An Evening With Gill

Last night me and the gals went to Gill’s Diner in Little Collins Street, Melbourne. I couldn’t resist pointing out the missing apostrophe in the sign out front: ”Gills Diner”, but was quickly put back in my place.

The food was excellent – my fancy rabbit wrapped up in a type of German hamon and served with polenta and a roast pumpkin mash was wonderful. And the serving sizes generous indeed.

The wine list was ok, but not really that exciting. We were drinking by the glass, and casting aside sparkling and rose wines (Corks doesn’t approve of rose), there were only four wines by the glass for each of white and red offerings. This was a little skimpy.

I had a Yarraloch Chardonnay. Perfectly good, well made wine with bright tropical fruit and lemon against moderate acidity and oak not overdone.

Later there was the Pondalowie MT Tempranillo 2007 - rich and solid, and with 5 years’ bottle age, had mellowed out the tannin and oak.

Measuring Value for Money

Yesterday I referred to a wine I’d had recently that was really good value for money. It got me thinking about value for money and how to measure it. I’ve worked a lot in UK central government (as a professional from a private sector organisation) where the concept of VFM is an important factor of their decision making, but VFM is not something easily measured. Surely it’s all relative – what’s good VFM to Corks isn’t always going to be good VFM for Mrs Corks or any of Corks’ fellow wine buffs.

But within the limited confines of my lunch break, I’ve come up with a scale for measuring VFM. It’s a simple formula by dividing the price paid for a bottle of wine measured in Aussie dollars by a 5 point scale of enjoyment squared. I’ve applied a 5 point scale because that seems to fit in pretty much with the types of wine experiences I tend to have:

1 – Undrinkable! This is a wine that is so rubbish, I’d prefer not to have any at all and stay sober all night. I would think twice about putting an undrinkable wine into cooking.

2 – Acceptable. A wine that’s ok, drinkable, vaguely pleasant. Let’s keep drinking it, but nothing memorable. The type of wine people who don’t like wine might bring to your barbecue

3 – Good. This is what makes wine fun. Pleasant to drink, well made. Enjoyable.

4 – Really good. Elegant, smooth, complex. I want to drink more of this type of wine.

5 – Awesome! Such wines are what I search for. Highly complex, elegant, smooth and silky; memorable.

Now Corks ain’t no mathematician, so welcomes any useful comments on how to improve the VFM scale, but the lower the score, the better the VFM.

I squared the 5 point scale because it provided better delineation between the 5 point scale for a given price range. Obviously I didn’t want the scale to appear to give equal VFM for an awesome wine costing $35 as an acceptable wine costing $14. That just doesn’t sound right.

Anyways, see the table below and let us know what you think. The lower the score, the better the VFM.

Addendum:

Ok, so it’s not perfect. I’m working on it. You’ll see some anomalies in the scores. An undrinkable bottle at $5 is clearly not as good VFM as a really good $80 bottle. Where’s a Swedish actuary when you need one?

In the meantime, I’ve modified the table since yesterday so it goes up in $5 increments until $50, above which it goes up in $10 increments.

Price	Enjoyment
	Awesome!	Really Good	Good	Acceptable	Undrinkable
	5	4	3	2	1
100	4.0	6.3	11.1	25.0	100.0
90	3.6	5.6	10.0	22.5	90.0
80	3.2	5.0	8.9	20.0	80.0
70	2.8	4.4	7.8	17.5	70.0
60	2.4	3.8	6.7	15.0	60.0
50	2.0	3.1	5.6	12.5	50.0
45	1.8	2.8	5.0	11.3	45.0
40	1.6	2.5	4.4	10.0	40.0
35	1.4	2.2	3.9	8.8	35.0
30	1.2	1.9	3.3	7.5	30.0
25	1.0	1.6	2.8	6.3	25.0
20	0.8	1.3	2.2	5.0	20.0
15	0.6	0.9	1.7	3.8	15.0
10	0.4	0.6	1.1	2.5	10.0
5	0.2	0.3	0.6	1.3	5.0

The Pursuit of Value

Wine is an expensive interest. Those for whom goon bags* or a bottle of Savvy B are not up to scratch, a good bottle of wine can easily melt a gaping hole in even the most robust of leather wallets.

