Whining about wine

This evening we sat down to watch the ABC programme (see, I still spell the old difficult way) Talking Heads where the head was Stephanie Alexander. I f you don't know who she is, use Google with Australia selected.

The show was most interesting and we broached a second bottle of Wolf Blass Eaglehawk bubbly.

Bugger - it was corked! Not so much that we couldn't finish it, but enough to sour our enthusiasm for Australian wines and their glut-induced cheap prices. You may or not know that we do imbibe the odd bottle of Aus. bubbly? We do.

Damn it, we estimate that one in ten bottles of Australian bubbly (can't call it Champagne these days) is either corked or lacking bubbles. They must be cranking it out by the thousands daily and I guess there should be some crook ones. A mate of mine has gone over to the terribly crass screw-tops and tells me that he hasn't has a dud in years. At least with corks you have the semblance of class even if the odd bottle is dead.

You can take a dud bottle back to the bottle shop without any hassle, but it is so cheap that we end up either putting up with the taste or pouring it down the sink.

One trick we employ when we try a suspect bubbly is to say that it is very similar to a French Champagne we tried when touring France....and we did try quite a few.