australia – Grape Nomad

What a better way to start your grape education than with Australian Shiraz? Sure you can call a bunch of friends over and have them bring obscure bottles of Müller Thurgau or Agiorgitiko, but you’ll just end up confusing the shit out of them and scaring them away. It’s like bringing John Donne to your first poetry club session – yeah, you romanticized about him during your useless four-year English studies, but that doesn’t mean that Dave over there should be shunned for “resting his eyes a bit”. Start out slow and then jump into your occult fantasies a few months in or you’ll have people concluding that their 9-dollar bottle from 7Eleven is not that bad after all. Continue reading “House Pour: A Real Guide to Australian Shiraz”

Getting a chance to attend the Annual Portfolio Tasting of Liberty Wines in London was a professional beauty in my agenda. The company was founded in 1997 by David Gleave MW as a start-up with just four people working as staff. Today, it employs 130 individuals and has an annual turnover of £45 million. With awards annually pouring in from IWC, Decanter and SWA (On-Trade Supplier of the Year, Merchant of the Year, Wine Educator of the Year…), I honestly don’t see the need to bore you further with data and statistics of what Liberty Wines is in the international market today.

The APT 2017 was held on the 17th of January in the fascinating Kia Oval cricket ground in South London. This is the chief event of the company and gives wine lovers a chance to taste over 600 wines, spirits, beers, ciders and olive oils from over 150 representatives. To be frank, I only tasted around 250 samples. I started off slow and focused on my writing, but after a few hours I figured out how time is soaring by without me trying anything French or Italian. Luckily, eight hours presented a perfect time period to keep me sane and awake (though a lil’ dehydrated), so I cherry-picked the most sophisticated examples in the last 60 minutes. Being a WSET Diploma student, I really can’t complain about the producers selected for this event, because everything I wanted to cover and rehearse for the upcoming Unit 3 exam was there – Barolo, Tuscany, Australia, Alsace, Bordeaux, Burgundy, South Africa, Rioja… Continue reading “Top 10 Wines @ Liberty Wines Annual Portfolio Tasting 2017”