The world adores matt hayward

When you think Asian beer garden, you might think outdoor furniture, random chaos, icy cold beer and great hawker food. Hot and stinky, yet the patrons wouldn’t have it any other way. Not so at Cho Gao. Take all the bad things about a swanky, pretentious inner city bar, mixed with all the bad things from a swanky, overpriced pretentious inner city bar and you have Cho Gao.

You could start with the kitschy Chinese decorations, or the faux rustic brick wall on the boucany. Or even go as far as saying $12 for 3 satay skewers is beyond ridiculous. But it’s the lack of service which is truly exceptional. While there are some Asian staff hidden away from sight in the kitchen, the staff here look about as Asian as the token white guy in a Kung Fu movie. Better still, a ham sandwich.

Now an Asian beer garden should have Asian beer. Well think again. They only had Kirin First Press on tap and I couldn’t see any others bottled (well maybe Chang). No Tsing Tao, Asahi or especially my favourite Japanese micro brews.

I can’t personally vouch for the quality of my $21 chicken curry though. Because it never came. The kitchen must’ve loved it so much they took it to the framers. Those that did eat, got their meals 5 minutes before their rice came. When I finally cancelled the meal, about the time my mates were finishing theirs, there was no apology from the head waiter. He was ran off his feet attending a half full restaurant.

If you like a cultural experience devoid of any culture, service without food, over inflated prices and Asians that look like Ginger Meggs, all washed down with $8 tap beer, Cho Gao is the go. Otherwise a lobotomy might be a less painful experience. There are plenty of great, well established Asian bars in Melbourne: Robot, Double Happiness, you name it. This place just puts the Asian in cauc-asian and looks as if it would probably melt in the sun - no doubt before your meal arrives. Avoid.

This year it was a big call for what to match to the Christmas turkey. There were a few cherryish pinots from the Yarra Valley which i’ve grown fond of, but they’re nowhere near ready yet. There are big cab savs, but you’d need a really old one that had a bit of grace about it. This was the year for an odds on bet. I took out a 2002 Petit Verdot.

Make no mistake this is not a trendy wine. For a start it’s from the Murray Valley region, not some glitzy South Australian region. It’s also worth saying that despite the five gold medals on the label (not like the bottle pictured), it cost less than twenty bucks in a corner store. What it was, from this winery and in this vintage, was a sensation.

This verdot, with five years in the bottle, had been aged properly and had lost its harsh tannins. It had a very luxurious fruit/acid balance, with a subtle tinge of cranberry that suits roasted turkey. Mouth finish was viscous and bang on perfect.

If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen verdot anywhere it’s simple. It’s not cool. It’s been an anonymous blender in Bordeaux blends since Adam was a boy and the vine looks like brambles in full bloom. When most wine makers will only mix about 4% of petit verdot with a Shiraz or something red, you get the idea how hard it is to make 100% of it taste great.

So my advice to you is this. If you see a 2002 Trentham Estates verdot, just buy it and drink it now. Don’t go pass go, don’t collect $200. Just get the corkscrew and a nice looking woman. After the requisite five years it’s sublime. You won’t find one. But if you see a 2004 or 2005, I reckon it would actually be better.

If you drink it before hand, it will be a bit more gruff and in your face. But if you’re patient it will royally award you with something very special at a very bargain basement price.

Hey Funkstas, more wine news! Over the summer break, the guys from the Eat It crew couldn’t be arsed and gave some other blokes a chance. Their show was called Plonk, and unlike Eat It, they deprecated the restaurants, fine dining and cooking and got to the heart of the matter: good vino!

For better or for worse, when Cam and the Eat It boys resumed their awesome Sunday show, the Plonk boys lost their gig. RRR couldn’t find any air time for them. But they did think there was enough merit in doing a podcast - thank god!

This is a one hour show and it looks like it will be a monthly podcast. Production quality is a bit naff, but the content is all great stuff. Three panelists talking all aspects of viticulture, tasting, the wine glut, vintages, regions, varietals, food matchings, you name it. The favourite is WWWW, or Wanky Wine Word of the Week! Each week they endeavour to demystify a new listeners wanky vinofile term.

If you don’t know RRR, trust me this is cool community radio. So think young, laid back, totally non commercial and funky. Not old men with overalls and beards talking about things they found in their shed. Well worth a listen. Subscribe to the plonk podcast, or listen to the first episode.

