Under other circumstances we might have tasted and trotted, but the quality evident throughout the range, the news that deliveries were freight free, and the fact that there was no minimum buy obligation was enough to get us signing on the dotted line.
I've written at some length elsewhere about Tahbilk's Everyday Drinking Range, which opened up interesting options when it came to maintaining that long term $10 average.
From Tahbilk we were off to Rutherglen, where a circuit around the Muscat Trail culminated in a visit to Pfeiffer Wines at Wahgunyah, where Robyn Pfeiffer inveigled us into signing up for their wine club operation, which worked around two deliveries of a dozen @ $210 a throw each year. We got around a few other operations after we headed up to Beechworth for the New Year and the experience was enough to suggest I'd be quite happy exploring the output from the region on a long term basis.
By 2007 Madam had managed to extricate herself out of the work force, and we were both free to take advantage of $10 air fares on offer as Tiger took off which got us to northern Tasmania via Melbourne.
We were never going to get around a lot of wineries over a four night stay, but by this time I'd got the research thing going, had checked everywhere in Halliday and come up with a one day loop around the wineries on the eastern side of the river, where we found Pinot Noir more in line with what we ere looking for, and were sufficiently impressed by what we found at Brook Eden to sign up for their wine club.
So by the start of 2008 I could have got by very nicely indeed buying from Tahbilk, Pfeiffers, Brown Brothers, Dal Zotto and Brook Eden, and I actually thought of specializing in northeastern Victorian wineries. There were enough of them to keep you supplied with a range of styles to try and an interesting take on assorted new varieties. Throw in the Pinot and Riesling from Brook Eden and things would've been pretty close to hunky dory.
There were a couple of factors that upset that particular apple cart. Madam decided she wanted to revisit Adelaide, and asked me how long I wanted to spend, respectively, in the Clare and Barossa Valleys and there were an increasing number of health issues with my father in Southport that had Hughesy shuttling back and forth between home base and the unit overlooking the Broadwater.
Dad left us in September, but we'd already made the travel arrangements by then, and were scheduling ourselves to spend a week in South Oz and some time in Southport on either side of the interstate odyssey.
Madam had suggested a couple of options, but given the fact that Clare isn't really on the way to anywhere else (except maybe the Flinders Ranges) we weren't likely to be back, so I thought we'd best try to get around as many places as we could while we were there.
Given the fact that you'd need close to a fortnight getting around the five star wineries in the Barossa, the approach there had to be more selective, but there was no way we were going to be passing Rockford without calling in.
All of which meant that by the time we'd made our way home we were on enough mailing lists to keep the Little House of Concrete effectively awash with quality wine, and once the financial details of sorting out Dad's estate had been looked after things loosened up considerably as far as the finances were concerned, and with the debt associated with the LHoC finally paid off in full I had an extra $300 per month that could be spent on something, so my thoughts, unsurprisingly, turned to upgrading the quality end of what was coming into the wine rack.
Assuming that I was already buying, say, a $7.50 bottle and a $12.50 bottle to average out to the ten dollar mark, a long term $20 average would mean that the third bottle could go to somewhere around the $40 mark and we'd still be looking good as far as the budget was concerned.
Alternatively, with a five price point calculation, $7.50, $12.50, $15, $20 and $45 still averaged out around $20. That'd mean, say, an order from the Tahbilk Everyday Drinking Range, something from The Wine Society, entry level wines from a couple of good wineries and something getting towards the premium end of the market.