I am so sorry the audio on this isn’t better (Any techies out there who can help?) but if you crank up the video volume and same with the volume on your device, here’s Chilean biodynamic legend Alvaro Espinoza giving a brief-ish lesson on biodynamics to us during a recent visit to his vineyard.

Barossa is the place that rekindles your dream of owning a small vineyard and making a bit of wine. Planted vineyard land here is actually somewhat affordable – $30,000 to $50,000 per acre – versus ten times that in Napa and even five times that in the Okanagan. The Barossa has the world’s oldest Shiraz/Syrah vines (around 160 years old) and arguably the oldest Cabernet vines (around 125 years old). We got the chance to stand in these both these vineyards: Langmeil’s Freedom Vineyard and Pendfolds’ Kalimna Block 42 vineyard. In an ultimate muddling of what is old world versus new world, the French are now traveling to Barossa to obtain clippings of old vines to bring back to Europe. The history of the valley is incredible – so many brick and ironstone buildings and estate houses with over a hundred years of age. Small towns with Germanic names that were settled by Prussians over 150 years ago. The preserved history is available everywhere to soak up.

Visiting Henschke was something I’ll never forget. The winery is miles down a dirt road in the Eden Valley flanked by a surreal terrain of barren grasslands, outcroppings of rough broken stone and scattered two-hundred-year-old white gum trees. Johann Christian Henschke immigrated to the area around 1841 and began making wine soon after that – his wife and two of this four children died on the voyage. The property is incredible, where fifth generation Stephen and his wife Prue still live in a house beside the winery. We tasted a flight of Henschke’s wines including the 2007 Hill of Grace. This is a wine that deserves its legendary standing as one of the best bottles to come out of the country every year. It has intensity, complexity and length without being over-blown. They make 800-900 cases in a good year (somewhere around 250 in 2007) and I’m willing to bet it was the most expensive wine on the planet with a screw top (now under Vino-Lok, and can probably boast the same claim). We walked through the iconic Hill of Grace Vineyard with the ancient church in behind the rows of vines. As preventative measures, we had to sponge the soles of our shoes with bleach, as South Australia is still phylloxera free. It was also cool to learn that Henschke is farming biodynamically.

Another great experience was spending a chilly sunset in the Steingarten Vineyard – where Riesling vines cling to a steep slope facing Eden Valley. The vineyard is owned by Jacob’s Creek and even though the majority of the grapes for the Steingarten bottling actually come from Eden Valley, it is a breathtaking place to hang out. We drank six vintages of the wine going back to 1996, including one while in the vineyard. It ages incredibly well.

Other visits included Yalumba, Charles Melton, Langmeil, Penfolds’ Kalimna Estate, St Hallett, and Peter Lehmann. Everywhere we went, the hospitality was fantastic and we were fed very very well. Some photos below:

In the gorgeous Yalumba tasting room, which used to be a gigantic concrete wine tank.

Yalumba has one of the craziest cellars I’ve seen. We snooped around wide-eyed and stunned by piles of DRC and things like 1889 Chateau d’Yquem and 1899 Chateau Lafite.

Possibly the oldest Cabernet Sauvignon vines in the world and winemaker Steph Dutton – Block 42 from Penfolds’ Kalimna Estate.

Tasting the top wines from Penfolds at the 19th century Kalimna estate.

Tasting a line-up from Langmeil off of a tailgate, feet from the oldest Shiraz vineyard in the world – the Freedom Vineyard.

Co-directed by the cinematographer of The Tree Of Life, a stunning video from Explosions In The Sky.

Epic.

The towns are starting to pile up, so this will be a breezy from the Adelaide airport.

For being just a little further north from McLaren Vale, the terrain, temperature and the wine all change in the Adelaide Hills. This region fills the space inland from Adelaide and stretches from Barossa in the north to McLaren Vale in the south. Altitudes here get up to 700 meters and, along with breezes from the coast, make it quite a bit cooler. The vineyards are on slopes, the aspects vary and this is also mixed agricultural land – you see farms and grazing livestock interspersed with vineyard land. This really is Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc country. These wines are distinctly cool climate and it makes the best expression of either that we’ve seen so far. The sparkling wines are also quite good and it gives the producers flexibility when comes to unfavourable cool and wet vintages (Grapes don’t quite ripen? Make bubble). All the reds we tried fit more into the medium bodied range and tend to be savoury.

