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Kind of blue
- Thread starter Thor
- Start date
originally posted by Bwood:
So what.
Hah!
originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:
I am also a big van of the wines made by Stephen George at his Ashton Hills winery - he makes great Pinot Noir under that label as well as my favorite sparkling shiraz in all of Australia. The climate in the Adelaide Hills is very good for grape growing.
-Eden (I bet nobody would have bet that they'd ever read the words "favorite sparkling shiraz" on Wine Disorder)
More than the Seppelt Show Sparkling Shiraz?
Salil Benegal
Salil Benegal
Thanks for the recommendation on Galah. I'll definitely keep an eye out for them - do you know if it's available at retail anywhere on the East Coast?originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:
Other than the fact that it's not exported to the USA, it's downside is that the bottles that do show up here are stupid-expensive. You could almost buy premier cru Burgundy for what a bottle of Wendouree costs. It's one of the few Aussie cult wines that's cultish there but not here. If you want to delve even a little deeper into obscure-land, you'd be wise to seek out anything from a winery called Galah. Winemaker Stephen George is also the consulting winemaker at Wendouree and quite some time ago he worked out a metayage agreement with the Birks family and is able to source fruit from the same vineyards that the Wendouree grapes come from. The Galah wines tend to be a little more forward than the Wendouree releases but they have the same rustic kick that enables them to age seemingly forever. They're probably about as old world as anything gets in Australia.
Another interesting Wendouree-esque style worth looking for is Adelina. Their flagship Shiraz (which costs a good amount less than any of Wendouree's wines) comes from an ex-Wendouree vineyard parcel that's supposed to also have been planted with the rest of the AP Birks vines and used to go into the Wendouree Shiraz or blends at times. The style is definitely more accessible than Wendouree (I opened my lone bottle of their '06 a few weeks ago and was only occasionally wincing at the tannin structure), but it's still built for the long haul and has the same dark coal/leathery/smoky flavour profile as the Wendouree big boys.
Cheers,
Salil (who needs to drink more Clare Valley wine. Unfortunately I drank up the last of my older Leasingham.)
Steve Guattery
Steve Guattery
So, Wendouree is one of Birks' works?
Lou Kessler
Lou Kessler
Wynton Kellyoriginally posted by Joel Stewart:
originally posted by Lou Kessler:
Kind of BlueAlthough I was momentarily disappointed because I thought I would get to listen to Miles again, the post was intersting with some great photos. If you get more detailed info on the Para I would be interested in reading.
By the way I heard Kind of Blue in it's entirety live with some friends many years ago in a joint in Hollywood that doesn't exist anymore. We went on a Saturday night and the album hadn't been release yet so all the #'s were totally new to us. My best description would be that we were all orgasmic listening to the group that evening. We came back on Sunday night (group only there a few days) and listened till the joint closed again at 2am, rode home went to sleep about 4am got up at 6:30 am went to work. As you get older certain things stick in your mind and that's one of them. My main man for many years was Trane. Died to young.
whoah...i'd pass up any wine to have had that experience. i prefer trane's playing around this era, and cannonball was great in this setting as well. who was on piano?
originally posted by Lou Kessler:
By the way I heard Kind of Blue in it's entirety live with some friends many years ago in a joint in Hollywood that doesn't exist anymore. We went on a Saturday night and the album hadn't been release yet so all the #'s were totally new to us. My best description would be that we were all orgasmic listening to the group that evening. We came back on Sunday night (group only there a few days) and listened till the joint closed again at 2am, rode home went to sleep about 4am got up at 6:30 am went to work. As you get older certain things stick in your mind and that's one of them. My main man for many years was Trane. Died to young.
Wow. I'm quite envious.
And now I'll have that in my head all night. Not that this is a bad thing.So what.
I'm not sure I foresee Graeme coming to the States anytime soon -- there's a young'un -- but making the acquaintance of international jet-setter and old-time-WLDG-refugee Mark Meyer might prove rewarding. (Actually, I haven't heard from Mark in eons. Anyone?) He poured me another quite impressive Aussie shiraz the following evening. And then there was the crew at the offline a few nights later, with more.Maybe if I worked someplace where we sat down and tasted often. Or maybe if I moved there.
