The Home of Renowned Tasting

This site is all about tasting wine (or wine tasting if you would rather) so you won’t find much in the way of news, current affairs, discussion of hot wine industry topics, etc. etc. What you will find is a regular stream of frank and hopefully meaningful tasting notes on current releases and some older wines from the cellar. Maybe some winery profiles every now and then. Most tastings are based on the hundreds of bottle tastings that the Winorama team get through each year. It seems a good idea to have records of these tastings in the public domain rather than just pages and pages of scribble in little pads.

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Profiles

Gary Walsh - Publisher

I can’t bring myself to write an author profile referring to myself in the third person so I’ll just do it this way. I was born in the excellent Bordeaux vintage of 1970 somewhere in the Lancashire countryside and came to Sydney,Australia as a young boy. The abundant sunshine and respite from a diet of chip butties allowed me to grow up (well maybe not) big and strong. I developed an interest in wine as soon as it was legal to drink (if not a little before) cutting my teeth on Tahbilk Shiraz and Rosemount Chardonnay (opps). A four year stint back in England in the early to mid nineties saw me confused by a whole range of European wines that at first seemed a bit fruitless and dry, but I persevered and found that I had a taste for Bordeaux. When I came back home late in 1995 I started cellaring local wines in earnest. Lots of South Australian reds in particular. My tastes have changed since then but generally I find something to like in most wines (not just the alcohol)..well perhaps not Pinot Gris and some of the flabbier white varieties that seem to be in vogue at the moment. I particularly fancy Hunter Shiraz and Semillon, Margaret River Cabernet and Bordeaux. At the moment I am kept busy in my capacity as publisher of Winorama, occasional contributor to Campbell Mattinson’s Winefront Monthly and wine chap for Inside Out Magazine. I hope you have as much fun reading the site as I do publishing it. It’s intentionally light hearted but with serious content - there are too many stuffed shirts in the wine world and a bit of humour might just help things along a little.

Lincoln Scott - Contributing Writer

I am of course more handsome than Gary. I was born in Australia in a rubbish vintage, 1964, but grew up in a very English household, having a mother born in a small Lancashire seaside town. You know the diet: meat and potato in varying forms, and boiled veggies. No wine, only beer, not that I was really interested. We did graduate to ham & pineapple pizza and Chicken Chow Mein, but that was about it. Of course, I am a bit more adventureous nowadays, not only with my food, but with my wine. I do, however, still like lard, especially in a pastry. I will cook you a pie if you happen to drop around. I drank a bit of wine at university, but was not very terribly informed about what I was drinking. I also spent 4 years in England in the early nineties, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t bump into Gary somewhere along the line. What I drank there was beer, and lots of it. I could pick the local beers blind, and blind, could tell if the pint was drawn from the top of the barrel or the bottom, could tell you the age of the beer, and occasionally what had died in the pipes through which the beer flowed to my glass. I returned to Australia in late 1994, reclaimed 5 or 6 dozen bottles of wine that had been stored under my sister’s house. It was not an ideal cellar, in fact it wasn’t a cellar at all, and those bottles were consumed blissfully in ignorance of the damage that had been inflicted on them. I too have moved from SA fruit and oak bombs, and now try to balance my diet with wines from all over the world. I am particularly partial to Burgundy and Southern Rhone blends. I am a hard-marker – I don’t believe in pandering to the local wines, and I live for the day that we can make an excellent Grenache based wine, and for the day when consistently good wine is produced from the Granite Belt.

David Lloyd - Contributing Writer
I was born mid last century in Brighton, South Australia. My dad was an Anglican minister and it seemed a heap of the Hardy (Thomas) family lived in our parish. I was brought up visiting vineyards. My family was full of Arts type people but I had an interest in science from very early on, building a transistor radio when I was about 7 and soon after that I started developing and printing photos. I cut my teeth on Cabernet and was given a huge understanding of it from friends in Coonawarra back in the mid 70’s. However, I fell into the clutches of Pinot Noir at a wine and food dinner that exposed me to a 1943 La Tache. The first Cabernet I made was in 1978, the first Pinot Noir in 1983. The first Gold medal wine I made was a 1982 Coonawarra Cabernet and our Chardonnays and Pinots won quite a few more before we stopped showing in 2002. My wife Wendy and I fell in love with Cru Beaujolais in 1985 but could do little about making Gamay until we (ie Wendy and I ) persuaded the bank of Adelaide to put its money where our palates were in 1995 when we bought a 20 acre property on the Mornington Peninsula. We have continued our obsession with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Gamay at Eldridge Estate.We buy a LOT of wine, mainly Pinot Noir which is sourced from USA, NZ and even South Africa which long suffering friends bring in and share with us. Most wine is consumed in brackets, served blind but once notes have been made we enjoy them with food. If the brackets and group is big enough we may throw in our wine without telling anyone to see how it looks. We have moved on from Cabernet and also avoid Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris. We are closet Zinophiles and enjoy a few Viogniers and as for traditional aussie muscats produced by the likes of Bill Chambers and the late Chris Killeen…..
My love of Pinot Noir and awareness/attendance of events such as the International Pinot Noir Celebration and Pinot Celebration NZ lead me to drag my colleagues into setting up the Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir Celebration which featured Aubert de Villain and the wines of DRC at the 2007 event. The big highlight of my Pinot world so far was being invited to Oregon for a gig at IPNC 06 where I discovered most Americans believe Australia is too hot to make decent Pinot!!?? I also discovered that in 20 years of the event we were only the 14th invitation issued to an Australian Pinot Producer. A great honour after 30 years of winemaking. Yes, I try a lot of Pinots.

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Monday, Feb 11, 2008