Wine on Wednesdays – Penfold’s Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet

If you are looking for a pleasant, mellow red wine that you can sip on a summer’s evening,Penfold’s Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet is a really nice, affordable wine that is made by one of the largest winemakers in Australia.

It is made mostly from shiraz grapes (71 percent) mixed with cabernet sauvignon grapes (29 percent). While Australia is known for its wines made with shiraz grapes — usually called syrah here in the US and elsewhere — sometimes the grape can produce wines that are slightly weaker and lack body. The addition of the cabernet helps give the wine structure, so there is a nice balance between the fruitiness of the shiraz and the tannins of the cab.

This particular wine is very affordable. I paid $6.79/bottle at my local wine shop, which included a 15 percent discount for buying more than 6 mixed bottles, well below my self-imposed limit of $7.99/bottle for affordable wines. That’s because it is made from grapes grown from all over South Australia, including Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale and Coonawarra, rather than from a single vineyard.

Like Penfold’s Rawson’s Retreat, this wine has a very berry flavor, with hints of licorice. It is just lightly bitter, but smooth enough to enjoy by itself. Ideally, it would be best is served with beef, lamb or grilled meats, but in my opinion it goes great with just about anything.

The wine loses points for having a screw top cap, but at least that’s better than using plastic corks. Plus, it helps keep the wine fresher if you aren’t going to finish the bottle all at once.

To get maximum flavor, remove the cap and let the wine breathe for about an hour before you are ready to serve it. This allows the wine to oxidize with the outside air, releasing additional flavors.

I always thought that letting wine breathe was B.S., but a Frenchman I used to work with once had me taste the same wine side-by-side as an experiment. One had just been uncorked and the other had been allowed to sit uncorked for an hour. The difference was amazing: The bottle that had been allowed to oxidize tasted about 10 times better than the other one.

I have yet to find a Penfold’s wine that I don’t like. The seem to be very dependably good. And I haven’t even tried any of the wineries more expensive brands. I can only imagine what they taste like!

Wine on Wednesdays – Battle of the Australian Shirazes!

I tend to gravitate toward wines I already know I like.

But on a recent trip to the local giant beverage depot, I decided to expand my horizons and try a couple of new wines.

That’s when I got the idea of having a taste test between two wines from the same varietal, from the same region and at the same price point. I’m calling it the Battle of the Australian Shirazes!

I purposely selected wines I had never tried before and with which I was completely unfamiliar. I did no research prior to tasting them. The goal was to make it as blind a tasting as possible.

The wines I selected were the Oxford Landing Estates 2010 Shiraz from Southern Australia and the Stump Jump 2010 Shiraz from the McLaren Vale winegrowing region, coincidentally also in Southern Australia.

Both wines were precisely the same price: $7.99/bottle, which, of course, is my upper limit for budget wines.

I tasted the wines on consecutive days because I wanted to enjoy each wine fully and also because I’m too cheap to waste wine by spitting it out after tasting it.

I tried the Oxford Landing Shiraz first. It was a decent wine and had a full fruity flavor, like any shiraz should. It tasted better than some of the mass marketed shirazes I’ve had — such as Yellow Tail, Jacob’s Creek and Lindeman’s — but I’m not sure it was that much better to justify it being nearly double the price.

The following night I tried the Stump Jump Shiraz. At first I was a little put off by the twist off cap, but more and more really good Australian wines are featuring these nowadays so it doesn’t necessarily reflect on the wine itself. I just prefer the romance of pulling a cork from a bottle of wine, although admittedly it’s easier to keep wine fresh with the screw caps.

From the very first sniff of the Stump Jump, I realized I was on to something pretty amazing here. It smelled fruity, not at all flowery, and the aroma told me before I even poured it that this wine was going to have a great flavor.

And it did. I was blown away by this wine. It has a dominant raspberry flavor with dark cherry undertones and a vanilla finish, which makes me suspect it is fermented in oak barrels.

A lot of times, inexpensive shirazes tend to have a bitter aftertaste, but not the Stump Jump. It was completely smooth from start to finish.

After tasting the Stump Jump, I would have expected to pay far more for this bottle of wine. At $7.99, it’s a real bargain.

Australia has a lot of great shirazes, and plenty of mediocre ones as well. But I would put the Stump Jump among the best I have tasted at any price point.

Winner of the first Battle of the Australian Shirazes: Stump Jump 2010 Shiraz!

That was really fun. I’ll have to try that again sometime!