After my third bottle of this over a few months, this is a dead set bloody winner. It’s not cheap, it’s not expensive (probably about $28 if you can find it), it’s just really, really, really good. I seldom mention wines on the old blog, but this is now my undivided favourite red.

Wrattonbully is a region not far from Coonawarra in South Australia. No I can’t think of anyone else with a winery there. In fact this is their first vintage (2003). Unlike a lot of Aussie red wines out there at the moment, it’s not about overripe fruit. Nor is it about alcohol content or ball tearing tannings (a la McLaren Vale Grenache blends and there’s NOTHING wrong with that!). It’s actually the balance of this wine that makes it so good.  The acidity is as close to perfect as i’ve found in any wine. The fruit doesn’t dominate and is just right, and it’s beautifully savory on the palette. Very mellow, not too complex and oh so drinkable. Hollick describe it as elegant, i’m inclined to agree. It’s what a drinkable Aussie red should be.

Don’t know about their passion fruit skins on the palette that Hollick describe though. A bit too high falutin for me . . .

Food wise, the Wrattonbully would work with anything from a pasta to a good old fashioned rosemary and thyme lamb roast. Or for that matter cheese, more wine and shit talking. That I can certainly vouch for.

This one can’t be missed if you’re a Coonawarra red lover. Look for the navy blue wrapping over the cork. I got this as a mixed dozen from the winery. In closing, a few people i’ve spoken to have had mixed emotions about Hollick. All I can say is that the quality is all there and everything i’ve tried is dead set impressive.

Links:

• Hollick Winery on Australian Wine Region Maps
• Hollick’s tasting notes for the Wrattonbully Shiraz

Oh fateful day (well if that isn’t the gayest start to a blog ever). The other day was a a bit of a wine coup d’etat. In one day, I tasted the Penfolds 1997 Grange and a mid sixties St Henri Shiraz. And it provided a very costly lesson - for some more than others.

By talking about this, i’m probably ruining my chances of any other dumb wine luck. But by finding some dusty labelless bottles being in a shop being sold for charity, I came across the mid 60s St Herni shiraz going for a song. Of course the problem was, with a label, it’s pure speculation. Although everyone I spoke to (a Grange specialist on eBay, the Penfolds customer support line and a posh wine store in town) unanimously agreed on the type and approximate vintage. Not a bad acquisition for a few measily bucks. The verdict was simply based on the markings on the bottle, and lack of a punt at the bottom. Apparently up until the 80s, they used really crappy glue on the labels. So it’s at least that old!

How did it taste? For a wine up to 40 years, just pure simple fruit. No tannins, no jaminess or kerosine  you sometimes get with over aged wines. Only pure, simple, divine and well balanced fruit. A very rare experience indeed.

How does this relate to the Grange? Well the store we were at had it on tasting at a highly reasonable $370 a bottle. Well highly reasonable for Grange considering most stores sell it for $450. A couple next to us pondered for a good 20 minutes and bought a case. Kind of sad when that $4500 could’ve bought literally 450 good reds at this particular sale. No doubt those 12 stunning Granges will impress their friends no end. Suckers.

Yes we tasted the Grange, and it was good. Well, it was a base model BMW good. Highly reliable, well put together and full of badge value, but hardly worth the money good. Drive the equivalent Toyota and you’ll wonder if the money was really worth it for that badge.

The lesson learnt is especially while there is still massive over abundance of good fruit, price doesn’t always mean you’re getting the best. Your pallette is the only thing that can tell you that. Failing that, if you learn a bit about wine, you can find bloody good bargains everywhere, even 40 year old ones!

So next time someone tries to impress you with their Grange collection, point and laugh and tell them you know someone that had a 40 year old St Henri for $1. And he couldn’t care less that it didn’t have a label on it! It’s for enjoying with friends, not to big note yourself to mates! And that’s why big dollar wines will never be worthy of their price tag. They’re just trying to turn wine into the next big dollar watch or Louis Vitton handbag.

N.B. Penfolds reckon the only difference between the St Henri and the Grange Hermitage back in day, was the former was barrelled in old oak, and the later in the new.

