Thursday, 7 October 2010
The Tahbilk range isn’t easy to find in this neck of the woods, and while the Marsanne was high on Hughesy’s list of wines I need to try, it was some time before I managed to run a bottle to ground. In the meantime I received frequent reminders this particular item on my personal to do list needed to be attended to. For instance, it seemed each time James Halliday’s Top 100 Wines appeared in The Weekend Australian there it was.
Checking would reveal that impression isn’t 100% accurate.
After all, with any wine there are going to be variations from vintage to vintage, but the consistency with which the wine appeared in the list was remarkable, particularly when you look at the price point, which hovered around the $10-$12 mark for much of the late nineties and early noughties. $9.85 was the price when I first spotted the wine in The Wine Society’s monthly newsletter, and a dozen was an automatic purchase.
A visit to Victoria at the end of 2006 gave an opportunity to visit the winery, and once we’d tasted our way through the range on offer the news that the Tahbilk Wine Club offered freight-free shipping throughout eastern Australia was enough to have Hughesy signing on the dotted line.
The first Tahbilk Wine Club Newsletter I received alerted me to the existence of the excellent value for money Everyday Drinking Range which subsequently became an integral part of Hughesy’s long-term ten-dollar-a-bottle-average.
After all, when you can pick up a dozen perfectly acceptable Cabernets for $59.40 (that’s $4.95 a bottle) is going to allow you to pick up a dozen for around $15 a bottle and still maintain the ten-dollar average.
That’s not to suggest for a moment that the Everyday Drinking Cabernets or the equally good value Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc (both $5.95/bottle or $71.40/dozen) were the only wines that ended up lobbing onto the courtyard veranda at the Little House of Concrete.
Each newsletter contains a number of mixed dozens, and opening a carton of wine often revealed a flier offering, for instance, a dozen of the gold medal 2005 Viognier for $114.
That particular dozen, along with the Spice of Life dozen from the start of 2008 and the mid-year New Reds pack were long gone by the time I started on this particular section of the site, but there’ll be full reviews of subsequent purchases once the plastic has recovered from a recent caning inflicted by purchases from other establishments.