Friday, 27 November 2009
Tahbilk: Straight Rhones and some extras
I thought I'd miscalculated.
Given the need to maintain a reasonable stock in the unit at Southport I'd done a bit of quick calculation and figured that since wine we order from Tahbilk on a Monday morning usually arrives on a Thursday afternoon, subtracting a day from the transit time to Bowen would mean a Monday morning order should arrive in Southport after lunch on Wednesday. We were arriving on Thursday afternoon, so a Tuesday morning order might lob on the doorstep before we did. No, I thought, order after lunch on Tuesday, which means they should ship it out Wednesday morning so it could well be there Friday morning. More likely Friday arvo, but you can never tell.
So in went the order - a mixed dozen covering the Rhone varietals, and a six pack of trophy-winning Marsanne - and off went Hughesy and ‘Er Indoors for a spell in Southport that would include a Ry Cooder concert. As the clock rolled past four o'clock on Friday afternoon, however, I figured that we'd be waiting till Monday and that I'd better do something to ensure that the red wine stocks remained at a suitable level over the weekend, which meant doing something I was trying to avoid.
Namely, visiting the bottle shop in Australia Fair.
Much of my unwillingness was the result of budget induced boredom as I made my selections from their heavily discounted section at the front of the store, so I passed straight through to what passes for the inner sanctum, which is where you find the more up-market lines. Surveying what was on offer a price tag advising that the Jamieson's Run Limestone Coast Cabernet Shiraz Merlot had been reduced to $9.99 caught my eye. I'd just grabbed a bottle when the young sales dude who'd been extolling the virtues of something or other (at that price we're better than Dan Murphy's) to a couple of other dudes and a stray dudette wandered over to ask if I was partial to a Merlot.
If you like Merlot, quoth he, there's this Jamieson's Run. Should be the same price but the tag must’ve blown away.
In any case, that was enough for Friday night, and expecting that we'd be passing Ferry Road and the decent grog shop in the complex over that way I thought I'd solved the temporary red wine deficiency rather well. I was back in the unit with a bottle open and breathing quietly when the intercom buzzer indicated an incoming communication which, rather surprisingly considering it was after 5:30, turned out to be about a delivery from Tahbilk.
As noted elsewhere I like to give wine deliveries a bit of time to recover from transport trauma, so I set about preparing the evening's lamb stew happily sampling the previously opened CSM rather than a more recent arrival.
Actually, given the $9.99 price tag, Hughesy was back in the grog shop relieving them of the remaining stock.
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