Australian Wine Region Maps has been around for about 6 weeks now. About 350 wineries in 40 regions have been marked. Thanks to our mate Darby at Vinodiversity.com and a few wine forums, we’re getting there to our initial target of 500 wineries by March. But we need more help!

So far finding wineries within regions has been relatively arbitrary. People keep asking ‘why don’t you just download the Yellow Pages or something?’. If only it was that simple. So many wine regions (especially the Coonawarra region) require expert knowledge, because 200 metres is the gap between one cellar door and the next! A few locals have been up to the challenge and been a great help.

The phone book won’t tell you which is which. It seldom even gives you street number in the addresses. And if you check out some other sites that use Google Maps, the locations are really approximate (eg the middle of a national highway). We’re making a concerted effort to get locations as exact as possible.

Another hurdle is identifying wineries by satellite imagery. In an area such as Sunbury in Victoria, this is a no brainer. Rows of vines stick out pretty clearly in satellite mode, if only because you’re guaranteed only one winery per about 5-10 kilometres. Go to Murray Darling/Mildura and it’s the complete opposite. The Murray region is so fertile that it’s near impossible to identify a winery without local knowledge. Almost every square inch of land is fertile with orchids, vines who knows what else. So there’s a bit of an inbalance between regions.

So if you operate a winery, cellar door or vineyard in the Murray Darling region, or really know your way around, why not drum up some free publicity for yourself and add your site to the maps. You can put a link to your own site from the maps too. Other regions that we could use expertise are the Riverina (NSW), Sunbury (VIC), Denmark (WA) and Tasmania.

Hurrah! It’s finally live for you to check out http://www.australianwineregions.com/

This site, using Google Maps, provides a map for each key Aussie wine region, and pin points selected wineries on the map. This is a personal project that i’ve been working on for a few months.

Some of the features include:
- you can ‘click and drag’ the maps around
- zoom in and out
- get a map, satellite image of a region or both
- generate a printer friendly version
- submit your favourite winery to the site (no doubt it’s probably not there yet. There’s only about 150 in there at the mo’)
- You can create a link directly from your site to any map on ours. So that when you click on it, the region map will load with your winery details showing (see images below).
- Is the winery entry just plain wrong? Well request an update. Easy!

Google’s map service have only been going in Oz since April last year. So satellite imagery is at best patchy in some areas, excellent in others [especially the Barossa (South Australia) and Denmark (Western Australia) regions]. But it can only get better.

So if you’re into wine, operate a winery or tourism board web site, use it to your heart’s content!

Here are a few satellite images generated from the site:

A few weeks back the snow was pretty bad in Victoria. So we decided to drive up to Bright. A town about 3.5 hours out of Melbourne nestled between the snowfields, the King Valley gourmet region and Glenrowan.

The theory was that if the snow picked up, then we wouldn’t waste money going skiing. But if not, at least we were in town and there was plenty to do. As it turned out, we had a few cold days, but the weather was absolutely beatiful - for spring! Fantastic holidaying weather nonetheless.

Some highlights were staying at the Buckland Resort. These 4 self contained studio apartments have everything from an espresso machine to 3 choices of pillows, LCD TV you name it! It was pretty expensive (approx $200 a night per 3 nights) but exceptionally good value. In many ways, these apartments are better than mine! It’s only about 5km out of Bright town, with some exceptional views. So I really can’t recommend this place highly enough.

Restaurant wise, there are two, two hat highlights. Simones of Bright is brilliant. It’s a converted house so it has great ambience and reflects all the great Italian heritiage of the area. Venison mains (venison is big in these parts!) were quite simply unforgetable and their gnoccino (or just plain gnocci) was without doubt the best i’ll ever taste. Not cheap but reasonable. It’s a feed well worth staying in Bright for.

Next we ate at the Villa Gusto resort. Now this is la dolce vita! This place is a completely private Italian villa resort and they go out of their way to make the experience special. If it’s not the Sangiovese library (about 40 different domestic and Italian varieties available) the four course meals, the villa ambience of cosy open fires and second to none service make it all worth while. If I had to choose between the two, Simones is better, but the Villa is the shiznit for a romantic night.

Cafe wise in Bright there is at least one awesome gourmet cafe with a great selection of local gourmet products and wines to buy, plus friggin’ awesome coffee. Definitely not what you’d expect in these parts, and a great epicurean surprise!

