That happened towards the end of 2005, and while I wasn't able to retire officially, accumulated leave took care of the interval before I could access my retirement funds. While the delay was negotiated I'd been careful to scale the spending back to my anticipated income stream once I'd retired, which is where the long term $10 per bottle average kicked in. I could, I figured, afford $300 each month for wine, so that $10 average seemed about right. Careful perusal of The Wine Society monthly newsletter suggested that there'd be enough wines from there to round out whatever was on special at the liquor barn and the reorders from regular tasting dozens.
Late 2005 also saw the first of our winery odysseys, as we headed south through Southport, continuing more or less straight on to the Hunter.
We were still fairly wet behind the ears when it came to organizing this sort of thing, but we were there midweek in the last week before New South Wales schools broke up, so we managed to get around places that (mostly) weren't as crowded as they might be once the holiday season kicked in.
There were a couple of things that became clear over the couple of days we spent in the Hunter. For a start I decided I liked going into places where I could talk to someone about the wines I was trying. In some cases, at that time of year you might catch the actual winemaker, but as long as the cellar door attendant was reasonably knowledgeable and communicative, that was enough.
At the same time it was fairly obvious those conversations were less likely to happen in places that drew largish crowds, particularly if the crowds arrived on tour buses. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to avoid those places like the plague, but if there are masses of punters in the cellar door the winery needs a highly tuned cellar door staff, which was what we encountered when we hit some of the wineries we visited in Victoria the following year.
We made our way back from the Hunter with a couple of boxes in the boot, largely odds and ends we'd picked up along the way but the mix did include a bottle of Lakes Folly Cabernet that has an appointment with Hughesy's birthday a little later this month.
Through 2006 we kept on more or less the same lines as before, and for much of the year the standard white tipple was the Oxford Landing Sauvignon Blanc, which regularly turned up on special around the $7 or $8 mark and represented remarkably good value for money.
A further element came into play on Melbourne Cup Day 2006, when Hughesy's suggestion that a lot of people like Pop Rock but Delta Blues Maybe Better delivered the trifecta, a $1200 collect and the opportunity to invest in a wine fridge that would allow longer term cellaring of wines that looked to have some staying power.
That meant our wine stocks included forty-something bottles laid down for medium- to long-term maturation, up to eight dozen in the wine rack for consumption in the not too distant future and thirty-odd bottles in the bar fridge, ready and waiting to be sampled.
Christmas holidays that year took us to Victoria, where a circuit around the Yarra Valley and a spell in the state's northeast confirmed some of the things I'd figured out on the visit to the Hunter.
For a start it was obvious we needed to do a bit of research before we set out on the tasting trail. Post-Hunter discussions with Warbo had revealed the identity of a couple of places we really should have visited, and a copy of Halliday was scrutinized carefully before we set off.
Our arrival in Victoria, however, coincided with that peak holiday period between Christmas and New Year, which ended up underlining Hughesy's feelings about places that drew large crowds.
Given its location and the holiday season, most of the places we visited in the Yarra Valley were surprisingly under-crowded, but things got decidedly difficult around lunchtime. Most of the places we visited were relatively small operations, and there weren't too many offering wines that would slide in under Hughesy's long term $10 average.
Almost everywhere we went were underwhelmed by the highly rated Pinot Noirs, many of which seemed to be strawberry-flavoured lolly water and well away from the heartier reds we tended to favour.
Heading out of the Yarra, however, we struck gold when we visited Tahbilk. For a start, though the place was humming, the cellar door attendant who looked after us guided us through the extensive range with helpful commentary, then signed us up for the wine club.