Monday, 25 October 2010
I've been getting phone calls from people who want to sell me wine. Not that I'm objecting when they're offering 20% off wines I've rated as 5/5. At the same time I've got a slight problem with the month's credit card budget a little over half way through the four week cycle.
As a result I'm dreading the ringing phone.
All of which suggests it's time to review the current state and future tends of Hughesy's buying habits. Like everything else on the site, what follows is a meditation intended to clarify my own thoughts, and if it turns out to be of interest/benefit to anyone else that's a bonus.
Having reached the point where I can meet my drinking requirements without heading to the bottle shop there needed to be some shaking out on the Wine Club front. A couple of long term memberships have already fallen by the wayside. The Rothbury Estate Society no longer bears any resemblance to the organization I signed up for back in the seventies. They're now effectively, from what I can gather, a direct marketing extension of Fosters and Cellarmasters, and is now the Rothbury Wine Society, thank you very much. Cellarmasters seem to have taken over the Hunter Valley Wine Society, which apparently continues under its own banner. I was on board in the eighties, but have no idea what the current state of play on that front might be.
Cellarmasters offer a fair selection of regular dozens, which are perfectly reasonable ways of keeping your wine rack topped up, but Hughesy's moved on a fair way from needing to look at those options.
I'm still, however, a member of The Wine Society, which operates on a similar basis but requires a $50 share purchase (it's a cooperative), refundable when you drop off the membership list. Still, you're not talking free or no obligation (you need to buy something to maintain your membership).
There is, however, a free freight option if you're ordering three cases or have surpassed a specified minimum spend (currently $1200) in the previous financial year.
TWS offers a variety of Regular Tasting Dozens, and I was availing myself of the Best Value Dozen until relatively recently. Incoming orders from other sources meant I've since cancelled those deliveries.
Actually, if you look at their Regular Tasting program, it's possible to get a delivery every month provided you're able to accommodate a variety of price points and consume that many bottles. Unfortunately those options no longer match up with my current purchasing priorities.
I'm looking at using the Society to source wine from wineries I don't buy directly from, as long as I can maintain the minimum spend that guarantees freight free status. That won't be too difficult if, for example, I use them to source a selection of fortifieds from Seppeltsfield and the odd bottle of Penfolds red. I mean, two bottles of Grange and you're more or less there! (Not that I'm likely to be going that far up market, you understand).
Much of the change has come about because we've visited a number of wine regions, called into a large number of wineries and signed up for a multitude of mailing lists and a variety of wine clubs.
Our earliest tours weren't really serious affairs. We got to the Granite Belt, visited a number of wineries and came away with a quantity of wine, but didn't go out of our way with long term commitments. The same thing happened when we passed through the South Burnett region on our way back north one Christmas holidays. Visited a number of places, tried a fair bit, bought some but nothing to sign up for.
I started getting serious when we headed for the Hunter Valley in December 2005. Not that we were too scientific, of course. It was before I owned a copy of Halliday so we headed around the valley on a hit and miss basis, and while we headed for places I thought would be OK, the decisions weren't the result of a deliberate selection process.
The same thing happened when we hit the Yarra Valley. We got around a number of places, didn't buy much, and, to be quite honest weren't overly impressed. That changed over the next couple of days when we headed north towards Rutherglen.
On the way we stopped off at Tahbilk, and I've written at length about what we found there elsewhere, so I'm not going to bang on at length about the winery here.