And better yet, I didn't have to jeeb with Mark Dignam.I was pissed that I wasn't famous enough for someone to open a Para for me when I visited Australia in 2003.
Lou Kessler
Lou Kessler
Obviously you possess impeccable taste. What sad turn of fate drew you to a board like this? Didn't your mother tell you about the company you keep in life?originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Lou Kessler:
By the way I heard Kind of Blue in it's entirety live with some friends many years ago in a joint in Hollywood that doesn't exist anymore. We went on a Saturday night and the album hadn't been release yet so all the #'s were totally new to us. My best description would be that we were all orgasmic listening to the group that evening. We came back on Sunday night (group only there a few days) and listened till the joint closed again at 2am, rode home went to sleep about 4am got up at 6:30 am went to work. As you get older certain things stick in your mind and that's one of them. My main man for many years was Trane. Died to young.
Wow. I'm quite envious.
Steve Edmunds
Steve Edmunds
that you've got monkey glands
Eden Mylunsch
Eden Mylunsch
Godammit...I check in here on my way to going to sleep and then Bwood has to go "so what" and it's one of the only times that it's okay to put "Kind of Blue" on the hi-fi. I hear these songs played in Starbucks and in The Gap and at every fern bar and restaurant and "we-know-wine" bar on the westside and it might as well wallpaper, the "fabric of our lives" or whatever jingle co-opts Miles' work.
But it's past midnight and I've been drinking Austrian pinot (04 Brundlmayer Cecile) and I just got some Prada shoes on eBay for $50 and I'm a little buzzed and there's no traffic and the stereo's been on since about 5:30 yesterday morning and the tubes are all warm and glowing and I can crank it up and my neighbors will neither hear it nor complain. My system isn't so good as to make me think that these guys have become zombies and have resurrected themselves to perform in my *********** but it sounds pretty damn good, with plenty of percussiveness from the bass and some real grip coming from Coltrane's solo on "So What". The high quality, limited edition gold CD really does sound better than the LP on my system, and it's hard to believe that they recorded this album in a studio with florescent lighting, y'know?
"But what does this have to do with Wendouree and the soul of Australian wine?" you might be asking.
As I see it, Australia has been a pretty cool place (figuratively, not literally, unless you want to get into place like the Hunter Valley or the nether regions of Victoria) to grow wine since the late 1700s. Sure, their fear of success (and bankruptcy) created the vine pull scheme of the 1980s that crippled the fine wine, old vine side of the biz forever, but they really screwed the pooch after Parker over-bestowed points on the cultiest of wines in the early years of the current millennium. As Jay Miller rightly pointed out in his recent introduction to his reviews in some wine rag somewhere, the Australians decided to give the customers what they wanted and since those customers were followers of The Wine Advocate, they followed the scent of Mammon and the US market rather than the Oz buyers who appreciated what they'd been making all along but weren't willing to pay enough to buy the winemakers a Porsche or two.
"Bigger is better" goes the saying and the prices rose higher and faster than anything offered in spam emails. I've got it on good authority that the secondary auction market may or may not have been manipulated by people who may or may not have had an educated inkling as to the magnitudes of greatness that would be found in the scores, and this opportunism combined with too many dot.com geniuses with too many dot.com dollars created a juggernaut of escalating prices built on genuine rarity. Winemakers seized on the situation as a means to prove their invincibility and vinous superiority and began charging all the market would bear. Simultaneously (well, pretty much so), the beer companies began buying up vineyards and wineries and the wine biz at one level (cheap-shit critter labels) became focussed on quarterly earnings reports and at the other end on how big a Mercedes the wife wanted to go along with your Porsche. The low end killt itself off in a mad quest for market share while the super-ultra-premium side did a good job of pricing itself out of the market. All of this was done under the aegis of a government plan to turn Australia into the world's greatest wine exporting nation by about 2025. They achieved this goal sometime in the last five years but did so by stressing quantity over quality in a Machiavellian quest for dominance.
