Report from - Australia’s First Families of Wine ... May 5, 2011
29 Sep 2011- Details
- Category: On the Road with the Grape Guy
I wrongly kept referring to this event as the Five Families of wine, I guess the Godfather is fully ingrained in my brain; but that wasn’t the name of the event at all. First, this was an Aussie event, not an Italy wine tasting and really what could be feared from the 5 Families of Australia? Too many shrimp on the Bar-b? Were they going to drown us with Foster’s? Or make us watch all of Paul Hogan’s movies, (plus his Subaru commercials)? I'd say we're pretty safe on all counts.
Turns out it was far from 5 families in attendance, in actual fact it was 11 (twelve are part of this organization but absent was the Brown Brothers winery, because they have no distribution in Ontario). According to the "families" mission statement, they got together to “represent 16 Australian Regions across 4 states and between them have more than 1200 years of winemaking experience.” These families have 5000+ hectares of vineyard land between them, and that’s a lot of growing space, they also claim to be the “Guardians of some of Australia’s finest vineyards, most famous wine names and some irreplaceable history.”
The sit-down portion of the tasting was set up in a speed-dating style: each winery got a chance to pour two of their iconic wines to a small assembled mass of ~10 people per go. Every 10 minutes or so a bell would sound and we were told to move tables; not my favourite way to try wine, but definitely an innovative method, which, in truth, I hope we never do again. Anyway, let’s look at the best of these two wines per producer – hopefully you’ll recognize their names. (Find out which wines made the grade - click here)
