In the tiny outback town of Dunkeld in Victoria, Australia, it’s a nightly occurrence to spot sommeliers dashing across the highway clutching a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, an old Château Latour or an Australian icon. Plucked from a giant climate-controlled cellar, a steady stream of prized bottles make their way to The Royal […]

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Champagne rosé has never been more popular, says Tyson Stelzer. It wasn’t long ago that we wouldn’t be caught dead drinking pink. How times have changed. Rosé champagne is now a highlight of every champagne dinner I host, and connoisseurs can’t seem to get enough of it. So much so that Champagne is struggling to […]

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Australia’s greatest wines may not yet have been made and its finest vineyard sites might still be undiscovered. Trailblazers into new wine regions offer drinkers an exciting diversity of new wine styles. Australian winemaking identity Brian Croser is on a mission. His ambition is not simply to create a brand and sell wine, but to […]

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Oak is the most important and most expensive input in many wines after the grapes themselves. We talk a lot about the origins of grapes and the techniques of winemaking, but how much do we know about the sources of barrels and how they’re made? As modern winemakers hone in on the detail of every […]

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Blended reds create quite a stir. When a little Hunter Valley estate launched a new blend this month, no one expected it to rouse such controversy. “You’ll confuse the message!” accused one critic. “People won’t understand the concept.” Lake’s Folly has bottled just two wines exclusively from its legendary little Hunter Valley vineyard for precisely […]

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An expansion into cool regions and a change of focus into the premium wine sector have revitalised Australia’s second-largest family-owned winery. Tyson Stelzer discovers the new De Bortoli. “Premiumisation” is the buzzword of modern Australian wine: out with the commodity wines of warm, broadacre inland zones, in with cool regions and premium wines. The De […]

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Drama underwrites the story of Champagne like no other region in the wine world. This place has always been a flashpoint of tension, from the defeat of Attila the Hun in the 5th century, the founding of the Knights Templar in the 12th, the planning of the crusades in the 13th, fighting the Russians in […]

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Champagne labels Vintage and non-vintage Champagne’s tumultuous weather makes its harvest conditions some of the most erratic in the wine world. The region has developed its style to correct challenging vintages by blending wines from older vintages (‘reserve wines’) to create non-vintage (NV) blends. Vintage wines are created in smaller volumes and only in the […]

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Philosophy Buy strategically Most wines don’t inherently improve in the cellar, so it’s more astute to choose every bottle purposefully for its potential to improve rather than haphazardly assembling a collection of wines that you happen to like. Broadly speaking, for Australian wines, I’ve had much greater success with cabernet sauvignon and shiraz and their […]

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Liquid assets or retirement stash, the cellar has its rewards. I’ve never seen a room of wine show judges stunned by the age of a wine, not because of its sheer maturity but its extreme youth. A barrel sample of fortified Seppeltsfield Para Vintage Tawny, harvested just five months earlier, silenced the room by its […]

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