Some were even available in the better bottle shops around town, but it took years to track the others down.
In the meantime, somewhere along the line there was the opportunity to join The Rothbury Estate Society. It was one of those buy a dozen and you’re a member deals and for the next twenty years four-bottle tasting packs turned up on the doorstep at regular intervals, though the reordering of selected bottles became rarer as other options opened up.
In the end, faced with the multiplicity of options and the disappearance of Bankcard I ended up letting the regular deliveries lapse.
So when I decided that The Wine Pages on the web-site needed a section on Wine Clubs and Mailing Lists I needed to gather up a few sources of information to fill out the gaps in the finer details of an increasingly unreliable memory.
A Google search for Rothbury Estate Society, however, failed to reveal much except from the fact that the organisation exists and produces wine. And from a mailing that arrived in the PO Box recently it’s now apparently the Rothbury Wine Society.
That’s probably not too surprising given the to-ing and fro-ing that occurs within the corporatised world of Australian wine. One suspects that recording and preserving details of the previous incarnations of the brand name aren’t at the top of the list of priorities when you’ve got something that’s sitting under a large corporate umbrella.
And it’s probably not too surprising to note, as you look at the sections further down this section of the web-site, that the wineries that interest me are, increasingly, the smaller, family owned and operated ones.
