It’s the dream of many to buy a cute little vineyard somewhere and start making wine, good wine hopefully. It’s the sort of hobby that sends people broke with high entry costs and often inferior wine produced. But oh what a joy to drink something you’ve made yourself, even though all your friends just want to spit rather than swallow. The sensible way to make wine is not to own a vineyard. All you need is access to good grapes […]
Drinks
Get boozed-up here. Try a relaxing tea or a buzzing coffee
Gambling with padrons
Padron peppers: are you game? A box arrived in the post, a big one, packed with padron peppers. They were plump, bright green ones, picked the day before by Garry Crittendon, the pioneering winemaker on the Mornington Penisula, who first planted vines there in 1982 at the age of 28. These padrons were far larger and more vibrant in color than any I’ve seen for sale in some of the better food stores and in Melbourne’s markets. They looked and […]
Busting the great Pellegrini’s myth
People love Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar. It’s because of the atmosphere and the 1950s charm. It’s a great place to hang out and watch the top end of Bourke Street go by – as long as you are not eating or drinking coffee. If you have anything more ambitious than a glass of water (alcohol isn’t served) you’ll be disappointed because the food and the coffee are also both stuck in the 1950s. But the place is packed, so why would […]
Cibi: a cafe and a gallery by any other name
Cibi: try the green tea muffins Cibi is a cafe that thinks it’s a gallery. Actually, it is a gallery and regularly holds openings to launch the various (mainly kitchen) products it imports (mainly) from Japan. Housed in a modern warehouse building on Keele St, the Cibi space features a large open kitchen and grunge cafe mixing found objects and mismatched tables and chairs with a minimalist feel – if that makes sense. It’s the brainchild of former architecture nut […]
The Butter Factor
Butter’s come a long way since Marlon Brando first used it as a lubricant – just as cheese has come a long way since it was imported into Australia in tins. We now have our first legally made unpasteurized cheese – known as C2 – available from Bruny Island Cheese. And for the first time the Australian Cheese Awards have recognised a really decent local cheese – Jindi Old Telegraph Road. The long slow march of the cheesemakers is now […]
A perfect match for sherry
When Heston Blumenthal, one of the world’s most recognised chefs, starts to recommend sherry as the ideal match to food, it’s time to stand-up and reassess this fortified wine. In Australia, we have a ready supply of imported sherries, but also locally made wines in the sherry style. These are now called “apera”, a branding invented because Australia needed a new term for sherry after the signing of the international wine agreement, which outlaws outside countries from naming their products […]
The A to Z of food and wine matching
There’s a lot of stuffy tradition associated with wine and what food to match it with. It stems from the 18th and early 20th century dominance of France and the rest of Europe in winemaking, and the stuffiness of the English. Plus, before food and wine traditions developed in Europe, roads and the car opened up what were often isolated regions. This meant that the food and wine regions were very localised and both developed to complement each other. In […]
Wine? It’s natural even for you
Voice of the People at The Melbourne Wine Room. Try it. Wine, most of us drink it. Some of us love it. But many of us are intimidated by it, or the wankery that comes with labels, hundreds of grape varieties and the language of the wine critic. All we know is that we like that particular red or white while slumped on the sofa watching TV and we wouldn’t mind drinking something similar down the pub. Or wine bar. […]
Breaking the coffee (and road) rules
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVfvo16hXvQ] So there we are, driving along minding our own business in Sal’s Fiat 500. Well, we’d reversed out of Flinders Lane illegally right next to the Police Station and then driven through the bollards into Little Collins Street. A traffic warden has the gall to bollock us. Yes, I’m afraid my sound still isn’t up to scratch but here is my second stab of talking coffee with St Ali’s Salavatore Malatesta(who funds these videos) and we have a bit […]