 150 odd years of wine-making history.
It was the first time I’d learnt about the mile-long underground cellars that were hand excavated by the miners who lost their jobs once the region’s gold ran out.
www.wineaustralia.com features articles on site selection and flavour profiling, as well as downloads of Wine Australia magazine and much, much more besides.