A Young Red Wine Has to Rip Your Throat Out for it to have Any Cellaring Potential at All
Wrong, absolutely wrong. For a red wine to cellar you need to be able to taste it along the whole length of your palate, it requires clean acidity and a harmonious balance of fruit with oak and tannin. By which I mean that neither should over-dominate the others. Sure the traditional Aussie rough red has stacks of everything and enough tannin to all but destroy the lining of your mouth, but in the best examples there’s a comparable amount of fruit as well. Besides, so many wines are more supple, finer-grained and tighter, yet have the balance and fineness both to drink young and to cellar with confidence.
Pinot Noir is a Wine for Wimps
How to guarantee a fight over dinner. There’s no denying that Australian winemakers got pinot noir quite wrong for the first decade in which it was made in any sort of volume, but that’s rather changed somewhat. While its colour may be comparably pale and its structure fine-grained and restrained, top pinot noir is indeed a seriously full-flavoured red wine with power and strength. Just be prepared to pay a little more for them.
All You Need to Do to Breathe a Red Wine Properly is to Take the Cork Out from the Bottle
No way. When you breathe a wine you’re hoping for some of the pongier smells often associated with reduced sulphur to escape into the atmosphere, while you’re also hoping that a little oxygenation sharpens up some of its flavours. How small is the aperture at the top of a bottle? How on earth will all this gas exchange occur throughout its entirity, especially when some of the wine is around 20 cm from the tiny hole? You need to tip the wine into something preferably made of glass and spotlessly clean, with as wide a surface area as you can get. That’s why decanters, and even glass jugs are ideal. The bigger and the younger the wine, the longer it needs.
You Can’t Have Red Wine with Fish
Says who? While I’d only serve red wine with sweeter and more delicate fish provided it was a restrained, lighter pinot noir or gamay and if I’d tested it beforehand, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t pull out a serious red with tuna steaks, rich seafood casseroles and spicy Asian fish dishes. Go on, give it a try.
There is a Grape called Cabernet Shiraz
No there’s not. Winemakers have this infuriating habit of not naming certain grape varieties in full from time to time. Cabernet sauvignon and its relative cabernet franc are both often abbreviated to just ‘cabernet’. So, when either of these grapes are blended with shiraz, Australian winemakers have no hesitation in labelling the wine as ‘Cabernet Shiraz’. Confused? Hopefully the back label explains all.
