Bringing Down Under Up North

We met on Thursday January 11th at Dave and Marci's for our 2nd wine gathering. Our theme for this month was Australian wines and I was truly impressed with what variety was available, having never before searched for wines in this manner. Dave and Marci used their new wine plates and I was officially impressed by the "presentation" of their food and wine buffet. Delicious and lovely, all at once. Sadly, Matt and Anna had to miss this gathering but we were happy to add Jon and Margaret who wine tasted as a tag team since there was no child care to be found. Margaret was there for the wines and sampling... Jon had to play catch up with a bunch of slightly tipsy folk. Before we officially began Dave poured some glasses of Tim Adams 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon to warm us up on that chilly night.


The Wines:

Bridget and JR's
Angove's Red Belly Black
Chardonnay 2005

Jon and Margaret's
Penfold's Rawson's Retreat
Shiraz Cabernet 2005

Carmyn's
Rosemount Estate
Diamond Label Shiraz 2004

Dave and Marci's
Climbing Wines
Cabernet Sauvignon 2004

Pam's
Mattie's Perch
Chardonnay

My favorites ended up being the Red Belly Black Chardonnay and the Rawson's Retreat Shiraz Cabernet. I didn't dislike any of them. I thought the wine I brought was good the first glass but liked it less on the second. I'm not sure why. My least favorite was the Climbing Wines Cabernet, the the bottle art was quite nice.

To add to the educational aspect of this wine group I found wine notes for each of these bottles ahead of time so we could have something to take if we discovered we liked a particular one. I also found some "wine tasting tips" on the Rosemount Estate site and if you are curious check it out here. One other curious thing I ran across in searching for a good Aussie wine was how many of them feature animals. Apparently this is a new genre of wine to some extent. They call them "critter labels." Read more here.

The evening moved between the dining room and the living room complete with roaring fire. On the stereo were Jack Johnson and later The Magic Numbers but those cds were simply the background to our conversation as Jon and Pam debated and discussed music and the rest of us joined in. One highlight for me was when, out of nowhere, Pam asked if we could guess what was in her pocket. Hmmmmm.... any guesses? Wow, you're right! It was a baby Jesus. It was a grand time and I'm looking forward to our champagne/chocolate celebration in February.