Perusing the shelves this morning at the Vintage Cellars in Bridport Street, Albert Park, my wine radar sub-consciously guides me towards the upper shelves where the good stuff lives (Corks does stand 191cm [6'3" for my US visitors] though, so it’s no suprise I look to the wine at eye level first). VC AP has an excellent range of fine Australian and New Zealand Chardonnays and Pinots, amongst many other finey wineys, but many of the wines are $50 or more.

While we might buy such wines for a very special occasion, for most punters $50 for 750ml of liquid pleasure is too much to pay. So the approach to take is to search for wines which offer value for money. VFM is a relative term, but that’s ok. I just mean VFM in the ordinary sense – the ratio between enjoyment and price.

For me, the sweet spot lies somewhere between $20 – $40, with some exceptions at arond $15 a bottle (Tahbilk Marsanne a good example). This is where the enjoyment to price ratio is maximised, hence VFM.

 

* For the benefit of my overseas readers, goon bag is a colloquial term meaning a cask wine packaged in a plastic bladder inside a square carton. Typically wine that comes in goon bags is poor quality and best served to mortal enemies.

Cullen and Geoff Hardy Cabernet

We were at our country place in central Victoria last weekend for a working bee. This amounted to a few hours of wood splittin (country folk tend not to bother pronouncing the “g”, so do city folk when they’re in the country) followed by some eatin and drinkin.

So what did we drinkin?

Cullet Cabernet Merlot 2010. Purchased from Dan Murphys at QV in Melbourne for $36.99, we had high expectations. The wine delivered – silky smooth mouthfeel with lots of lovely dark fruit and well balanced oak and tannin. I won’t go into more detail about flavours and aromas, but let’s just say this is a special occasion wine that the three of us who drank it thought was brilliant.

The star of the night was a wine in father Cork’s wine rack which he’d kind of forgotten about. Geoff Hardy Kuitpo Cabernet 2000. I don’t know much about Adelaide Hills Cabernet, or Geoff Hardy, but this wine was outstanding. Elegant, fine, smooth and wonderful to drinkin. A brief search on the internet couldn’t locate any vendors with the 2000 in stock, but the Geoff Hardy site (link below) shows the 2007 as $35 a bottle. Will definitely give it a go, but no doubt 12 years of bottle age would have significantly improved the wine by taking the edge of the fruit, tannin and oak.

http://www.k1.com.au/Purchase/K1-Wines.aspx

Vintage Cellars Tasting At South Melbourne

A couple of Corks went to the Golden Gate Hotel on Thursdee night for a tasting devoted to Chardonnay. Let me declare now, this was possibly the best tasting I’ve been to: really good wine on display, a smallish room with not too many tables, and a correspondingly small crowd of about 50 people – enough to party but not so many it is a circus.

We tried heaps of Chardonnays from Australia and France. My take on the Aussie khardies is they are well and truly on top of the oak these days and none of the wines we tried were over oaked. The in thing seems to be minerality, that’s the flinty, rocky and sometimes sulphury nose you get on the wine. Chablis is well known for producing good minerality, as is Sancerre with the Sauvignon Blanc. However, a lot of the Aussie Chardonnays displayed too much minerality; out of balance and slightly sulphury.

Anyways, we tried:

- 3 different vintages of Leuwin Estate Art Series (2007-09)

- Vasse Felix Heytesbury

- Yeringberg

- Mount Mary 2005

- Premier Cru Chablis

- Bress

- Mountadam Eden Valley

There were heaps of other producers available, but there’s only so much Chardonnay you can try in a night before they all taste the same. We missed out on the Kooyong Estate wines, which I know are very good.

Wine of the night was the Curly Flat Chardonnay from Macedon Ranges. It’s a special occasion wine though, unless you are one of those urban Green voters who can no doubt afford to drink fine wine every night.

Next best wine was the Paradise IV from Bannockburn. Awesome

Vintage Cellars International Wine Show

A couple of Corks went to the Vintage Cellars International Wine Show 2012 on Thursday last week. This year it was at the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, the newer building next to Jeff’s shed.