It was also my first time drinking Nebbiolo that made me stop and reconsider my stubborn bias that the grape really isn’t worth a shit outside of Piedmont. Leave it to a couple boys with an Italian background to successfully pull it off (Longveiw ’07 Nebbiolo). Not surprisingly, they were also great hosts, fed us very well and kept us caffeinated. Check out their new winery accommodations if you’re in the Hills.

Vineyard shots from Nepenthe

There’s now a fair amount of the Austrian variety Gruner Veltliner in the ground, it’s apparently doing quite well, and over the next three to four years we’ll likely see a release from around ten different producers (including Nepenthe and Longview). If how the top producers treat Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay is any clue, it’ll be exciting to taste these wines.

It was a treat visiting the winery of Shaw + Smith, which may have the most Masters of Wine working under its roof than anywhere else around (Michael Hill Smith was the first MW in Australia). David LeMire MW took us through a lineup of their very clean, elegant and impressive wines.

I learned that Koalas are much more boring than their image overseas. They allegedly spend 23 hours of every day sleeping: their main food source, eucalyptus leaves, take a lot of energy to digest. We drove down an old highway called Koala Alley, scanning the nooks of every tree until someone spotted a lone guy perched high above us staring down. There are only somewhere around 100,000 of them left.

The view off the deck of the Lane’s fantastic restaurant (considered to be one of the top in the region).

Our motley crew with Julia from Nepenthe

OK, so not only is my next East Van Wine Academy gonna be SO kick-ass with Semillons from around the world, DJ Rico Uno from The Freshest, visuals by Jesse Robinson Williams and partial proceeds going to charity —BUT— I’m upping the excitement even more!

If you’re thinking of springin’ the 20 bucks to join the fun (a steal!) – I heartily recommend you buy your tickets by Noon THIS MONDAY ’cause I’m giving away two tickets to Wednesday’s Dish n’ Dazzle at the Fairmont Waterfront, which features 21 Argentinian wineries, a dozen Vancouver restaurants, a cocktail competition and more!

The scoop’s over at the East Van Wine Academy website, jump on it!

Been having such a crazy work week, the pace of this track seems a good fit.

McLaren Vale is another gorgeous region just off the sea with rolling hills, olive groves and, if it wasn’t for the odd kangaroo, you’d swear you were somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. Our first morning was a curated tour of significant and historic spots led by Justin McNamee of Samuel’s Gorge winery. Justin is insanely knowledgeable about his region and was the perfect one to introduce us to McLaren Vale. He took us to a lookout where we could grasp the technical points about the region – a hot, dry place (which can get heat spikes in the high 30s and low 40s from a bright and intense southern hemisphere sun), yet cooled by south breezes off the ocean – a very maritime influenced climate. The main viticultural hazard, more than anything, can be periods of extreme summer heat. The dryness of the region actually makes it a likely place to farm organically and some of the producers we met were either certified organic or generally farming that way. The soils are ancient yet incredibly varied; you see a lot of red clay over limestone, but there is also plenty of sand and basaltic rock. The hills don’t really get much higher than 200 meters. Justin, who has some of the higher plantings in the region, said in candid Australian fashion, “when anyone tells me that my winery is at an elevation, I find it humourous. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re on a huge, fucking flat island.”

Tasting wine at the old and very charming Samuel’s Gorge.

During the three nights we spent in McLaren Vale we tasted a lot of wine. Masterclasses in the region’s Grenache, Cabernet, obscure varieties, local whites, and Shiraz. Plus all the bottles we casually drank with lunch and dinner. The diversity was surprising and the quality of the wine we were exposed to was impressively high. Here are a few points I took away from the trip:

Samuel’s Gorge – these wines should really be in the BC market.

Grenache. Killer Grenache is being made in McLaren Vale, and it can be light on its feet – medium bodied with bright acidity and layers of savoury characters. It was a savior for those of us who don’t default to drinking full-throttle and full-bodied wines. Samuel’s Gorge is particularly exciting – we tasted a number of his wines out of barrel, including the 2011 Hammer Vineyard which was floral with lavender aromas and the most vivid pink peppercorns character I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the prettiness and vibrancy of this wine – and these aren’t descriptors you consider when you think of McLaren Vale. Other Grenaches I thought were great were the S.C. Pannell ’10, Wirra Wirra ’10 Absconder, and particularly the Samuel’s Gorge ’10 ‘Cadenzia’.

