Andrew Wood
It’s been a very hectic month on the farm. The growing season has well and truly begun and I have been madly planting the summer crop: 600 heirloom tomatoes; 100 chillis, a whole bed of Italian melons (a bed is 4 metres wide by 50 metres long); another bed of sixteen different types of pumpkins (the seeds kindly given to me by my good friends Lois and Geoff); half a bed each of zucchini, squash and heirloom cucumbers, and lesser quantities of beans, eggplant and capsicum. This is on top of the regular weekly planting of lettuce, rocket, herbs, Asian greens, radish, etc. And to top it off, the spring rains have failed for the third year running and I have been watering the beds since September—a task...
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News
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Campbell Mattinson
You can sit on the verandah of the shack at the Hoddles Creek Estate with a shotgun in your hand and take pot shots at wild deer. They are out there, roaming in the loaming, their hooves strutting at vineyard dirt, looking for leaves, grapes, fallen sweetness – though even the deer don’t seem to like sauvignon blanc.
Mind you, shooting here would be tiresome. Hoddles Creek is at the wild end of the Yarra Valley in Victoria, the end where it’s hilly and bushed and you can hardly see the houses for the scrub. Because of a warren of local by-laws you’d have to call the police before you fired the first shot, and warn them that you’re thinking of shooting at deer, or at rabbits, and not at...
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Feature Story
Brian Croser is a pivotal figure in the Australian Wine Industry. An academic as much as a visionary winemaker, he has done much to build the international reputation of fine Australian wine.
He is best known as the founder of Petaluma, pioneer and proponent of distinguished vineyard sites. Here is his Pinot Noir manifesto entitled “Pinosophy” presented to 65 Victorian Pinot Noir winemakers at Hepburn Springs on the 25th November 2008. It is vintage Croser and a great read!
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Top 20 Results
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Andrew Caillard
Langton’s Top 500 Australian Fine Wine Prices 2008 reveals the enduring prominence of Penfolds Grange, the remarkable efficacy of Langton’s Classification of Australian Wine, the strength of Australian Shiraz and the ever-increasing price evolution of Australian rarities. Many of Australia’s best wines have transcended negative economic sentiment because of their longstanding reputation of quality, solid track record at auction, overall value and relative short supply.
The secondary wine market, however, is not immune to the global financial crisis. The last quarter of 2008 saw...
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Free Download
Langton’s exclusive Penfolds Grange Guide is available for free.
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The World of Fine Wine
At his San Francisco home, Wilfred Jaeger, one of the world’s greatest collectors, recently held a unique Burgundy tasting, sharing with a small group of friends several fully mature and venerable vintages of the most celebrated, coveted and precious grand cru of them all.
Michael Broadbent MW describes the scene and the wines.
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Classification Poster
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Max Allen
It seems like such a good idea at the time. Plant a few vines, make some wine. Lovely. But the thing about vines is they can live for an awfully long time. A century or more in some cases.
Longer, clearly, than most people. And the other thing about vines is that they keep squeezing out grapes. Every year. Which means somebody has to keep making those grapes into wine. Every year. Even when the people who planted the vines are long gone.
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Vintage Chart
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