Hello All,
Long time no chat. Thought you'd find the below interesting, from my latest mailout.
The Mad Dog
From Brisbane's Courier Mail -
""Seven Brisbane wine tasters - two experts and five ordinary drinkers - were hand-plucked to blind-taste six Barossa Valley Shiraz wines, one of which was the newly released $350-a-bottle 1998 Penfolds Grange.
The stand-out winner on the day was the little-known Barossa Shiraz Mad Dog, made by boutique wine maker Jeremy Holmes and selling for a comparatively cheap $30 a bottle. All but one of the tasters picked Mad Dog as their favourite out of a line-up which included upmarket reds like Peter Lehman Stonewell Shiraz and Yalumba Octavius, not to mention Penfold's Grange."
All wines were tasted masked and the people asked to state which they preferred, and which they thought was the Grange. The result, almost all the tasters, even though they successfully picked the 1998 Grange, unanimously preferred this wine."
Does this article and tasting experience prove Mad Dog is a better wine than Grange, well, clearly no. Will it be as good as Grange in 10 years time, again, no. Does it help prove its an outstanding wine and outstanding value, I say yes.
2001 Mad Dog Shiraz $30 per bottle by the 6 pack
My notes - Lovely 100% Shiraz nose full of powerful fruit, pepper, plums, blackberry and much more, with hints of spice and vanilla. The palate is all power, but from fruit, not alcohol or oak, intense black and other berries along with plums, spice and pepper and balanced oak. The wine has length and persistence and real presence, a roundness in the mouth, mouthcoating tannins and some structure and a long life ahead of it. Alcohol 13.5% Very nice wine, my wife (the talented amateur consumer palate) loved it too.
Lovely story about wine and putting price into context. No attempt to say the wine is better than Grange, but if Grange is too dear, or too hard to find and the price escalates, there is always more good wine!
Cheers
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