Category: Wine Events

A recent dinner with some friends in Canberra, including the very best red wine I have been lucky enough to taste. I know I have been talking about a fair few international wines recently which is a deviation from the theme of the site, but I hope to get back to more Australian content shortly […]

A couple of months ago the United States signed a pact with the European Union to restrict the use of geographic names on their wine labels. It looks as though Australia is close to a similar deal whereby geographic names such as port and tokay are going to be banned from next year. This mainly […]

A quick get together at Borelli’s Italian Restaurant in Epping. The restaurant was good for what it is, a small local place that has food with good flavour and large servings, with fairly priced meals (for us it was around $50 AUD per person for three courses and tip) and corkage at $4 a bottle. […]

Following in the footsteps of the successful first French Wine Dinner at Marque and the moderately successful Australian dinner at Atelier came a dinner earlier this month with mostly the same group of people, at the famed Tetsuya’s restaurant in Sydney. The number of awards this restaurant has received is too long to be listed […]

I received an email earlier this evening from Graham Wright asking if I would be able to see if there were any readers of this site who would be interested in joining his monthly tasting group that was started in 1982 and is based around Blakehurst in Sydney. He says that there are currently six […]

Clonakilla is a well known, but still relatively small winery in the Canberra region, close to Australia’s capital city. I had a less than ideal experience with one of the wines that I purchased last year from the cellar door and I wrote to the winery expressing my concern over the problem that night and […]

An excellent dinner hosted by friends Gavin and Gen. I’ve included the menu items interspersed throughout the notes. I won’t post too detailed impressions on the food, but in general they were good matches, especially the Salmon with the Champagne and the smoked Duck with the Pinot/Burgundy. Smoked Salmon, mayonnaise and avocado Franck Bonville Grand […]

A few short notes from a free tasting with Torbreck winemaker David Powell at North Sydney Cellars late last month. These wines are favourites of the powerful American wine critic Robert Parker, hence the prices of the top wines are beyond the budget of most people. This was a good chance to taste these wines […]

To balance the night of French legends that I spoke of in the last post – it was decided that we should come together again in early April to have a dinner that would be a tribute to some great Australian wines. We gathered at Restaurant Atelier at Glebe – another restaurant with an excellent […]

While French wine doesn’t match the theme of this site, I think it’s important for me to look beyond Australian wine from time to time. Without doing this, I can’t put Australian wines in context with the rest of what the world has to offer. So, along with 11 others, I made my way to […]