2003 and 2004 Sweet The standout wine in this class was the Villa Maria “Reserve Noble” 2003 which was rich, intense and sweet with excellent length and balance. Ten wines on offer and nine tasted, varying from very good to very bad. All wines are from 2004 unless otherwise mentioned. Villa Maria “Reserve Noble” 2003 […]
Category: New Zealand
2003 and 2004 Semi-Dry As you will probably note from the scores, I was generally unimpressed with this class. Nothing that stood out as being anything better than good. Ten wines in this class, and all ten were tasted. All wines are from 2004. Te Kairanga – 88/100 Villa Maria Clifford Bay “Single Vineyard” – […]
2003 and 2004 Dry The second largest class with sixty eight wines and I tasted through sixty five of them. All wines are from 2004 unless otherwise mentioned. Some good wines, but in general quite mediocre – can probably be put down to 2004 being an average year for Riesling in our two biggest quality […]
Current Vintage (2005) Sweet Only two wines entered in this class, which made it easy to try everything on offer! The Forrest Estate wine from New Zealand was very good, sweet honey and marmalade along with obvious botrytis influence but at the same time fresh and with enough acid on the finish to keep it […]
Current Vintage (2005) Dry The biggest class on show with 149 wines. Due to time constraints, I aimed to mostly try wines that had done well in the judging – hence the high nature of my scores in this class. From the 25 wines I tasted in this class, 2005 is going to be a […]
15 classes of Riesling featuring 338 entries from Australia, New Zealand, Germany and North America? $15 entry and you get to pour your own samples and you get to take home whatever half bottles that are left over at the end? All I have to do is drive 4 hours to Canberra? I’m there. So […]
Tasting Note: Cherry, raspberry and herbs on the nose. Palate shows a noticeable hit of vanilla oak. Good fruit in the shadow of the oak and nice textured mouth-feel, but perhaps somewhat simplistic as well as pulling up short on the back-palate. Some acid structure and may develop some additional complexity with bottle age but […]
Last month Australia’s largest wine company Southcorp (now part of Fosters and even bigger) put on its annual road-show to showcase its wines across major capital cities. In Sydney, this was held at the completely refurbished Hilton hotel that was reopened in July. As often happens at these public events it didn’t take long to […]