Tasting whites at Angove

Oddities. There are cool vines planted in the ground that you wouldn’t expect and that are doing quite well. It’s in times like the current lull in the Australian wine industry when producers have the chance to play and experiment with less commercial vines. We tried a huge range of these from grapes like Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Touriga Nacional, Fiano, Zinfandel, Savagnin. They keep things interesting in the region. A handful of producers have Fiano planted and the 2011 example from Coriole was especially delicious – a fresh green nose with a creamy texture with almond and lemon. Both the ’10 Sangiovese and ’09 ‘Black St Peters’ Zinfandel from Kangarilla Road were both great. They also make a Jura style Savagnin called The Veil, complete with flor yeast aging for 6 months that I could drink every day.

Some of the wines from the Scarce Earth Project.

Scarce Earth Project. This is a consortium of producers who bottle single site Shiraz that fit into different sub-regions of McLaren Vale. The project is in its infancy still with only the ’09 and ’10 vintages having been released, yet the intention is in the right place. We tasted through twenty-two wines which have the branded, Scarce Earth band and the elevated quality is extremely high. Wines with too much oak influence or other skewing qualities, don’t pass the tasting panel (around 30% were rejected this year). A few of the sub-regions had tactile similarities, yet many varied and it seemed to come down more to differences in the hand of the winemaker and possibly vine age, but keep an eye out for the work they are doing.

Gratuitous beach, meal and bottle shots:

Fantastic lunch with Chester and D’Arry Osborne on the patio at D’Arenberg.

From Samuel’s Gorge

The Barn in McLaren Vale.

Dinner in the cellar at the Victory Hotel.

Old Shiraz from Chapel Hill.

Neville Rowe of Reynella, Tintara, Hardy’s.

My new favourite McLaren Vale producer: Battle of Bosworth. They farm organically and I enjoyed the 5 or 6 of their wines I tried including this non-sulphured Shiraz.

After a day in Sydney to recalibrate to our new time zone and meet the fellow travelers, we drove up north across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and towards the Hunter Valley. It’s a couple hour drive along a highway cut through sandstone bluffs and lined with feral eucalyptus trees.

The Hunter Valley is the region I was most excited to see. Hunter Valley Semillon is one of those truly unique wines that isn’t successfully emulated anywhere. The wines have electric acidity, develop weight and complex caramelized coconut characters (without ever seeing an oak barrel) and usually clock in around 10.5% (breakfast wine). We tasted around 37 of them over the two days and could have happily had more.

The region was much more beautiful than I expected: rolling hills of vinyards and patches of olives trees planted within a mixed terrain of forest and grasslands. We caught a glimpse of the encroaching energy industry just up the valley – home to one of the largest coalmines in the world. Just to put it in perspective, a prime acre of land mined for coal can yield around $100 million, whereas an acre of vineyards yields around $4000. If it does becomes a battle for the land, we can all guess who will win.

Andrew Margan telling us all about the Hunter Valley

During our first morning with Andrew Margan, I spent half the time writing down his witty and cynical quotes. He had spent the night before in the hospital getting 8-stitches in his head from a match of ‘footie’. Also attached to his winery was a beautiful white table cloth dining room which overlooked his property, including a farm where a lot of the vegetables came from. Someone asked, ‘you don’t eat your chickens?”
“No, then we wouldn’t have any eggs”, he said. “That would be like eating grapevines. It wouldn’t make any sense”. Along side the Semillon and Shiraz (which he says like She-rah), we tasted cool bottlings like a semi-sparkling frizzante Semillon, a Barbera, a dry Ripasso style wine and a sweet botrytis Semillon.

We spent that afternoon with the winemaker from Audrey Wilkinson, named Jeff Bryne, whose property easily has the best view in the valley and everyone seems to know this too, as the tasting room boasts more traffic than anyone’s around (there’s even a patch of grass as a heli-pad). Jeff has the most mind-bending accent I’ve ever heard. He grew up in Halifax and has spent the last 12 years in Australia. After walking us through the Audrey Wilkinson wines, he brought us down to the very Cactus Club-esque tasting room of Poole’s Rock (the toilets are even square). He shed light on the inherent meanness of kangaroos and how he’s seen one lure a dog to the lake and press it underwater with its two big legs until the dog drown. They can also severely injure humans by kicking them in the stomach. A pretty shocking story for a busload of North Americans who, just minutes before, saw their first wild kangaroos (plus one ‘sleeping’ on the side of the highway). That instinct of premeditated animal murder makes me question their cuddly image.

