Monday 6 December 2011
I like it when someone delivers you a ready made, straightforward but still rather elegant to a potentially thorny problem.
We weren't long back from Western Australia and I was trying to figure out how to include the wineries we'd visited over there into a purchasing schedule that didn't have much room for manoeuvre when the flier about the Hay Shed Hill Four Seasons Club arrived in the P.O. Box.
The beauty of we'll send you a specified number of bottles at prescribed intervals wine clubs is it saves the buyer the effort of deciding what he or she wants to buy. Someone else makes the decisions, but you've probably got the chance to try what you would have ordered in the first place and, most importantly, it takes the when out of the ordering equation.
In the end it depends on whether you're interested in what’s on offer.
An arrangement where you receive the Semillon Sauvignon Blanc in summer, their Sangiovese and Tempranillo in the autumn, Cabernet Sauvignon in the winter and Chardonnay in the spring looked attractive, though the $180 a throw for half a dozen wines seemed rather steep, so I did a bit of research, and a bit was all that was needed.
Apart from the autumn wines, the wines are drawn from their Block Series, wines made from single parcels of fruit from designated blocks that supposedly represent the best grapes on the property.
Fine, so how were they rated?
The SSB consistently rated 94 from Mr Halliday, the Cabernet ranged between 94 and 96, and the Chardonnay was the same.
As far as the pricing went, the autumn wines were $20, the SSB $30, the Chardonnay $35 and the Cab Sauv $50, so I figured that $135 x 6 was $810, while four times $180 was $720, and the deliveries were freight free, so why not?
The SSB duly arrived, and made for quite sublime summer drinking, the autumn wines were acceptable without being overly impressive, but the Cabernet was where we walked straight into substantial Wow! factor territory...