How much should you pay for wine? Or let’s put it this way: How much more than the cost of food should wine be? In Melbourne the cost of a main course in a restaurant is fast catching up with the cost of wine. If I’m feeling poor I may spend $40 to $50 on a bottle in a restaurant. Feeling rich and I may double the figure. To put this into context in the kinds of restaurants where I’m […]
Drinks
Get boozed-up here. Try a relaxing tea or a buzzing coffee
Weekend toadstool mushroom blogging
Someone was trying to be helpful. True those bloody Zucchini were overgrown. But under their leaves hid my winter crops – horseradish and jerusalem artichokes. J just ripped them out and I’m left with a barren patch of earth. No herbs. Just a few weeds and grass sprouts now. So I have had to go further afield to find something for Weekend Herb Blogging, which Kalyn has handed over to DMBLGIT winner Ilva at Lucullian Delights to host this southern […]
Great wine advice for restaurants
Veteran food writer Rita Erlich talks good sense in The Age over absurdly long wine lists. Giant wine tomes are best avoided: “Even a speed-read list would help – say, a dozen whites and reds, chosen because they’re appropriate drinking and fairly priced. The longer the list, the higher the individual bottle prices, since stocking the cellar with thousands of bottles is expensive. Neither do I have much time for the wine list full of big company wines, available at […]
WHB: Street pinapple Hanoi
What is a picture worth? About 50,000 dong- nearly US$5. Or at least this one did and involved me buying four peeled pinapples. They were elaboratley carved in spirals and were fresh and delicious. All in the name of Wekend Herb Blogging over at Kalyn’s Kitchen. Thes women are shrewd. This money and overnight train journey to the north west in Sa Pa, near the Chinese border, I bought another of these elaboratly carved fruit for 5,000 Dong and they’d […]
Should I buy wine at the airport (at double the price)?
Hmmmm…should I even contemplate buying wine in Singapore airport. A couple of Batard Montrachets at about S$230…plenty of Petrus…the usual posh but sadly overpriced stuff. Take the excellent grapefruity Shaw & Smith M3 2004 Chardonnay which in Australia costs about A$38 (about S$48). In the airport it costs S$69. What the hell is happening? I was under the misconception that stuff was meant to be cheaper in duty free. And by the way, why such a clichéd selection of wines […]
Wine’s doomed. We’re doomed
While most of Europe and the Hunter Valley doomed by global warming in the next few decades (this could be a good thing. For the most part the Hunter’s quite ugly and there are only a handful of wines worth drinking there. ), other parts of this red and dusty land may just about outlive me. Decanter reports: Southern Hemisphere temperatures in vineyards in New Zealand, southern Australia, parts of Chile and South Africa will rise more slowly due to […]
Broad shouldered, macho and the smell of saddle. All the bull
Cosme Palacio y Hermanos 2002 is a perfectly good rioja. Its traditional label is inviting. A tall bottle, it’s everything you’d expect from a rioja. And the taste has all that leather/tack room nostalgia. But wait. There’s more! At least with the Bodegas Palacio reserva especial 1995. Also a rioja, first is the bottle. It’s not as tall and elegant as the Cosme Palacio. But it has this attraction. It is very dark, almost opaque. It is solid, very solid, […]
Weekend grape glut
Inspired but humbled, I drive back to Melbourne. We’ve been staying in the gold fields in Bendigo for M’s wedding. The art museum exhibits Cecil Beaton’s portraiture. His grasp on light, iconography and semiotics is astonishing, saying more about the subject that their own likenesses. Bruised, we roar through the apple capital of Victoria, Harcourt and pull over in a plume of dust to buy some cheap fruit. But it is that low winter sun that catches my eye. It […]
The future is foie gras
Why should a duck symbolise Melbourne or Australia? You may be wondering this if you caught the opening of the Commonwealth Games on TV. And Michael Leunig didn’t divulge what he knows. The truth is that Australia is secretly the largest producer of some of the best duck foie gras you’ll find in the southern hemisphere or Asia/Pacific. Titter ye not. This is a fast growing industry which is hidden from the world because the RSPCA says it will prosecute […]