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I want something interesting to drink at the end of the day, and I want it every day. I don't necessarily want it to be something special. It'd be nice to have the financial and cellaring wherewithal to allow you to drink a properly cellared something from Langton's 2010 Classification of Australian Wine every night of the week, but I don't have it and there's plenty of interesting drinking further down the pecking order.

For me, the best way of getting something interesting is to track down some decent wineries with an interesting range of good quality wines and buy directly from there.

So I do. It'd be nice to be able to add a few extra names to the existing list, but there's only so much an individual can do. If we had wine drinking visitors turning up on the doorstep more often, or a number of good BYO wine only eateries to head off to with friends that might be different.

Those places, however, are doing it tough under the current circumstances. Part of that comes from the flood of heavily discounted New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc being offloaded over here to cut down the wine lake over there. 

One wonders what the Kiwi contingent would say if, for example, Australian producers started selling government-subsidised wine into New Zealand (or elsewhere) at a price below the actual cost of production. 

Anything like that would run against all sorts of international agreements, of course, but if it was done as part of, say, a systematic rearrangement of water arrangements in the Murray Darling basin (sell off the wine and restructure the industry, that sort of thing), but if it did I suspect I'd be able to hear the howls of protest from across The Ditch down at Bowen's Front Beach. 

Call me nationalist and jingoistic if you like, but if signing up for allforonewine.com.au will help the places I go to for my interesting supply of wines to survive, it's a no-brainer.


Thursday, 2 December 2010

© Ian Hughes 2012