Month: October 2014

travel planning, with Vino!

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One of the bests part about travel, for me anyway, is the planning. The searching out towns and villages, researching accommodation, planning routes with transport needs, finding interesting and varied things to do, places to visit, surprises found along the way…tripadvisor, booking.com, airbnb, google, etc, etc. I enjoy it so much I sometimes forget I’m not travelling alone! I probably need to keep Rachael in the loop! Hence the wine, the book, the map….time for a debrief! And what better way to do so than with a wine from the region? Except the wine we tried isn’t! It’s from Burgundy, which we visited last year. Never mind, it is French and anyway Bordeaux is expensive, and I don’t want to spoil the excitement before we get there! So…La Chablisienne 2011 Chablis 1er Cru, Cote De Lechet. $40 from 1st Choice. Quite the mouthful, lots of detail. La Chablisienne is a co-operative of growers that have bandied together since 1923 producing wines, coming from a mosaic of vineyard plots, providing a pallet of emotions marked with a …

Behind….dementia!

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The featured photo is of Dad rubbing his hands in glee….”got her”! That’s Mum! About 1954. Before they were married, before 6 kids, before Mum was gone, before dementia! Here they are again in 1988, Dad doing what he does best…..hamming it up for the camera, or the crowd. With Tim on his wedding day, doing his usual. …and again resident DJ, Mozart style! The family at his 80th. Up till now he was still functioning quite well, and if you didn’t know him too well you wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss. But sadly, things were amiss, missing, forgotten… Early onset dementia was the diagnosis a couple of years earlier, whatever that meant? He looked fine, just a little vague. Nothing to be concerned with, nothing? He was a bit like a functioning alcoholic, all calm on the exterior, still playing it up for his audience, probably completely panicked inside. Knowing what lay ahead. Just not how horrible it would be, how hopeless he would become, how dependent on others for every moment of his …

d’Arenberg d’Arry’s Original

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Sometimes when you look at the vast array on offer on the wine list, you thank your small mercies for a trusted old friend that rears up at you, saying “pick me, pick me”. So, I did! d’Arenberg d’Arry’s Original Shiraz Grenache 2010, about $16 pretty much everywhere. Unless its on a wine list, in which case it could, and will, be a whole lot more!! Confession first, I have a very soft spot for d’Arenberg, and more particularly the Original, which used to be called Burgundy. So, yep, I love this humble wine which has never failed to please and impress. What used to be predominately Grenache, now has plenty of Shiraz for the younger set, but this is still an old fashioned wine with plenty of tannin, grip, and old school ‘get down & dirty’ to it. Grenache is quite popular in the McLaren Vale, as in the Barossa, and is usually blended, most often with Shiraz and Mourvedre, becoming GSM. Sometimes its a straight varietal wine, which can be a bit course …