Lots of wine on display and as always, the men far outnumbered the gals. Notwithstanding, there was a couple of lovelies at one table being served by some gushing fellows, meanwhile the menfolk waiting to get a pour stood by patiently, us included. And why wouldn’t a bunch of blokes prefer to keep another bunch of middle-aged fellaz waiting when they can be talking to some beauties?

Anyway, there was plenty of interesting wine on the night and the people serving were friendly and happy to talk about the wines on display. One person we spoke to had flown in from Spain for the show, which is on in Sydney and Perth too. Another thing worth mentioning is the location was good too. Lots of room for people to move about and the tables were spread far enough apart that people weren’t climbing over the top of eachother to get a pour.

Highlight of the night was a premier cru Vosne Romanee, but at $129 a bottle, not within Corks’z wallet spectrum.

Dexter Dude

Well Hullo!

Was at the Montague Hotel recently and tried the Dexter Chardonnay from Mornington Peninsula. What an outstanding wine! So very French in style: elegant, balanced and subtlely oaked. Corks’ kinda wine and the wine of the year, so far.

Dexter has a distinctive label – white background with black font in a kind of cursive script / handwritten style (being a complete novice when it comes to font styles, please excuse my lack of technical description) – but it really works.

Dexter Chardonnay is $38 a bottle from their website. They also do a pinot, but I am yet to try it.

Stonier International Pinot Tasting 2011

Two years have flown by since the last Stonier Pinot tasting was held in Melbourne in September 2009. My niece Rose was not yet born and St Kilda almost won the Grand Final. Anyway, the next tasting is on Monday 21 November, and Mr Corks is really looking forward to it.

I expect tickets have sold out – they’re not cheap ($185 each), but the opportunity to try fine, fine local and imported pinots is too good to pass. Will let you know how it goes.

Why Has Facebook Forgotten Me?

A number of Cork Talk groupies have mentioned recently they no longer receive updates to their Facebook pages whenever there is a new post on this blog. Well, based on a limited investigation, Corks can’t explain. But for the time being, remember that I do post on a regular basis, so even if Facebook doesn’t alert you, drop by from time to time for new material. Better still, try subscribing to Cork Talk so you will be sent an email for each new post.

Having said that, this weekend was more beery than winey. A Japanese restaurant in Fed Square got my order for a Pinot wrong, instead delivering unto me a rather ordinary Cabernet or Cabernet Merlot. Alarm bells rang out when I asked the waiter for a glass of the Pinot (it being the only Pinot on the list) and he didn’t know what I was talking about. So I says to him “just ask for a glass of Pinot, the barman will know what you mean”. Oops. Too hard.

Last night I had a glass of Morgan Vineyards “Hip N Shoulder” Shiraz 2007. This is really not the best wine out of Morgan Vineyards: overly sweet, raisiny, high in alcohol. While some bottles are better than others – last night’s must have been one of the better ones – it is still not satisfying to drink. Sink. Fridge. Beer.

Last week Corks took delivery of some rather special Burgundies, courtesy of a close relative who can get access to such wonderful wines CHEAP! Corks will keep the source of the wines under wraps for the time being, or at least until readership levels get above 10,000 hits per month, but will be happy to write about the wines.

So far, none opened, but Corks is sure to open a bottle sooner or later and will happily let you know how it goes.

BYO With No Strings Attached?

We’re going for another special family meal this Satdee night. With older brother Corks pulling out of contention, we contacted Wildflower in Maling Road, Canterbury,  to advise them our Corks 7 was now Corks 6. 

And just as well we did, because during the conversation it was revealed their BYO policy does not apply on Saturday nights, saving us the humiliation of turning up with a range of fine wines which we were not allowed to pop.

So we’re heading to Esposito in Carlton, who permit BYO at $15 per bottle corkage. Yikes. Will let you know how it goes.

The wine list is shaping up nicely, so giving you a sneak preview:

1.  Seppelt Salinger 2006

2.  Domaine Vincent Girardin Chassagne Montrachet 1er Cru En Remily 2005

3.  Penfolds Bin 707 Cabernet 1997

4.  Heathcote Winery Mailcoach Shiraz 1999

5.  Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 1996