The next day we met David Lunn and Peter Hall who took us through nine Semillons from McGuigan’s that spanned 15 years – back to 1997. How age worthy these wines were, which originally retailed for $15, was incredible. They were certainly the largest winery we’ve seen so far (we’re talking a total annual production of around 10 million cases), yet the quality in the Bin 9000 line of Semillons was apparent.

We then headed to Brokenwood where new winemaker Simon Steele toured us around one of the most charming tasting rooms and wineries I’ve ever seen. The fact that they make such awesome wines solidifies my love for the place. Simon could have given me a job cleaning tables with a rag and carting around hoses, and I probably never would have left. We walked through the famous ‘Graveyard Vineyard’ which doesn’t actually have anyone buried in it (they don’t think), but was slated to become one until vines were planted in late 60s first. The vineyard makes some of the most incredible and elegant (we’re talking 13.5% alc) Shiraz you’ve ever tasted (it also costs $150 cellar-door). And just when we thought the visit couldn’t get any better, the guys in the cellar brought out a round of beer and we played a quick match of bung cricket in the winery. This isn’t something I knew existed, but it involves cricket with several improvisations, including hurling large rubber barrel bungs instead of a ball.

Our final stop was with Tyrrell’s, whose Semillons I’ve always considered top notch, yet I found a new respect for their reds. The 2007 ’4 Acres’ Shiraz (again only 13.5%) rivaled the Graveyard Shiraz for being the most complex and vibrant red of the trip so far. These are also the kind of wines made in miniscule quantities that don’t leave the country. The young Chris Tyrrell is the fifth generation in the Tyrrell family to make wine – we had dinner with his dad Bruce the night before who is great fun. The history on the property was incredible. A small one-room shack still stood in the parking lot where the first Tyrrell and his family lived for two years before a house was built; the original portion of the winery, still in use, had a dirt floor packed hard from over a century of use.

A few more photos below:

I’m sitting on a fifteen hour Qantas flight from LAX to Sydney. Not the least spacious seat I’ve had to occupy for that sort of stretch, yet I’m barely able to open my laptop with the seat in front reclined. I’ve started four or five movies before turning them all off at some point. I’m not sure if I’m just too uncomfortable to enjoy a film or if my standards have become a burden – I’m betting only a handful of these new releases have broken above 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. We inquired about an upgrade to the comfort of first class, yet for $15,000 (not a joke)… I’ll enjoy my seat just fine, thank you very much.

In our economy seats, we’re afforded a selection of five wines: a bubble, two reds and two whites. All served with a nice, tapering glass made by a guy named Marc Newson. Jacob’s Creek bubble and Xanadu’s Next of Kin Chard from Margaret River are a couple examples. The libations are much better than the plonk our Canadian airlines peddle at 30,000 feet. I’m trying to remember what qualities in wine are said to be accentuated at higher altitudes – and I think it’s the acidity. At this point, it’s something to drink alongside our meal and there will hardly be any analysing going on. I have a longing to be drinking whatever Champagne is being served in first class where the seats cost as much as a new compact car. I can barely see through the gap in the curtain barrier, but I can only imagine that everyone has the choice of either Selosse, Salon, or vintage Krug to sip on in their personal travel pods. Despite the gross vinous inequalities of our cabins (conceived or otherwise,) I can say that what I have now is hitting the spot.

Pancho Campo, the Spanish Master of Wine, has resigned from the Institute of Masters of Wine after being embroiled in investigations for allegedly charging Spanish wineries for access to (then Wine Advocate correspondent) Jay Miller, a charge that comes loaded with many conflicts of interest  and ethical failings.

Decanter has the story right here..

If you find yourself inundated with my social media updates, transmitted from some back-country Australian town over the next two weeks, here’s why.

I’ll be touring the world of Aussie wine, led by Mark Davidson, with six or seven other sommeliers from the west coast of North America. I’ll mostly be on cruise control. Besides two free nights, we’ll be following a tightly curated itinerary established by, and on the tab of, Wine Australia. Wine Australia is a promotional body, which among many other things, is involved with marketing Australian wine in export markets like Canada. I’m excited to have a veteran like Mark as our tour guide. If the number of times I’ve heard him reference pairing a wine with breakfast is any clue, I’ll also need to bring plenty of Advil and milk thistle. I’ll also be bringing several hundred flash cards and practice essays to fill my time sat on a bus or  a cramped airplane seat with studying for my final WSET exam, which has unwelcomely crept onto my horizon (June 13th is D-Day). It is convenient, however, that this trip and my study are, you know, somewhat related.

