The world adores matt hayward

For those of you who know your wine, you will know that Tahbilk has some of the best vines in Australia. Their range toppers go back to 1860 and their Marsanne vines are probably some of the finest in Oz.

If you give the old Liqourland a cursory glance over the wine shelves every now and then, you will know their standard stuff well. Their Marsanne, Shiraz and Cav Sauv. What you should know is that this is literally the tip of the iceberg. Tahbilk are a family concern and seem far more concerned with the cellar door than selling out to the retail chains. They must have around 30 wines for tasting at the door.

Highlights
Of what was on offer, we must’ve tasted about 15. Their 1990 Shiraz/Malbec is sublime and quite reasonably priced (around $30). Malbec by itself is a bit so so, being a very light red (7% alcohol and lacking tannin) but combine the two and you’re so in business!

New to their range is their Sparkling Mousanne. It’s a bit yeasty, being their first vintage, but this is sure to become a classic. Quite simply there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s very different, but if you like your dry whites, it’s worth the drive alone.

New Sparklings
Also the new Tahbilk Sparkling Shiraz is remarkable. For sparkling lovers, this is not quite so intense with the fairy floss flavours of a freshly cracked bottle. It has all the pluminess of the non sparkling but is perfectly blended. Leagues apart from other Aussie sparkings which polarise wine lovers at the best of times.

Huge Variety
Some you will never see on the shelf are their [reds] Sangiovese, 1860 Old Vines Shiraz, Cabernet Rose [whites] Roussane, Verdelho, Viognier, Sauv Blanc and a few fortifieds. Arguable the biggest non-corporate, estate grown range of wines offered from a single winery in Australia. And to boot Heathcote, full of great cool climate Shiraz is just down the road.

The Restaurant
The cafe/restaurant just a short walk from the cellar door is absolutely picturesque. If you have some rellos coming from overseas and want to show them something Oz yet beautiful, drive straight from the airport here. Both times i’ve been there, the food on offer was baguettes, gourmet pastries etc. but not to their discredit. They were of the best quality the region has to offer. Living proof that there’s pies and there P I E S.

The Chateau buildings around the place are worth a look too for history boffins. It’s also by the Nagambie lakes, very pretty and there’s the unique (but crappy wine) Michelton winery down the road. It’s roughly a 90 minute drive from Melbourne central.

Walking around Tabhilk, you don’t see any of the hyper industry that you do around Penfolds, Zilzie, Lindermans and Jacobs Creek. No 20 story silos or ominous looking shit that belongs mor on an oil refinery than a winery. It may not be organic but it’s smaller scale and honest and that’s what counts

So quit buying your wine from a rip off, surface scratching supermarket chains and get to the source. Go to the winery, and make a day of it. Buy yourself a case of good estate grown Victorian wine and get into it! It’s cheaper and it’s a lot more fun when you see where it comes from.
http://www.tahbilk.com.au/

Make no mistake, this is a rant. As if the current Mitsubishi Magna isn’t a bad enough example or corporate turd polishing to make an outdated square fit into a round market peg hole, now Audi are doing it too! Enough of the corporate rhinoplasty already!

Cars for years have had similar elements without having the same front across the range and have done well for it. In the early nineties, put a Bluebird next to an R33 sedan and you see a resemblance. Or the BMW range all had their distinctive kidney grille without having the same everything across the range. Their was a family resemblance, but no ghastly hand me downs.

Mitsubishi, Audi and GM are by far the worst corporate nose job offenders. WHY did Mitsu’ feel the need to made EVO 8 have such a god damned ugly nose the same as their Pajero 4WD? Sure some of this is subjective but cars are not about a corporate ethos, they are about reflecting the attidude of the individual. Frankly I think the Evo 6 and 7 are far better, butcher looking rides than the Evo 8 which looks like a lopsided plaster paris experiment gone wrong. The Pajero and Evo are strengths to the badge but disparate and exclusive; symbiotic but siblings that don’t need (or want) to share the same limelight.

GM are becoming offenders with their Saab grille on the Saabaru and their new Saab SUV. Audi have this atrocious grille, albeit subjective, I loathe the bastard.

Loathed to admit to it as I am, perhaps Honda and BMW do it best and everyone else is just trying too hard. An S2000 and an Accord go together. So too a Z4 and the X5. You look at these cars and you know who makes them. They’re subtle and the rest are overt. And subtlety speaks volumes in enduring style.

Michael C Ruppert is like the Shaft of the consipiracy theory world. He’s a bloody legend. I got onto him because in 2002, someone gave me an MP3 of one of his lectures. He’s been doing lecture tours around the world since 2001 as well as maintaining the fromthewilderness.com web site. This book is in part, several extracts from that web site’s manifestos over the past 3 years.

Speculation is not his thing and he proudly starts a lecture proclaiming that the FBI or CIA have never formally denied any of his claims. If that wasn’t enough, he tells you that he’s an ex LAPD who was well on the way to making rank as detective. Early on he tells you how he was shot at by drug running CIA operatives who worked for Cheney’s Brown and Root in the late 70s.

