Thursday, 22 October 2009
Brown Brothers 2006 Barbera
Brown Brothers 2006 Sangiovese
Brown Brothers 2008 Cienna
Brown Brothers 2008 Viognier
Brown Brothers 2008 Pinot Grigio
Brown Brothers 2008 Vermentino
When my father passed away in October 2008, my brother and I became joint owners of a handily-located unit in downtown Southport that’s the sort of thing you're going to have difficulty finding again if you decided to let it go. Until we come up with a better use for it, which translates to when somebody in the family has a long-term use for the unit we decided to treat it as, more or less, a holiday house. An up-market holiday house, but a holiday house just the same.
While it's not ideally located vis a vis Brisbane Airport the unit is a convenient staging post when 'Er Indoors and I head off on one of our increasingly frequent trips. It's now possible, for instance, to fly directly from the Gold Coast to Kansai, an option that isn't always on offer from Cairns, and one that suits much better than flying into Narita, The location also means that we can base ourselves in the unit when there's a concert in Brisbane - we still need a night's accommodation in the city, so the location's not 100% ideal when it comes to things like that - but, at the same time we can take an extended break and enjoy a variation in the day-to-day routine that operates back home.
A significant element of that day-to-day routine is, of course, the consumption of wine.
While there are a couple of outlets representing major liquor chains in the neighbourhood, a pretty decent specialist wine shop about twenty minutes' walk away, and a couple of Dan Murphy's that'd require a bus trip, a compass and a cut lunch, the closest options tend to stock the usual corporate suspects and as you travel further afield there’s the problem of getting the purchases back to base.
Taking everything into account I decided the idea was, to order a dozen from somewhere, whenever we were dropping by and, in the process build up a stock of interesting offerings on site.
The first place I went to for an order was Brown Brothers.
Hughesy's current buying strategy, where Brown Brothers is concerned, is to pick up one of the Epicurean Club offers when one catches the eye and make up the odd mixed dozen to fill in the gaps.
Given prevailing weather conditions in Queensland, I felt the idea was to go with a fifty-fifty white/red split, with some of the reds being varietals that could take a bit of refrigeration.
With that in mind, the initial unit dozen comprised two bottles of six wines: the 2006 Barbera, the same vintage Sangiovese, and the 2008 Cienna, Viognier, Pinot Grigio and Vermentino.
There were scheduling problems when the order went in, and the box arrived at the end of the relevant stay, but when we arrived a week before the Elvis Costello concert in mid-October 2009 there were a couple of chilled bottles waiting so that we could cut the dust of the trail. The preferred dinner option turned out to have morphed into a chicken, fish and chips emporium (it had previously been a noodle-based Asian outlet), so dinner for Hughesy, given an unwillingness to expend too much time and energy on considering alternatives that aren't overly thick on the ground right in the neighbourhood after eight o'clock on a Sunday night, turned out to be a frozen package Dad had installed in the freezer as a rainy day measure should something interrupt the flow of Meals on Wheels. We'd lunched at Sorbello's in Mackay, so Madam wasn't hungry, but she did opt for a relaxing glass and joined me over a bottle of the 2008 Viognier (RRP $16.90, Epicurean $15.21).