It was very similar to the situation that Boffer Biggs found himself in, lo these many years ago in the Ambrose Bierce story.
We're about five years into the Aussie wine biz hangover and there are a bunch of people running around wondering why they're wines get good scores but they hit the closeout bins before they'd been even brought into the store. And the Australian wines are more diverse and interesting than ever. Interesting (and tasty) pinots are coming from the Mornington Pennisula that are more than credible (yet not to the point of being incredible) and regions such as Orange and Heathcote are producing wines that are quite interesting, but aren't exactly reminiscent of things we've tasted from the Old World. Which brings us back to Wendouree (you knew I'd get here eventually, didn't you)!
Wendouree never got caught up in the mess. Their wines were already in such high demand that someone would have to die before a space would open up on the list. They are earthy, rooty, and minty with enough tannic structure to pass for Madiran and they lack overt frootiness and there's little hedonistic about them. When you'd see them in a wine shop, there'd always be a premium placed on the price. They were valued by the locals and since they didn't appeal to the Parkeristas, they weren't scooped up by the grey marketeers and speculators. Same thing with Mount Mary, Giaconda, Yarra Yering, and other codger wines that were revered in Australia but received scant attention over here. These producers (and many others) would probably delight FL Jim and others who've sworn off their Australian wine hangovers (physical and financial) forever, having been burned too many times. It's their loss, but an understandable one, and the Australian wine industry is just now beginning to wake up to what they've done to themselves.
Omnipresence is not a good thing for art. The ubiquitous nature of "Kind of Blue" makes it seem less special when I hear it and any day now I expect to hear a version of "Flamenco Sketches" (my favorite track) remixed by the Black-Eyed Peas or Timbaland in the background of some feminine deodorant spray commercial during American Idol. Cool. More money for the Davis estate. Penfolds may make Grange in quantities measured in acre-feet, but it's still good, as "Kind of Blue" is still good. But at some point it gets to be about more than what's in the bottle (or in the grooves) and it stops being fun. And fun is what's missing from Australian wine these days - the sense of newness and undiscovered treasure in the bottle. It's sort of there, but you've got to know where to look, just like everything on "Kind of Blue" is the Voice Of God or that (suprise!) not every track on "The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions" needs to be put on the iPod.
-Eden (I always liked "In A Silent Way" more than "Kind of Blue" anyway)(and Steve G, they're indeed technically "Birk's Works" but I'm getting kind of dizzy at this stage so will wait until tomorrow to complete this thought)
But it's past midnight and I've been drinking Austrian pinot (04 Brundlmayer Cecile) and I just got some Prada shoes on eBay for $50 and I'm a little buzzed and there's no traffic and the stereo's been on since about 5:30 yesterday morning and the tubes are all warm and glowing and I can crank it up and my neighbors will neither hear it nor complain. My system isn't so good as to make me think that these guys have become zombies and have resurrected themselves to perform in my *********** but it sounds pretty damn good, with plenty of percussiveness from the bass and some real grip coming from Coltrane's solo on "So What". The high quality, limited edition gold CD really does sound better than the LP on my system, and it's hard to believe that they recorded this album in a studio with florescent lighting, y'know?
"But what does this have to do with Wendouree and the soul of Australian wine?" you might be asking.
As I see it, Australia has been a pretty cool place (figuratively, not literally, unless you want to get into place like the Hunter Valley or the nether regions of Victoria) to grow wine since the late 1700s. Sure, their fear of success (and bankruptcy) created the vine pull scheme of the 1980s that crippled the fine wine, old vine side of the biz forever, but they really screwed the pooch after Parker over-bestowed points on the cultiest of wines in the early years of the current millennium. As Jay Miller rightly pointed out in his recent introduction to his reviews in some wine rag somewhere, the Australians decided to give the customers what they wanted and since those customers were followers of The Wine Advocate, they followed the scent of Mammon and the US market rather than the Oz buyers who appreciated what they'd been making all along but weren't willing to pay enough to buy the winemakers a Porsche or two.
