Dan's Wine Blog

WELCOME TO 2021 – Hopefully it will be a much, much better year than what 2020 was for all of us, in the wine industry. This week I'll be reporting on some changes in the wine industry overseas...

This is the last blog for the year so I would like to wish you and yours a very merry and safe Christmas and may 2021 be a fabulous year for you, both personally and in the wine business, full of joy with a minimum of disappointments....

Those of you who have seen Jancis Robinson et.al book, “Wine Grapes”, will know that this definitive tome says there are 1,368 different grape varieties used to make wine upon planet Earth. Well that count is obsolete...

Continuing on from last week’s “Clean & Green” theme, it can be said that in many aspects the Australian wine industry is ahead of the American wine industry – this includes experimenting with emerging varieties. However, there is one area where the Yanks are ahead....

This week I am talking about how the wine industry is slowly and carefully taking steps to improve its environmental credentials....

Mention sparkling wine to most Aussie wine drinkers and they think of the “holy trinity”, Chardonnay/Pinot Noir/ Pinot Meunier (classic trio), which form the basis for Champagne and much of the world’s sparkling wine. However, there is...

The premise behind the “dumping” enquiry is that Australia is “dumping” wine cheaply into China and this is affecting the local wine industry...

In recent times there has been a growing murmur/rumble about “Natural Wines” and more recently about “Clean Natural Wines” – which tends to suggest that most of our wines are either “unnatural or artificial” and now “dirty” as well.

We are all sick and tired of the never ending stream of bad news that has been 2020 so far. So, here are a couple of smackrels of good wine industry news to help cheer up the tone.

When you mention “bulk wine” to most people in Australia, they immediately think of cheap and/or nasty wine – cask quality or lesser. However that is far from the case in reality.

This week I am back on my soap box as a result of some recent propaganda from two major cork suppliers…

Whilst most people are “introspectively navel gazing” during the pandemic, there are plenty of things happening out in the wine world – here are a couple of them…

This week the Blog and Wine Review are rolled into a single report on one of my favourite white varieties - Grüner Veltliner, native of Austria and now flourishing here in Oz.

After all the recent doom and gloom around the world and in the wine world, here is a little dose of positivity....

This week I will be reporting on the drop of Bulk Wine exports from Spain and some insight into the China investigation of Australia wine imports....

Just about everybody who drinks wine in Australia has heard of Max Schubert – the creator of Grange and the story of its creation. He is one of what I call, the “Milestone Men”, in the history of wine...

This week I am reporting briefly on a spot of wine news from around the world which I am sure will interest you.

I have spent the last twenty years advocating “emerging” varieties and saying that Australia is the most “experimentatious” wine producing country in the world.... So imagine my surprise the other day when in discussions with Adelaide University’s, Professor Kym Anderson (AC Executive Director, Wine Economic Research Centre), that I discovered....

This week I am talking about South Australia’s Riverland wine region.

According to figures released by the China Association for Imports and Export of Wine & Spirits (CAWS) - The total volume of imported wine in the first five months of the year was 180 million litres, worth US$690 million...

What of it? Well, this week in the wine world you could CAN IT, BAG IT, RIP IT or HYPE IT!

This week I have a smackrel of items from around the world which may be of interest to you.

Here are a couple of interesting updates from overseas – USA and China.

For a couple of years now I have been banging on about wines in cans and how they are an integral part of wine’s future. Well it seems that Covid-19 has expedited their “arrival” in the USA, with a 26% increase in canned wine sales in April this year.

This week Dan mentions a few “not so cheery” news topics which have had an impact on Aussie businesses.

We have all heard of how the Chinese Government is “punishing” Australia because we had the temerity to ask the WHO (World Health Organisation) to conduct an enquiry into the origins of Covid-19....

This week a cacophony of little wine news snippets from around the traps. Starting with the news that –

Grape vine research has never been more intense than it is today.

After reading the recent Wine Australia Market Bulletin (see extract below) Dan felt this subject should be further commented upon:

This week Dan reports on some interesting and somewhat bizarre news which has recently come to light in the wine industry overseas.

This week Dan reports on some TRIVIAL and NOT SO TRIVIAL world news which may be of interest to you.

Given that our whole world has been turned upside down since the start of this year, and almost every wine fair and exhibition around the globe has been cancelled

Following on from my Blog of April 24, where I mentioned some of the initiatives happening here in Australia

Picture this: It is Easter 2019, you are having a quiet drink with a few friends and a person walks in...

In these ultra-challenging times that we are living in, all the “norms” and “usuals” have gone out of the window

The first time I was aware that I was drinking a wine from the Clare Valley was in 1986 when my great mate...

Here are a few more wine news snippets which may be of interest to you:

Over the summer recess there were a number of things happening in the wine industry across the world, in addition to the crippling bushfires which burned so many vineyards here in Australia.

For the last two decades wine consumption has been growing in most parts of the world, except the “Old World” wine countries – mainly France and to a lesser extent Italy and Spain, where the younger generation has shied away (to some extent) of the “old folks” drink called wine. It is like here in Australia where in the 1980s we shied away from Sherry and Brandy because that’s what the oldies drank.

Recently I read that one of my wine heroes, Randall Grahm, had sold his famous Bonny Doon Vineyard. Randall is one of my top wine heroes – although I have never met him and only had a few opportunities to taste his California icon wines, they have always been very impressive.

Next Friday afternoon is the start of the 10th CELLAR DOOR FEST, to be held at the Adelaide Convention Centre. The three day indoor event is a sensational way to check out South Australian wines.

A MILLION POINT WINE: Jim Boyce the creator of the sensational “GRAPE WALL OF CHINA” Blog, www.grapewallofchina.com and founder of “World Marselan Day” (Do you know what Marselan is?), recently published an article where he went past the 100 point

Well here we are one-fifth of the way through the 21st century. The “oldies” amongst us can clearly remember the global “panic” about the Y2K bug. Nobody knew whether the computerised clocks would click over to 1900 instead of 2000 at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. Would the planes fall out of the sky?

This is the last Blog for the year so we would like to wish you and yours a very Merry and safe Christmas. We hope that 2020 (the Year of the Rat) will be a fabulous year for you, both personally and in the wine business, full of joy with a minimum of disappointments.

We are coming up to it being twenty years since the winemakers of the Clare Valley decided that they had had enough of the cork taint that had been plaguing their magnificent Riesling and they switched to screwcap.

We started shipping still wine to China for our clients in 2006 and it wasn’t until 2010 that we sent any sparkling wine – and even then it was just a few cases in the container. Many pundits suggested that sparkling wine would not take off over there, however, the level of interest is growing as people have more occasions to celebrate than they did in the past.

The world of wine is changing like never before and as I have written previously the rise of wine in a can and 2.0 litre casks are shaking things up just a tad. Well, here are a few other things that may (or may not) shake up the wine world in the near future. TEA INFUSED WINE: Pernod Ricard have launched a range of wines which have been infused with tea. Calling it, Tea & Wine Infusions, they have recently gone on sale at Dan Murphy’s for $22 a bottle.