What this book is specifically about is Peak Oil. Or more so, the fact that oil production peaked many, many years ago. Which puts us, the humans in a really fuck off bad place. Because, as he points out, oil just doesn’t power your car, it powers the powerpoints and makes the plastics that virtually everything is made from - or wrapped in. So with so little oil left (and the remaining oil being so bloody hard to get to. Very, very hard in fact).

Now, all we need is an evil tyrant to take control of what’s left and throttle it out. Oh, and wouldn’t it be helpful if we killed off a shit tin of people so there’d be more oil to go around? Bonzer! Enter George Bush’s Empire. Tyranising the world, through it’s oil fields and keeping it inline with terror.

Invariably, this will get typecast as a 911 book. But it doens’t talk about missiles hitting the Pentagon and other salient theories. What this book does is establish a case against the Bush Administration for having a LOT to gain from such attacks taking place. This includes, and is not limited to:

- getting to loot social security funds in the advent of an emergency (eg a terrorist attack)
- putting military bases where oil fields exist and/or pipelines are requried, so long as the oil field owners look like terrorists and evildoers. And who woulda thunk the oil fields all belong to ‘terrorists’! wow!
- advancing their own corporate profiteering interests (Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Brown and Root, all who have MASSIVE Department of Defense contracts).

From the get go, Ruppert spells out this book takes the approach of a detective preparing a court case and the final chapter takes the “ladies and gentleman of the jury. . .” tack. He himself has had an interesting life and met some ne’er do wells in the making of the book. It was written over about 2 years (2002-2004). So much so that the last chapters revisit what he’d written two years ago.

Perhaps the most provocative topic explored is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were VERY much in control and directing the events that had happened on 911, Rummy in particular. Cheney had setup several war game excercises to distract and confuse NORAD and the armed forces that day. He also points out the high probability that the planes were actually remote controlled on the day and even identifies a company that could’ve supplied the technology to do so.

Let it be said, this book covers a LOT of ground and goes into a lot of extracts from his newsletter and at times can be very verbose. There’s sections on where the oil is now and what the US is doing to get it, the Patriot Act, the death of several world class microbioligists all working on germ warfare and vaccines, you name it. It can get quite overwhelming.

Ruppert puts forward a pretty compelling case in this 600 page manifesto. Whilst I question a lot of it, such as his claims about Promis software, quite a lot more is definitely plausible. One thing that really sticks out is that his theory about the Saudis in particular is that their plan is to scare them out of town, leaving their lucre in the bank. As Michael Moore points out in Farenheit 911, they own a huge chunk of the US ecomony, I think some 7%.

Anyway, back to the Shaft thing, Ruppert is very unpretentious and modest, though he makes some audacious claims. There’s a lot to take in here, and it may even be worth two reads, but you really feel up to date once you’ve read it. Almost enlightened. Well worth a read- in fact a must read.

Jamon is what eating out should be all about. It’s minimalist, small and cosy and exceptionally good.

Unlike most restaurants, the chef is right in front of you. For the real experience, you can sit at the Sashimi bar and watch your meal unfold before you. As far as size goes, if they had 20 people in they’d be packed. So you’re always assured coziness and personalised service.

There are no menus here, which is fantastic! The bloke who owns the place is the chef and has been doing Jamon since ‘97. So he knows by the look on your face whether you like it or not. If you like it, the next course will build up on that ingredient. If not, you don’t see it again. So you’re not locked into a set menu.

Fortunately too, if an ingredient is below average or out of season, he won’t stock it. Chef only stocks absolute minimal quantities of fresh ingredients. Often regulars are SMSed to tell them that their favourite ingredient is in and mightn’t be this good again for many months, so get in quick! Suffice it to say what’s on offer changes regularly, as opposed to getting masses of frozen food in.

As far as $ go, there’s a regular, deluxe or gourmet set price. Regular is $55 a head. We must’ve had about 7 or 8 courses of sashimi and rolls all made to our palletes in front of us. The regular was so sumptuous that the gourmet must be pure sin. We left absolutely full as a boot, no room for desert.

Worth noting is regardless of whether you’re coming for a good time, or a long time, tell the chef. He’ll time the courses accordingly so you’re on the way to your show no probs.

From memory, I think the gourmet set menu was about $100 a head. That’s all the sublime shellfish and what have you. Likewise they have a wine list that caters from good local pinots and Sauv Blancs right up to great Traminers and top shelf French stuff for the gourmet foodies.

Frankly you can’t fault this place. If you like a bit of spontinaeity, trying new combinations and ingredients and have a Japanese bent, come here. You’ll have trouble leaving.

Absolutely 6 out of 5. Best dining experience in a long bloody time.

A downright dissapointment. My girlfriend told me that this place was a real, home cooking style Japanese restaurant experience.

While the food wasn’t bad, they didn’t have many covers for the night (probably about 20 while we were there, on a Saturday) and we waited ages for the entree. And when food did come, we got our mains before Sashimi entrees because the sushi chef was too busy. For some reason, the staff were just out to lunch. Hopefully we caught them on a bad night. It sounded like one of their chefs walked out on them.

They should be commended for their liberal use of organic veges and the food was at least on par with Misuzus and Eis down the road - though Eis is still king.

3.5 out of 5. Fuck epicure magazine.