"Bigger is better" goes the saying and the prices rose higher and faster than anything offered in spam emails. I've got it on good authority that the secondary auction market may or may not have been manipulated by people who may or may not have had an educated inkling as to the magnitudes of greatness that would be found in the scores, and this opportunism combined with too many dot.com geniuses with too many dot.com dollars created a juggernaut of escalating prices built on genuine rarity. Winemakers seized on the situation as a means to prove their invincibility and vinous superiority and began charging all the market would bear. Simultaneously (well, pretty much so), the beer companies began buying up vineyards and wineries and the wine biz at one level (cheap-shit critter labels) became focussed on quarterly earnings reports and at the other end on how big a Mercedes the wife wanted to go along with your Porsche. The low end killt itself off in a mad quest for market share while the super-ultra-premium side did a good job of pricing itself out of the market. All of this was done under the aegis of a government plan to turn Australia into the world's greatest wine exporting nation by about 2025. They achieved this goal sometime in the last five years but did so by stressing quantity over quality in a Machiavellian quest for dominance.
It was very similar to the situation that Boffer Biggs found himself in, lo these many years ago in the Ambrose Bierce story.
We're about five years into the Aussie wine biz hangover and there are a bunch of people running around wondering why they're wines get good scores but they hit the closeout bins before they'd been even brought into the store. And the Australian wines are more diverse and interesting than ever. Interesting (and tasty) pinots are coming from the Mornington Pennisula that are more than credible (yet not to the point of being incredible) and regions such as Orange and Heathcote are producing wines that are quite interesting, but aren't exactly reminiscent of things we've tasted from the Old World. Which brings us back to Wendouree (you knew I'd get here eventually, didn't you)!
Wendouree never got caught up in the mess. Their wines were already in such high demand that someone would have to die before a space would open up on the list. They are earthy, rooty, and minty with enough tannic structure to pass for Madiran and they lack overt frootiness and there's little hedonistic about them. When you'd see them in a wine shop, there'd always be a premium placed on the price. They were valued by the locals and since they didn't appeal to the Parkeristas, they weren't scooped up by the grey marketeers and speculators. Same thing with Mount Mary, Giaconda, Yarra Yering, and other codger wines that were revered in Australia but received scant attention over here. These producers (and many others) would probably delight FL Jim and others who've sworn off their Australian wine hangovers (physical and financial) forever, having been burned too many times. It's their loss, but an understandable one, and the Australian wine industry is just now beginning to wake up to what they've done to themselves.
Omnipresence is not a good thing for art. The ubiquitous nature of "Kind of Blue" makes it seem less special when I hear it and any day now I expect to hear a version of "Flamenco Sketches" (my favorite track) remixed by the Black-Eyed Peas or Timbaland in the background of some feminine deodorant spray commercial during American Idol. Cool. More money for the Davis estate. Penfolds may make Grange in quantities measured in acre-feet, but it's still good, as "Kind of Blue" is still good. But at some point it gets to be about more than what's in the bottle (or in the grooves) and it stops being fun. And fun is what's missing from Australian wine these days - the sense of newness and undiscovered treasure in the bottle. It's sort of there, but you've got to know where to look, just like everything on "Kind of Blue" is the Voice Of God or that (suprise!) not every track on "The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions" needs to be put on the iPod.
-Eden (I always liked "In A Silent Way" more than "Kind of Blue" anyway)(and Steve G, they're indeed technically "Birk's Works" but I'm getting kind of dizzy at this stage so will wait until tomorrow to complete this thought)
I'm an "In a Silent Way" guy too; my favorite Miles album. I guess, however, that I'm lucky in that popularity doesn't affect my ability to enjoy something. Ubiquity can but since I'm never in a Starbucks -- in fact, I rarely leave the house -- I can't say that I'm oppressed by its everywhereness.
In an offline a few days after this one, both a Mount Mary (my first) and a Veritas were offered, blind (most of the wines were blind that night, partially at my request). I think most modern drinkers would have preferred the Veritas, and on the night it was probably a "better" wine by the standards of those same moderns, but there was no question but that I preferred the Mount Mary by a wide margin.
