The Glug Quartet - a mixed dozen reds from the Barossa and there's not a shiraz in the box

The Glug wine maker Ben Parker has been experimenting and used his skills to make this intriguing limited edition collection of:
Glug 'The Italian Job' Barossa Valley Montepulciano 2017 x 2 bottles; 
Glug 'The Wayward Child' Barossa Valley Pinot Noir 2017 x 3 bottles; 
Glug 'The Heartbreaker' Barossa Valley Grenache 2016 x 3 bottles; and 
Glug 'The Outsider' Barossa Valley Cinsault 2017 x 4 bottles.

Order at http://www.glug.com.au/index.php…
Personally I'm a Grenache man but the Cinsault really took my fancy

Don't be a wine buying goat - get a case of the Barossa Goat

It's been back to the Barossa for me this last fortnight and there's one big advantage of staying with a winery owning brother. You get to try wines at his expense that have escaped your attention as a Glug internet customer! It makes for a very satisfactory holiday.

And amid all the sipping and swirling I have certainly discovered some gems that will be on my order form when I return to Canberra. Or perhaps I should say rediscovered some gems, for one of them is a wine I enjoyed when his Goat Square Barossa Shiraz first entered the Glug portfolio some eight years ago. I don't know why it dropped off my radar but I notice now that it's down to a most economical $9.99 a bottle.

How long it will be there I know not but I fear we consumers will be facing some price rises across the board in the very near future. The wine industry people I have been speaking and drinking with in the valley are in a happier mood than I have known for years. Australian wine exports are going gang-busters with the Chinese market becoming something of a bonanza as it soaks up surplus stock. For we drinkers it's probably a good time to restock the cellar.
My brother refers to the Goat as one of Glug's special wines.

The Barossa Valley is a small, rare, unique piece of the earth's crust and only from this spot do you get red wines which display such a powerful and unusual concentration of mid palate weight. At times the fruit is so intense as to appear sweet a feature which can make wines which live for 50 years. The Goat Square wines come from a group of vineyards in the northern Barossa and any that look more interesting and intense than others are separated for the Goat.
The wine is named after Goat Square which is an historic location in the centre of Tanunda which in the 1840s to 1860s was a weekend market place, particularly for livestock.
This is the 8th vintage and the second and final bottling of about 150 cases. The winemaker is Benjamin Parker and we refer to Goat Square as the salt of the earth.

To order you will find it on the Glug site at
 Goat Square Barossa Valley Shiraz 2015.
As something of an expert BWS and Dan Murphy shopper I can tell you that when it come to value for the dollar the wines of Glug beat hands down those I often buy when I forget to restock on-line.

Wine marketing hokus pokus from Treasury Wine Estates

Look, I know Treasury Wine Estates CEO Michael Clarke has a tough gig. Selling branded products in this age when major retailers can, and do, make their own is a difficult, perhaps even an impossible, task. But the task is not made easier by forgetting that you are a wine company and succumbing to marketing madness.
To take an example. Treasury, Mr Clarke announced along with some dismal profit figures last week, is "at the start of our transition from being an order-taking, agricultural company to a brand-led marketing organisation." And what does a brand-led marketing organisation do? Accelerate efforts to establish Treasury brands in the premium and masstige segments of the market and continue to “pull through’’ sales.
No mention there of the quest for quality. Just "masstige" - mass prestige marketing that saw Penfolds sell 12,000 wine fridges in Australia and more in other markets through a discounted offer to Penfolds wine buyers last year. The current masstige effort is offering $900 plasma televisions to buyers who spend $200 on Wolf Blass Wines as promotion for its sponsorship of the Cricket World Cup now under way in Australia and New Zealand.
To give you an idea of the effectiveness of that kind of marketing I can do no better than direct you to The Story of Penfolds Wine Storage Cabinets and Old Fashioned Discounting that my brother David posted on his Glug website in September last year.
Here's brother David's conclusion but I recommend you read the whole thing.

After the release of Treasury financials we were told this: "At the end of the latest financial year Treasury had total inventories (at cost) of $1.23 billion, slightly up on the previous year's $1.16bn. About 90 per cent of those inventories are masstige and luxury wines: 42 per cent, or $517m, are luxury wines and about 42 per cent ($525m) of the total inventories are classified as 'non-current'".
Stephen Bartholomeusz, Australian, Business Spectator, 21st August, 2014.
This large horde of premium red wine, most destined to be Penfolds, was built up by the previous CEO Mr Dearie. Some see it as a future pot of gold but whatever the outcome it was a bold gamble.
And consider this; we do not know the global size of the warm climate shiraz market. The Treasury method of selling premium and prestige wines is in its infancy while rivals such as those selling the cooler climate reds of Bordeaux use very different methods well removed from the grips of chain supermarkets and local auction houses.
What if Treasury cannot sell its pile of reds at luxury prices?

What indeed.

Which is Better - Young Wine or Aged?

From my brother David's Glug website where you should all be looking for wine value.

Which is Better - Young Wine or Aged? 
Wednesday, 27th August, 2014  - David Farmer 

When you watch wine judges at work you will note time and time again that younger, fresher wines receive higher scores than older wines. It is also usual in vertical tastings of famous wines to observe younger wines receiving scores as high as or higher than the venerable, classical vintages.

In long, vertical tastings covering many decades the famous classical vintages with high scores will have on either side wines with mid-level scores yet as the wines get younger the scores slowly rise with a pronounced uplift for the best of the recent vintages.

Why is this? Two possibilities I think; younger wines are agreeable as the fresh aromas and vibrant, lively, sappy, primary tastes are very appealing. For a judge what they see in the glass on that day is what they must judge and score. They may well mark down a wine that has a long future because it lacks current appeal or charm even though it may have the structure to evolve. It is worth noting here that many judges believe a wine which will age well will also be appealing when youthful and there is much truth in this view.

The second reason is that young wines have similar colours, aromas and pleasant fruity tastes and it is not so easy to split out those that are distinctively better and even harder to predict which wines have a long future. Experts may well tell me I am wrong but I have been studying the results of judging for many decades.

Which wines age well and move to a level of interest beyond the delights of the primary flavours takes two to four years to be revealed. Naturally there is more certainty in wines from notable regions which have been well studied and the wines have a long provenance. I refer here of course to wines like the classified growths of Bordeaux.

In general I think pretty well all whites are best drunk young while better reds can improve - change is a better expression - but be cautious about the long term potential.

Recently I reviewed a Winestate tasting of Shiraz here and a table of the results shows in a striking manner the influence of youth in scoring.

Circled are the top scores for the cheaper Shiraz brackets which illustrate how young wines are frequently favoured by wine judges.

I have circled the following points.

1) The top score, averaging 3.87 stars in wines selling for $10-$15 was shiraz and shiraz blends from 2012 with 12 wines tasted and 12 wines rated;
2) The top score, averaging 4 stars in wine selling for $15-$20 was shiraz from 2012 with 12 wines tasted and 12 wines rated.
3) The top score, averaging 4.08 stars in wines selling for $20-$25 was shiraz from 2012 with 10 wines tasted and 6 wines rated.

Please note the lower scores for each price division are usually for older vintages.

This tasting well illustrates the points made in this shopping guide.