Your best buy is the Karrawirra Barossa Valley Shiraz 2021 though being so certain in my opinion is worth investigating.
From the 1960s-1970s consumer wine magazines tested this need, so let’s note that Wine and Spirits, the U.S. magazine (est.1984) published the final print edition in May 2024. And recall Australia’s last consumer guide, Winestate, folded a few years back.
For reasons that puzzle me, why is it that offering and paying for such advice about the ‘best buys’ never moved on-line?
Wine bloggers conventions date to 2008, four or five years after the first blogs appeared. Yet these blogs were never about the best value at Traders Joes or Aldi or Woolworths. No, they were about enhancing the writers self-worth with pointless tasting notes and adoration for a couple of battlers trying to make a living from some remote vineyard-winery. The words price, value and consumer are never mentioned.
The internet created wine bloggers so from the early 2000s the numbers grew and grew, enough for a Wine Bloggers convention in California in 2008.
Now a feature of the comradery of bloggers is providing a list of other sites they approve of and on intrepidwino.com this reads, Do Bianchi, Full Pour, Grape Observer, hawkwakawaka wine review, La Donna del Vino, Que Syrah, Q Wine, The Vino Geek, The Vinsommniacs, The Wine Idealist, Vino Notebook, Vinofreakism, Vinography, Wine Muse, and Australian Wine Review.
What the thinking is behind these 16 sites and the thousands of others I am not sure, apart from what they do which is leave a record of wines that meet with their approval. Using the internet or Facebook for a personal indulgence is fine though my view that bloggers would offer consumers insights into where, how and what to buy never happened.
And for me that is the problem. What the internet instead provided is a self-indulgence of no help to the commonsense drinker. The blogs are all about them, a personal journey and never about discovering a decent, cheap drink for all. Why did I imagine it would be anything else?
Glug began in 2004 as a blog though the aim was to create and discover wines that gave customers value. By then I already knew this could only be achieved by making wine and buying wines made by others ex-barrel versus selling branded wines. To remind you, nowadays the wine in that $50 bottle drops to $4 a litre in the bulk market.
That is how Glug trades as shown in wines as diverse as Goat Square Barossa Valley Cabernet 2021 and Crayford Barossa Valley Grenache 2023. To answer my opening query. I enjoy writing about wine yet the real expression of knowing wine is in the doing, made easier with 2000 wineries making high quality wines with their vintage left-overs being offered in the market place.
So, Drink Widely Drink Well
David Farmer
