Australia
With the Soldier’s Block lines creeping up in price, and the Shiraz going through the £8 barrier (thanks mostly to George Osborne and a terrible exchange rate) we have looked again at our straight Chardonnay and Shiraz options from Australia and returned to a couple of lines we featured at our pre-Christmas tasting last year from Murphy’s in the Murray River.
The
Shiraz is deep in colour with characteristic red fruit notes and the
Chardonnay is unoaked, fresh and clean.
In due course these will be joined by The Black Craft Shiraz from Magpie Estate in the Barossa (when the ship eventually gets here in July sometime) which is fat and rich and we are sure will win many friends!
Australian wine - click here to browse our full selection of wines online
New Zealand
The ripe tropical fruitiness of The
Cloud Factory Sauvignon Blanc was such a hit that we have now added this to our
New Zealand section.
It means that we now carry two Kiwi Sauvignon Blancs with the Bascand providing the crisp, green gooseberry flavours as a foil to Cloud Factory’s riper style.
We have also added two wines from Waipara Springs in the form of their
2010 Dry Riesling and
2010 Chardonnay.
Two new Pinot Noirs are also included; the
2011 from Bascand Estate in
Marlborough and, after extensive tasting, we settled on the superb
2010 Beetle Juice (great name eh?) Pinot Noir from The Wooing Tree in
Central Otago.
New Zealand wine - click here to browse our full selection of wines online
South Africa
With the £ being clobbered against most other currencies at the moment South Africa (where the exchange rate has been less worse) has provided a rich seam of new faces this time around.
We have a couple of new entry level wines (a
Merlot and a
Sauvignon/Colombard blend) from
Cape Heights in the
Western Cape.
At £6.25 these are excellent value.
Tasting Pinotage is always a challenge for us but the
False Bay version is clean and full of black cherry fruit and joins the ever popular Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc and
Shiraz trio from the same producer.
We are still listing the fabulous Secateurs pair from Adi Badenhorst, though they have gone up in price, so we were delighted to discover a pair of wines called The Curator (a Chenin/Chardonnay/Semillon
white blend and a Shiraz/Mourvedre/Cinsault/Viognier
red blend) also made by Adi Badenhorst, which hit the list at £9.25 – you must try these, they are super!
Further up the tree is a deliciously smoky Mourvedre called
The Spice Route and a deliciously rich straight Semillon from Swartland called “
Mon Vieux”, there’s not much of it about though so be quick!
What we love about our new flexible buying regime at Wines of Interest is the opportunities it provides us with to tune into wines like these as we find them rather than having to wait to include them in our annual printed list. We can sniff out new discoveries and take advantage on suppliers' promotions as and when they appear by adding them to our website, where you can buy wine online and either have it delivered to your door, or collect it from our shop. You can buy these wines online now - click
here to start shopping!