Toms Waterhole Wines March Newsletter

We''re Back

This years harvest has been very involved and time consuming. We apologise you haven''t heard from us for a while. We hope you missed us, but now the Newsletter is back with a vengeance. You see, we have been very, very busy and there’s lots to tell you.

Winning from the wine glut.

Anybody with even a passing interest in wine knows that Australia is suffering from a wine and grape glut. Massive over-production caused by a toxic mixture of greed and stupidity has left hundreds of millions of bottles in the warehouses and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grapes on the vines.
So who wins and who loses? The biggest winners are, as usual, the big retailers, Coles and Woolworths who control almost 70% of the Australian wine retail market between them and can name their own prices for the wines they sell. You would think that the consumers would win too, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. Apart from some really nasty cleanskins in the $2.00 to $4.00 range there has been no real fall in bottle shop prices because the retailers have scooped up the benefits.
But one winner has been us!
With the grape glut we have been able to pick and choose our grapes this year. What we have done is, rather than trying to force down the price to the growers we told them that we would pay last year’s price but we wanted only the very best fruit. And they have delivered in spades, which leads us to …

Vintage 2010

Vintage started before we were ready, ten days before Australia Day and for the next ten days we were frantic as the Semillon, Chardonnay, early Merlot and Shiraz for our 2010 Rose buried us under a grape avalanche. Then it all came to a screaming halt with over 80 ml of rain. While we''re grateful for rain at almost any time right now is damned inconvenient. What happens is that the vines soak up the water and dilute the grape sugar. Every 30 mls of rain dilutes the sugar by around one Baume and it takes a week of sunshine to make up that Baume again. Which, to cut a long story short, means we didn’t start again until last week when we picked some of the most extraordinary Shiraz we have ever seen.
We mentioned Shiraz for our Rose. That was forced on us because there’s no Grenache in the district this year but early indications are that the 2010 model with Shiraz will be every bit as good as 2009 but with just a slight flavour twist.

The Great Semillon rush

Many of you our loyal customers will remember the great rating James Haliday gave our 2005 Semillon. We have been a great fan of this variety ever since we started and not so long ago we wrote that in our opinion the 2006 was even better. We refused to release any in 2007 because it didn''t meet our standards but 2008 was right up there with the best, so we thought. All it needed was time.

Starting a couple of weeks ago we began to receive orders for our Semillon from Tasmania. We do have a couple of loyal buyers down there so when we received the first order we didn''t think anything of it. But then we received the next ... and the next ... and the next and then a phone call from a Hobart liquor chain asking us to supply the 2008 Semillon to them in substantial quantity.
What was going on?
It seems that a while back our local wine growers association (the CRVA) put together a tasting pack of wines from our region and sent the pack to some fifty wine journalists all over Australia. Included in that tasting pack was our 2008 Semillon. Now we think our Semillons are good and we have said before that the 2008 is right up there in quality but all too often because it''s not the new thing like Pinot Grigio it doesn''t even get reviewed.
They must be more open minded in Tasmania because in the Sunday Tasmanian Magazine (that''s the magazine for Hobart''s daily newspaper) in the "Fruit of the Vine" column Graeme Phillips reviewed our 2008 Semillon. He gave it a five bottle rating which by his classification is "fabulous" and said this about it:

"Attractive burnished gold colour with a nose showing developed citrus, honey and some slight funky characters suggesting its organic winemaking regime might have included using wild yeasts. The palate is light and full-flavoured backed by lovely refreshing acids running to a crisp clean finish and a long honeyed aftertaste. Lovely drinking, full of character and excellent value."

We couldn''t have said it better ourselves and his comment about the yeast is almost spot on. Almost, but not quite. It''s not exactly a wild yeast but it''s not a standard commercial yeast either and that''s all we''re prepared to say about it.
We still have about thirty cases in stock and we promise that good as it is it will get better.
Buy some before the Tasmanians get it all! Order on line now by clicking here and remember to login to buy at special members discount prices.

Red Rewards

We have just finished a complete review of all the red wines we have, both in bottle and in tank and we are very happy puppies. We’ll tell you more about the 2009 reds next month but what we will say now is that they are very, very big and almost certainly won’t be ready for release for months yet, and maybe even years. This is unfortunate in one respect because we’re down to our last twelve or so cases of 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon and it’s going to be a long time before the 2009 is ready. If you love the 2008 the way we do buy it now. By April it will be gone
But after it’s gone there are some lovely alternatives. The 2007 Shiraz you know about – big, rich, classic warm climate wine – and the recently released Waterhole Blend Cabernet, Shiraz Merlot has come together startlingly well. We had some private worries about this wine straight after bottling but once it recovered from quite severe bottle shock it has integrated beautifully. It’s the classic after work wine. This is the wine that makes the world all right again after a b. of a week.
By the way, there won’t be a 2008 Shiraz. It just wasn’t good enough and we scrapped it a while back.

Festival Time

Ku-Ring-Gai Garden Festival

Once again Toms Waterhole will have a stand at the Ku-Ring-Gai Garden Festival on 13th and 14th March. We will have all our wines on display and you will be able to buy by the glass, bottle or case (we’ll deliver the case). For those who haven’t been to the Festival it’s a great weekend with lots of garden and related exhibitors, some of the best food around and astonishing performances by local school orchestras and bands as well as professional entertainers.
And don’t forget to tell us that you’re on the mailing list for your discount. See the full programme here.

Canowindra Challenge Balloon and Wine Festival

Canowindra, long known as The Balloon Capital of Australia, will be hosting a fresh new balloon festival April 5th to 11th this year.Graham and Jan have been busy organising this for some months. This is during the NSW Easter school holidays. Come and watch the balloons or take a flight and taste our new vintage and join the wine and food twighlight fair from 4.00 pm till 8.00pm on Saturday the 10th. See the full programme here.

Finally, Norwegian Winemakers

Yes, really! This vintage we have working with us two students from Norway, Elizabeth and Espen. They are here for six months as their work experience program for their Food Technology Course at Trondheim CAE. We think that winemaking in Norway is possibly taking global warming projections a little too far but you can read more about them and their experiences on our website.

Well, we could have gone on and on but we’ll leave some for next month. And as we always say,

Good Drinking

Graham, Graham and Jan