BWFS

Huon Hooke:  The dark art of pairing food with wine Q: People rave on about pairing food with wine, but it's largely pretentious nonsense, isn't it?  A: Matching food and wine is one of those dark arts, one that seems to have few hard-and-fast rules. We all know what we like when we taste it, but what you like could be anathema to someone else. "One man's meat is another's poison" sums up the problem neatly. At an event last year for Barossa Valley vineyard St Hugo, I was amazed to hear St Hugo chief winemaker Dan Swincer declare he didn't like cheese with red wine. Most people do, in my experience. The "wine and cheese night" was quite a fixture in my early days of getting into wine. Thankfully, we've come a long way from those evenings of mousetrap and rough red. At the St Hugo dinner, guests were served Murray cod with shallot, wakame seaweed and peas, and a semi-mature 2004 St Hugo Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon. Some might ...

By Max Allen Riesling Riot There's a beautiful aroma you find in old, well-cellared bottles of riesling, one that is deliciously distinctive but hard to describe. If you've ever stuck your nose into a glass of good, 20-year-old Eden Valley riesling, or a mature golden spätlese from the Mosel, you'll know the aroma I'm talking about. It's sweet, like candied citrus peel or mandarin syrup, but savoury, too, like buttered toast. It's a bit earthy, like button mushrooms. And oily and evocative, like faded sandalwood. But … it's not really like any of these things. It smells of itself: lovely old riesling perfume. The Germans, of course, have a word for this aroma: firne, pronounced "feer-neh". I first heard the term used by energetic and entertaining Mosel winemaker Ernie Loosen at one of the early biennial Frankland Estate International Riesling Tastings in Sydney in the early 2000s. Loosen had poured one of his old spätlese ...

Visitors to Passing Clouds Winery in Musk will soon be able to catch the Daylesford Spa Country Railway to the cellar door.  Passing Clouds, in partnership with Daylesford Spa Country Railway, will receive $30,000 to expand its tasting room and build a railway platform as a stop for the tourist train. The funding comes as part of the state government’s Wine Growth Fund, which will also benefit four other wineries in the Daylesford and Macedon Ranges region. Passing Clouds winery part-owner Cameron Leith said the Wine Growth Fund grant was timely for the industry, as it would help their business overcome challenges through wine tourism.  “Instigating plans in this area can be difficult in an industry that inherently faces difficulties based around cash flow,” Mr Leith said.  “We get a couple of hundred of people through every weekend, but it really is at the point now where we are getting so busy we are actually turning people away. ...