Thursday, 27 May 2010
If it's taken me a while to get to the April 2010 C2 Cellar Club dozen, I've got four pretty reasonable excuses. For a start, looking at the list:
2005 Christopher’s Vintage Port
2008 Carlyle Cabernet Merlot
2008 Carlyle Chardonnay (2 bottles)
2008 Pfeiffer Carlyle Shiraz
2008 Cabernet Sauvignon
2008 Marsanne
2008 Pinot Noir
2008 Shiraz
2009 Carlyle Chardonnay Marsanne
2009 Gamay
1999 Chardonnay
there's nothing that leaps out to attract your attention like the first batch of Carlyle Chardonnay Marsanne did. That '99 Chardonnay provides an interesting prospect, but it’ll be a while before it comes into play.
Secondly, there's been the frequently-remarked issue of space in the wine rack. We returned from the southern sojourn with a fair proportion of what we'd taken with us, along with a couple of bottles we'd been storing in the Southport unit. Since my nephew's going to be on site for the next four and a half years if we were going to be trying that Tahbilk 1927 Vines Marsanne or those couple of Grosset Rieslings we were going to need to bring them home with us. Add a dozen bottles of six-year-old Merlot from Kooroomba (would probably have given them the flick pass at $22, but at half price I thought it was good value as an everyday drinking proposition) and the rack was filling up pretty well before the shipments started turning up. There was the quarterly delivery from The Wine Society that needed to be assessed since there's a looming crunch point regarding Hughesy's continued membership and the results of the phone calls from Jim Barry, Thorne-Clark and Paulett which meant that by early April we had a full wine rack with extra cases on the floor.
Creating space in the rack meant that I was busily polishing off odd bottles that had been there for a while rather than looking to try more recent arrivals. I've found that unless I maintain extreme vigilance of the contents we tend to end up with forgotten bottles gathering dust and approaching their drink by dates, though we haven't had many that have managed to get to the past stage.
Creating space in the rack brought the third factor into play. I still don't understand why you can replace a dead bar fridge with something that has a substantially larger volumetric capacity and end up with a container that holds significantly fewer bottles, but that's what we've managed to do. That factor doesn't help when you're trying to get bottles of white out of the rack so they can be chilled prior to serving and you know you want a Clare Riesling, a White Frontignac and an Alicante Bouchet on hand, chilled and ready to serve at all times, and there are a number of better bottles lurking there that we haven't found the excuse to crack yet.
That becomes a significant factor with that '99 Chardonnay, where the cork closure means it's probably better lying on its side in the rack than sitting on its bum in the fridge. Most of those 'better bottles' happen to have cork seals, and the available space at the top of the cork closure section doesn't take standard bottle shapes. Stickies, halves and long narrow rieslings, yes, but not your typical chardonnay bottle that’s a bit wider than most.