Wednesday, 6 October 2010
It didn’t take long to discover a pack of four bottles twice a year wasn’t enough to keep the wine rack full, so it should probably come as no surprise that an advertisement prompted me to sign up with the Hunter Valley Wine Society, which promised a dozen four times a year. I was still living in Townsville at that point, and the deliveries kept coming after I relocated to Bowen until, eventually, a mixture of financial necessity and other options brought them to a stop.
Shortly after I landed in Bowen I discovered one stop shopping, since the local supermarket complex had facilities to purchase groceries, meat and grog under the one roof. I also discovered that the liquor barn at the eastern end of the complex supplied most of the resorts in the Whitsundays with their liquid requirements, which made for an interesting variety of bottles in stock on the retail side of the operation.
Opting out of the Hunter Valley Wine Society deliveries meant I wasn’t aware of any developments within the organisation until we landed on the doorstep of the Hunter Valley Information Centre and sighted a HVWS section inside the building.
In other circumstances I could well have been tempted to investigate further, but Madam was keen to investigate a highly recommended gallery before we sidetracked onto the tasting trail. In hindsight if we had called into the HVWS we probably wouldn’t have made it to Tamburlaine, which was one of the highlights of that particular trip.
As a result, I have no idea of the current state of play with the HVWS, and a quick Google suggests that it is now part of the Wine Selectors group. While I could investigate further, my current interests tend towards investigating particular individual wineries in a variety of regions.
For anyone with an interest in sampling a variety of wines from a number of different wineries, and bearing in mind that I’m looking back twenty-something years, the Hunter Valley Wine Society could well be worth investigating.