We spent a whole day in Milawa, where seemingly even bird crumbs are gourmet. Everything in this tiny two bit down tastes better than if god cooked it. The mustard shop and cheese factory are brilliant. Just so much to try it’s unbelievable. The Milawa Brown Brothers’ winery has at least 40 red, white and fortified varieites to taste, so be warned! Several of which you can’t get anywhere but the cellar door. So bring an esky!

There are some other wineries worth checking out too. Gapstead has an extensive list for tasting. The Petit Manseng is the best buy here. It’s a wine that would go perfectly with Vietnamese rice paper rolls. The pick of the area would have to be the Politini Sangiovese though. It’s everything you like about a Shiraz, in a Sangiovese! Sangiovese really will be the next black and the King Valley are leading the way.

There is an awful lot of varietals around that are just plain Italian (Marzemino, Barbera, Nebiolo and and obtuse though. Bad Wineries? Well Michelini did nothing for us. Try with caution.

Anyway, the country doesn’t have to be meat and 3 veg. Bright, the King Valley and Milawa have some fantastic food and wine going on and make for a fantastic stay all year around. Snow or no show, give it a crack! I for one can’t wait to go back.

Been here a few times now. First time the service was reasonable, for the price paid. But the second time it was well below average. They had the silver service where staff come and pour your tea and top up your wine. Unfortunately on a Wednesday night, they were adamant about taking the tea and wine from the table, but not so demanding on actually making the effort to top it up! This was pretty dissapointing.

Chinese lovers will be glad to know that there’s plenty of dishes on offer, great for sharing (geez a lazy Suzan on the table would be good!) and the duck crepes for entree are unbelievably good. Other dishes are decent but not stand out. David’s makes a great dinner venue for 4-6 people, particularly given that it’s so close to the Jam Factory.

We were also treated to an Arundel Estate Shiraz from Sunbury which I thank them for, because it was Shiraz find of the century. Wine list overall ain’t so bad, nor is the decorum. Biggest problem here is that service. It just plain sucked.

This place gets 3 out of 5. Give it a miss unless you’re in the area.

Ages ago on the Eat It program on RRR radio, they talked about some guy called Cameron doing a wild mushroom hunt by the coast. It’s $45 to basically fossick around roads in Red Hill, looking for edible wild mushrooms. Sounds like a rort but when you match it up to the T’Gallant winery and get a coffee and a nosh up afterwards it was pretty cool.

Firstly I should be honest though. I think I didn’t learn a huge great deal. You also can’t take your mushrooms home because even though this guy Cameron (who also sells wild mushies at the Queen Victoria Markets) is a bona fide boffin,  the risk of accidentally grabbing something wildly toxic is just too great. Infact only about 5% of the mushrooms sighted were actually edible. You certainly do learn a bit about mushrooms that can kill you though. So in hindsight, you don’t come out of the hunt with a PhD in mushrooms, but it’s fun and interesting enough to make you want to go and cook something.

Don’t bother booking lunch at the T’Gallant restaurant afterwards. Because when you get back to the vineyard, they will fill you up with mushroom pizza, very hot mushroom soup and a glass of Red Hill’s most lush pinot noir. It’s meant to be nibbles, but no one leaves hungry! They say that they will cook up your mushies when you get back. But meh they don’t and they probably wouldn’t have time to inspect and prepare them anyway.

Back at the winery there’s also ample tastings of the wineries soft reds, moscatos, pinot grigios and chardies. Frankly though, they looked very overpriced for cellar door prices.  It all works well though, after all this is Red Hill, the Toorak of the Bay and frankly I don’t think the locals who were settling in for a quiet bottle were phased, judging by the new Porsches, an Aston Martin DB7 and a Bentley Continental coupe that arrived in the car park when we finished the hunt! It’s all very chic!

If you choose to do this thing, it should only be on for autumn and you’ll need to wear your sturdiest shoes and warmest clothes you’re usually too cool to wear. And don’t worry about looking cool, that is until you get to the winery.

N.B. Red Hill is about 70 minutes drive from Melbourne CBD and very close to Arthur’s Seat and Phillip Island etc., so yeah, it’s worth the trip.

Links
Mushrooms in May Flyer
T’Gallant Winery