To bastardise the words of Aeschylus, Hiram Johnson or Oliver Stone, the first casualty of wine is integrity. An almost inevitable result of the spate of mergers and acquisitions that seemed to characterise and redefine the Australian wine industry around the turn of the century was the loss of many of the things that had led to the companies involved being worth so much money.
Read MoreIt doesn’t take much to make me want to open a good bottle of wine, but reminiscing about great bottles past is a sure fire way to make me grab a corkscrew and head down to the cellar. Mention of the bottle of 1992 Yalumba Octavius Shiraz that returned with me from Australia started me thinking that it was about time that I tried a bottle from the case of the 1996 vintage I bought ten or twelve years ago.
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