Thursday, 22 October 2009
Dal Zotto
On reflection, New Year's Day wasn't the best option when it came to dropping by a winery and expecting the associated restaurant to be open for lunch, but we'd mostly pulled the right rein on our jaunt through north-eastern Victoria on the cusp of 2008, so you're entitled to make the odd mistake.
Actually, had Madam been unaware of the existence of Rinaldo's Restaurant there's every chance we would have bypassed Dal Zotto Wines, which would definitely have been our loss.
As it was we sailed past the place first up, and had to make a U-turn to make our way back to the tasting room and cellar door operation, located in the old police station at Whitfield.
Over the preceding days we'd worked our way around some of the best wineries in the area, starting with Tahbilk and Baileys in transit between the Yarra Valley and Rutherglen, worked our way around the Muscat trail in Rutherglen (Campbells, Stanton & Killeen, Bullers, Chambers, All Saints and Pfeiffers) and made our way to Beechworth, our base while we investigated the King Valley and the Alpine Way.
New Year's Eve had seen us make our way up to Bright, visiting Gapsted Wines along the way, before heading back to Brown Brothers. That's a pretty impressive list of names, and when we called in to Dal Zotto we'd already visited Sam Miranda, where I'd also been quite impressed with the range that was on offer.
Now, through that impressive list the buying action to date had consisted of signing up for the wine clubs at Tahbilk and Brown Brothers and ordering a mixed dozen and signing up for the wine club at Pfeiffers.
We'd bought the odd bottle here and there as well, but luggage restrictions were going to rule out anything much in the way of take it with you purchases.
Since we'd worked our way through the range at Dal Zotto and promptly started putting together a mixed dozen to be delivered to the Little House of Concrete it's reasonably safe to assume that we were impressed.
Actually, make that extremely impressed.
The visit provided our first encounter with Prosecco, the result of Venetian-born Otto dal Zotto's determination to produce something on a par with the home-grown product.
The contents of that order were long gone by the time I started recording our impressions of wines we've tried on this site, but it was only a matter of time before another order went in. Along the way we've received frequent updates through the Dal Zotto mailing list, so the delay in placing a subsequent order has more to do with financial and other issues rather than lack of interest or motivation.
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