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 Hornsby – NSW?
Well, I’ll be frank. We have absolutely no idea where this
wine comes from (we assume it's Edenvale but the label doesn't give any hints). It’s really notable because of its
packaging. It arrived hard on the heels of a tetra-pack that
came in a padded post bag, sloshing (but intact) and
crushed where the postie’s truck had clearly backed over it. This
wine was in pristine condition – in its glittering anodised
aluminium bottles. It’s called Brightlite, it comes in red,
white and rose, it is low alcohol, it chills really fast and
it’s clearly aimed at young people who want something
pleasant and alcoholic to consume at ‘no glass’ venues. Or
wine-drinking bushwalkers who find lugging glass bottles too
arduous and chancy. Oh, and the packaging is recyclable.
Very worthy all round, don’t you agree?
But what do they taste like? Sweet and fruity (as you'd
expect).
Apparently Coles liked them because they bought out the
whole first production batch of the wines.
Ben Canaider in The Age Epicure told the story.
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 Barossa – SA.
According to the publicist, Grant Burge is now ‘the boy from
Oz’ taking one of Europe’s most venerable wine styles to a whole new level.
We must admit, we found the Moscato, with its touch of
spritzig, a very pleasant aperitif. It is described at crisp
and ‘zingy’ and although ‘zingy’ isn’t actually a word in
our normal vocabulary I guess that’s accurate enough.
(If you want to hear from the wine-maker the Americans know
as the boy from Oz, listen to this
podcast of
Peter Gago chief winemaker of Penfolds speaking to
Canadian sommelier
Jamie Drummond in Toronto).
Grant Burge is also releasing a new ‘wine
for the people’ – in other words, a cheaper version of his
blended Holy Trinity ‘usually reserved for the wine-consuming elite’. The
Barossa vines Grenache Mourvedre and Shiraz is described as a
‘carnival of aromas, translated onto the juicy, well-rounded
and fruit-filled palate, with the taste of ripe raspberries
and violets domating and underpinned by exciting hints of
toffee and spices’. There’s even a hint of fairyfloss. Hmmm
– how young is that younger market they’re aiming for? It's
aimed at a mass audience who want immediate dirinking
pleasure, and sure we
found it very likeable, but the memory disappeared quickly
like…say…fairyfloss.
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