Thursday, 7 October 2010

Tahbilk Wine Club

Tahbilk Tower

The Tahbilk range isn’t easy to find in this neck of the woods, and while the Marsanne was high on Hughesy’s list of wines I need to try, it was some time before I managed to run a bottle to ground. In the meantime I received frequent reminders this particular item on my personal to do list needed to be attended to. For instance, it seemed each time James Halliday’s Top 100 Wines appeared in The Weekend Australian there it was.

Checking would reveal that impression isn’t 100% accurate.

After all, with any wine there are going to be variations from vintage to vintage, but the consistency with which the wine appeared in the list was remarkable, particularly when you look at the price point, which hovered around the $10-$12 mark for much of the late nineties and early noughties. $9.85 was the price when I first spotted the wine in The Wine Society’s monthly newsletter, and a dozen was an automatic purchase.

A visit to Victoria at the end of 2006 gave an opportunity to visit the winery, and once we’d tasted our way through the range on offer the news that the Tahbilk Wine Club offered freight-free shipping throughout eastern Australia was enough to have Hughesy signing on the dotted line.

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