Vino! Vino Everywhere – Drops Too Good To Drink!

First Published in The Skinny, October 1, 2009

When motoring in Bordeaux one naturally gets a hankering for a 1945 Chateau Latour, but as one could not expect a driving holiday in the Macedon Ranges to deliver such delights one feels one might amuse the urban sophisticates back home with an ironic bottle of the local plonk. One might imagine wines that make Chevron Anti-Freeze taste like Chateau Mouton-Rothschild shouldn’t be hard to find in rural Australia, but here’s the thing – one needs to know where to look.

The shed at the end of the lane off the Old Somewhere–Somewhere Else Road sits beside a sign wearily proclaiming ‘Wine fore Sail’, but instead of the expected teeth-clencher of a salad dressing you will encounter a medley of oak, leather and elderberries augmented by notes of honey and chocolate for which you would gladly sell your grandmother. ‘Si’, ‘says Guiseppe, ‘But you should taste the good stuff!’

Aha! The front bar of the pub! The house red is guaranteed to strip paint! ‘Well, sport’ said the tattooed hulk behind the bar, ‘some say this Cabernet Savignon’s bouquet eclipses the 1900 Margaux while this Merlot, in my opinion, has more clout than a ’90 Petrus and…

What about that falling-down roadside General Store? Surely that must have a sampling of something-to-be-avoided among the spuds? ‘Sorry’ says the guv’nor ‘but since Guiseppe won the Chardonnay-du-Monde, well…

You could try Un Bistro, but as that only deals with the finest wines of the regions – Guiseppe can only dream of getting his produce in there – head for the gleaming glass and marble edifice atop the distant hill amid the rolling sea of vines. This grand winery specializes in the floor cleaner of your assumptions – in fact, you are the very reason it is there, so the locals can keep the good stuff.