James Halliday’s articles
Hawke’s Bay’s Gimblett Gravels Wine Growing District
French vignerons have a time-honoured saying: “If our soil wasn’t the best in the world, it would be the worst.” Over the centuries, the best cropping and/or grazing soil was chosen first, vines and mustard left to struggle with stone, gravel and...
Penfolds’ California Collection wines
The Penfolds fine wine marketing team is unofficially led by chief winemaker Peter Gago. He’s like the Energizer bunny, utterly inexhaustible, needing only a couple of hours’ sleep a night for a full recharge, and ready by dawn. No matter what he...
How Tasmania’s winemakers weathered the Covid storm
As Australian wineries are moving into the 2021 vintage hopes are sky high that the nightmare of 2020 will be blown away. We are a tough lot, our sense of humour generated by the knowledge that complaining isn't going to make things better. And...
Ricky Ponting’s wines: are they any good?
I am a cricket tragic with a 70-year obsession fed by a fascination with continuous and ingenious coverage via drones, cameras and microphones in cricket stumps, and ever more sophisticated reviews of decisions by umpires. Geoff Merrill is a very...
2009 Egon Müller Scharzhofberger Auslese
This is an outrageously beautiful wine, a strong contender for my Desert Island wine (if you only had one bottle...). Its fruit/acidity/sweetness is like a ballet dancer in Swan Lake, gliding across the senses in an unbroken stream of sheer bliss....
2009 Chateau Thivin Côte de Brouilly (Les sept vignes)
If tasted blind, and told the vintage, the question 'Is this from Burgundy, the Rhône or Beaujolais?' would cause some furrowed brows. One answer (Beaujolais) would attract no one with knowledge of the other two regions. It's a medium-to...
The making of Brown Hill Estate wines
When Jim, Gwen and son Nathan Bailey established Brown Hill Estate in 1995, they chose the name from a 19th century landmark in Kalgoorlie. Brown Hill was one of the claims that made the Golden Mile famous, this speck on the vast map of Western...
The Marks family business: Gembrook Hill wines
My association with the Marks family goes back 75 years to the NSW Southern Highlands town of Moss Vale. I was living with my mother, my father away in the war. There was a large turkey paddock between our houses that much later became the site of...
Adam Richardson, high-flying winemaker
Over the past 50 or so years I have come across many unusual stories of how people have migrated from different careers to the world of wine. One was a nuclear physicist; another a marine biologist; doctors and lawyers, a dime a dozen. Adam...
1998 Guigal Hermitage
Inspired by a recent tasting of Guigal 1979 Cotes du Rhone, a humble blend from the south of France, still flaunting its charms in November 2020. To prevent any misleading comparisons, Guigal Hermitage is a shiraz from the northern end of the Rhone...