Except for the secondary market-manipulation part, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising but is, this all tracks with what I've learned about Australia, and in fact a lot of it was mentioned in dire tones by some of the people I met down there a while back. It's a shame, though. And among the many, many times that New Zealand winemakers will insist that they've gone out of their way to not take their inspiration from Australia*, this is one of the least-mentioned but most important.
* Of course, they've dabbled with it in Marlborough, with predictable results.
In an offline a few days after this one, both a Mount Mary (my first) and a Veritas were offered, blind (most of the wines were blind that night, partially at my request). I think most modern drinkers would have preferred the Veritas, and on the night it was probably a "better" wine by the standards of those same moderns, but there was no question but that I preferred the Mount Mary by a wide margin.
Except for the secondary market-manipulation part, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising but is, this all tracks with what I've learned about Australia, and in fact a lot of it was mentioned in dire tones by some of the people I met down there a while back. It's a shame, though. And among the many, many times that New Zealand winemakers will insist that they've gone out of their way to not take their inspiration from Australia*, this is one of the least-mentioned but most important.
* Of course, they've dabbled with it in Marlborough, with predictable results.
Lou Kessler
Lou Kessler
Seeing as how my direct mention of Miles and his rendition of Kind of Blue has turned this thread into a small Disorder classic, will I get a share of the residuals earned by you due to my brilliant collaboration? Times are tough.originally posted by Thor:
Kind of blue< (3/05)
Salil Benegal
Salil Benegal
What's happening in Orange? I've only tried a couple of Rosemount Estate Shirazes from there that were pleasant but not much more.originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:
Interesting (and tasty) pinots are coming from the Mornington Pennisula that are more than credible (yet not to the point of being incredible) and regions such as Orange and Heathcote are producing wines that are quite interesting, but aren't exactly reminiscent of things we've tasted from the Old World. Which brings us back to Wendouree (you knew I'd get here eventually, didn't you)!
Really excited about some of the things being produced in Heathcote. Some of the Shiraz being made by Carlei and Hanging Rock is absolutely stunning, and I can't wait to see what some of those will turn into with some age.
Re. Mount Mary, Giaconda and such receiving such little attention in the States, the pricing probably plays a part in it here. I've heard lots about both producers and would love to try their wines at some point - but I very rarely buy any wine at that price point (and if I did, there'd be some other producers that I'm more familiar with like Henschke or Donnhoff I'd turn to first, depending on what I was looking for). The amount of other wine options we have in the US at those price points (and much lower ones) makes those pretty hard to justify buying. In Australia the situation isn't the same as most of the other wine options either aren't on shelves, or are marked up far higher thanks to the ridiculous duty rates on imported wines.
- Salil
Steve Guattery
Steve Guattery
Eden - Thanks for the link to the Bierce story. I read and enjoyed a lot of Bierce back in my high school days thanks to Dover editions, but I hadn't read "Oil of Dog" before. What a treat.
As for Miles, I'm a fan of "Kind of Blue", and I can't recall ever objecting to hearing it, though in this part of the world we don't have many of the kind of commercial establishments that overplay it. My problem is that when I hear it, it sucks my attention away from whatever else I'm involved with at the time. I certainly envy Lou for having heard it performed live. I don't particularly favor Miles from any period; he produced so much great music. That said, let me put in a plug here for the mid-60's quintet. If you haven't listened to the complete live recordings from the Plugged Nickel in 1965, check it out. Fuckin' A wow.
As for Miles, I'm a fan of "Kind of Blue", and I can't recall ever objecting to hearing it, though in this part of the world we don't have many of the kind of commercial establishments that overplay it. My problem is that when I hear it, it sucks my attention away from whatever else I'm involved with at the time. I certainly envy Lou for having heard it performed live. I don't particularly favor Miles from any period; he produced so much great music. That said, let me put in a plug here for the mid-60's quintet. If you haven't listened to the complete live recordings from the Plugged Nickel in 1965, check it out. Fuckin' A wow.
Arjun Mendiratta
Arjun Mendiratta
Another recommendation for Live at the Plugged Nickel. It takes a bit of work, but, wow.