It’s no secret that the Australian wine market is in the depths of a shambolic mess. The truly cool and terroir driven wines are suffering from being grouped into a market drowning largely at the hands of the bulk producers who have saturated exports with entry level wines. I’ll admit that I’ve been dismissive of Australian wine over the last few years. Wines that once excited the hell out of me – and Grosset Clare Valley Riesling is one great example – had all been relegated to the same pile: a continent that I generally didn’t want to hear about or discuss. That’s changed over the past year – I’ve started to talk about and sell the kind of Aussie wines that I enjoy, even if that category has almost entirely been made up of Riesling, Pinot Noir and wines from Tahbilk.

These styles of wine-and-dine trips aren’t used as liberally in most industries as they are in the booze business (in fact, they’re illegal in many). In the wine trade it exists, but not nearly as intensively as the spirits business when you consider vodka producers who rely on massive marketing budgets to be successful (it takes a lot of marketing to sell a product that strives for having as little flavor as possible). The wine producers that make the kind of wine that most of us like to drink would never be able to afford to fly a group of people across the world to visit them (DRC maybe?). However, groups like Wine Australia, Wines of Chile and the Wine Institute of California, while still representing many little guys (and big guys alike) do have the collective marketing budgets. This trip is about demonstrating the quality and diversity of Australian wine regions and that means much more about meeting the smaller farmers making kick-ass wines and less about touring through industrial parks of giant stainless steel tanks. I welcome that.

I know the reason I am being included in this trip is because I run a wine program at one of the busiest restaurants in Vancouver, giving me a direct line to influencing what a tiny segment of the market drinks, and I do have a voice in the wine trade. I don’t think I’m immune to the kind of perception swaying that is inherently involved with a trip of this nature. Regardless, my posts won’t be shameless plugs or blind cheer leading – no post on this site ever has been. I’ll simply be commenting on stuff that I think is cool, or uploading dark and blurry bottle shots of wines that I enjoy and I may even commit the odd indiscretion I associate with culinary paparazzism. I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to chat with and post profiles on some of my fellow sommelier travelers from LA, SF, and Seattle. I know I’ll learn a ton and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading.

We had a great wine dinner this Sunday that was only slightly skewed and embittered by witnessing an early playoff exit by the Canucks. As I rode my bike home afterward down blossom-lined green streets through the balmy night, I couldn’t help but concede that summer in Vancouver really does begin when the Canucks’ season ends.

The first strange incident with our loose ‘bring a bottle of wine blind’ theme was that all seven of the wines were white – and maybe it was subconsciously spurred by warming weather. Second, four of the seven bottles were Muscadet. I’m not exactly sure of the mathematical odds of having four bottles of Muscadet poured in the same room, but it’s quite low. Take into account that it wasn’t a preplanned Muscadet party, and those odds are likely in the same realm with the odds of a professional sports team winning a playoff series after being down three games (it’s very low).

We had some very fine Muscadets including two from Michel Brégeon (one being the ‘Gorges’ bottling on a different site from 50 year old wines), ‘Clisson’ from Stephane & Vincent Perraud, and Landron. Domaine Landron may be the only one available in this market – it’s priced well at $24 and word has it that Tableau will be pouring it by the glass in time for patio weather. While not for everyone seeking a fruit driven white, Muscadet has an ethereal appeal expressed with minerality and texture. This wasn’t new to me, but what blew me away was how these wines were aging. The vintages were 2004, two from 2005 and one from 2009. The older wines were gaining subtle complexities, yet weren’t anywhere near what I would consider ‘developed’ or ‘developing’. The freshness was astounding. For a wine that is so often thought of something to consume young and on a patio in the sun, these wines were aging incredibly. It’s time to begin stashing some of these away.

My other revelation was the introduction I had to Ramonet – widely considered the top producer in Chassagne-Montrachet. The Ramonet brothers, Noel and Jean-Claude, are known somewhat as mavericks, neither with any technical training and known for taking risks in the vineyard. Apparently his Bourgogne is made entirely with Chassagne fruit and it was unlike any Bourgogne blanc I’ve tried – complex and hard to wrap your head around – there was an underlying and cooling spearmint character which I loved. The 1er cru ‘Morgeot’ had intensity and pedigree that could only really come from Chassagne or Puligny (or Meursault, yet it didn’t quite have the oak to be). These wines are brilliant.