(17-12-2009, 08:56 PM)El Gordo Wrote: I had something new and excellent last night in a restaurant in Nottingham. A shiraz - viognier blend. Weird as viognier is a white grape and shiraz is red. Never heard of the producer before: Red Dot. Australian. MLCM may know of them. Maybe it was the ambience, but this was the best Aussie wine I've had in a long long time.
Yes I can tell you a little about this. Red Dot is a discount label of a McLaren Vale (south of Adelaide) winery called Penny's Hill, who make some very decent wine and seem to specialise in the wine club/mail order/export/discount-warehouse line of business. I've had a few of their wines and they are generally very acceptable and reasonably priced.
The shiraz/viognier blend is very, very trendy here at the moment. It's not strictly speaking a blend in the usual sense, as the grapes are fermented together rather than being blended after the fact. Whether this makes a bee's dick of difference or not I couldn't say. Nice enough wine, however.
Nice as it may be EG, I suspect the ambience probably did have something to do with it!
