Spitbucket drinking

by Martin Field

Moss Wood Ribbon Vale Vineyard Semillon/Sauvignon Blanc 2006 – seen for $19 - \_/\_/\_/
Fuller bodied white shows spiciness, lemongrassiness and dried apples. Quite delicious.

Plantagenet Riesling 2006 - $19 \_/\_/\_/
Aromatic with white flowers and lemons. Dry zippy white shows a lovely lemony tang in the mouth and finishes with lively acidity. Works well on its own or try with an entrée of saganaki.

Sticks Sauvignon Blanc 2006 - $18 - \_/\_/
Yarra Valley. Victoria. Fresh lively style bursting with passionfruit and lychees on both nose and palate. Serve as an aperitif.

Tarrawarra Pinot Noir Rosé 2006 - $17 - \_/\_/
Pale pink with a hue of onion skin. A light soft wine showing a melange of raspberry/strawberry fruit, mildly acidic at the finish. Serve well-chilled as an aperitif.

Nanny Goat Pinot Noir 2005 - up to $32 - \_/\_/\_/
Central Otago. New Zealand. Maraschino cherry nose with underlying savoury notes. A pinot noir of substance showing plenty of black cherry fruit and integrated tannins on the palate. In a word: tasty.

Coldstream Hills Pinot Noir 2006 – up to $29 - \_/\_/\_/\_/
Assertive and complex pinot style showing blackcurrant, cherries, faint herbal notes and upfront, sweet toasted French oak. The finish is long and firm. A pinot noir for full-bodied red fans.

Nepenthe Tryst Cabernet Sauvignon/Tempranillo/Zinfandel 2005 - $16 - \_/\_/ $
What an odd blend – but it works. The nose is sweet with a hint of cabernet capsicum. Medium-weighted ripe red fruit flavours extend along the palate and finish nicely with softish tannins.

Penfolds Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz 2005 – up to $27 - \_/\_/\_/\_/
Generous tightly structured red with an assertive, very dry, youthfully tannic palate. The palate shows notes of blackberry supported by understated oak. Not a ‘fruit bomb’, merely a fine example of classy winemaking. Excellent as a food accompaniment and will drink well to 2014 - and longer.

Spitbucket rating system
Five gold spitbuckets \_/\_/\_/\_/\_/ - brilliant
\_/\_/\_/\_/ - classy
\_/\_/\_/ - first-rate
\_/\_/ - good stuff
\_/ - spit it!
An added $ or two denotes excellent value for money.

Posted by Martin Field at 10:47 PM
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Crumby corks - Waiters knives don't cut it

by Martin Field

Corked wines are disgusting to drink. Less annoying, but common enough, are wines with bits of cork floating in them. Admittedly, cork crumbs are more a cosmetic than a taste problem but they’re very irritating when you find them in your glass.

My certifiable genius friend Kim, cast his beady mathematical eyes over a number of crumby wines. He observed that cork flotsam and jetsam appear most frequently when he uses a waiters knife to extract corks from older wines.

In the E-vine tasting lab he demonstrated, using a deluxe waiters knife on a 15-year-old bottle of wine, that just before the cork fully emerges from a bottle the waiters knife actually pushes the cork away from the perpendicular.

This leverage bends the wet end of the cork, and if the cork is unsound, causes it to break and shed crumbs. Consequently, small pieces of cork tend to stick in the bottle neck and fragments fall inside the bottle. These then have to be fished or filtered out. Or, chewed and swallowed.

To put it more simply: the structural integrity of a decomposing cork will be compromised as the waiters knife’s vectoring forces simultaneously compress and expand the wet end of the cork in opposite directions. Having lost the springiness of youth, the stressed cork will self-destruct.

Kim’s solution is to use an old-fashioned butterfly corkscrew when opening older wines. This type of corkscrew will extract the cork in a strictly vertical direction, avoiding destructive stresses and strains caused by sideways movement. He’s convinced me.

If you have a strong arm, a simple T-shaped corkscrew will also do the trick.

Posted by Martin Field at 10:43 PM
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