Rockford 2011 Alicante Bouchet

I've noted a couple of not quite favourable references to the old Rockford Alicante Bouchet recently, and on every sighting I've scratched my head and remarked that the person making the criticism obviously doesn't live in our neck of the woods.

Hell, if I lived somewhere close to a half way decent independent wine merchant in an area where there restaurants had interesting wine lists with extensive by the glass options I might get a little sniffy about wines like this.

But, for good or ill, I live two hundred kilometres away from a Dan Murphy's in a town where all the liquor outlets are tied to a major chain (ad I can understand the reasons why they would be, the locals tend to buy on price). Pub and restaurant wine lists tend to feature the usual big name corporate suspects and Kiwi savvy blanc.

So if you want something interesting to drink you have to buy it in, don't you?

And when you've started to find things that suit your purposes you're going to stick with them, aren't you?

So the reasoning behind the annual Alicante Bouchet reorder in these parts probably don't apply to the people who posted those recent comments. Low alcohol, lunchtime, fridge friendly, and if you've got more than two people on site when it's opened there's always the option of opening something else.

Suits me.

Rockford 2011 Alicante Bouchet (4.5* $18) Bright translucent red in the glass, attractive fruity bouquet and the usual low alcohol refreshing palate, a degree of sweetness lurking there but it's well in the background. Your mileage may vary but this one almost invariably works in a North Queensland summer environment. That opinion, by the way, has been almost universally mirrored by those I've inveigled into sampling a glass. Excellent under the right conditions.

Bloodwood 2011 Riesling

A few words I don't expect to be able to peck out very often.

We tried this at the winery when it was just out of fermentation and were rather impressed then (not that we had much prior experience to compare it with, you understand).

Now, just on seven months later, the first sample of the finished product is almost certain to have us lining up for more. We're talking a classy Riesling with acharacter that sets it comfortably apart from the familiar Clare Valley styles we tend to go for, but at the same time is just as impressive.

Bloodwood 2011 Riesling (4.5* $28) Pale green-tinged straw in the glass, understated but rather complex floral notes with a smidgeon of talcum powder through the nose and a bright, complex citrus-centric palate that runs along nicely and finishes very nicely indeed. We'll be having more of this one for sure.

Two excellent little numbers

While the retired lifestyle is supposed to deliver plenty of time to do things it doesn't take much to throw a spanner in the works and disrupt the old blogging schedule.

Now, the reader who's familiar with Hughesy's habits will probably leap to a totally unwarranted conclusion when I remark that a recent hiatus in blog activity coincided with a milestone birthday, but the arrival of my brother on the doorstep to assist with the celebrations associated with the milestone had a considerable impact on the publishing schedule.

We collected him from Whitsunday Coast Airport around Friday lunchtime, took a leisurely lap through Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour on the way back, entertained Mr & Mrs Actor over pizzas on Friday night, spent much of Saturday chatting and catching up, took another drive to Airlie for the long lunch on Sunday, took things fairly easy through the actual birthday on Monday and lost a fair chunk of Tuesday dropping him off at Whitsunday Coast, so there was a fair quantity of what might have been writing time gone….

Add to that the decision to acquire littlehouseofconcrete.net and a need to generate some content to start filling it, the start of the process of migrating content from MobileMe to the new site, and you'll see why we've got this backlog of data that needs to be delivered to the various LHoC sites.

There are these two little numbers from the Sunday Long Lunch at Déjà Vu, for example. After some recent experiences I was mildly apprehensive about what I was likely to find on the wine list, since there's nothing about it on the Déjà Vu website, and I suspected we might be finding ourselves in the land of the usual suspects once again.

It only took a brief glance to reassure me, however, and I was in the process of tossing up between a couple of options in the white department before settling on a Tasmanian sauvignon blanc.

Decisions in the rose/red section of the list were a bit more straightforward, since I'd spotted something that had attracted favourable attention during the Rose Revolution promotion earlier in the month and I had suspicions I'd sighted it in Halliday's Hundred the day before.

As far as the Long Lunch was concerned, at $44 for around half a dozen courses it's reasonably good value with one major reservation.

There were three of us at the table, and we found great difficulty demolishing everything on offer. It appears they've catered on the basis of tables of four, since I couldn't detect much difference between what arrived in front of us and what appeared on nearby tables with two and four customers.

Either arrive in a foursome or, if you can't quite muster the numbers, book yourself into overnight accommodation so you can do a carpet snake routine after a big feed rather than climbing back into the car for the homeward journey. I'm not sure whether five or six diners triggers a double helping, but if five doesn't you might find yourself slightly peckish at the end of proceedings.

As far as the food is concerned, the opening antipasto platter was excellent, the calamari that followed it some of the best I'd tried, the mussel dish superfluous and padded out with far more pasta than necessary, the pizza good but not great, the lamb quite excellent and the dessert excellent, though I wasn't able to finish mine (Madam looked after it, however).

And as far as the wine was concerned:

Dalrymple Vineyards 2010 Sauvignon Blanc (4.5* $25) Pale straw in the glass, and from the first whiff of the aromatic herbaceous nose I was firmly on side. Well balanced citrus and passionfruit across the palate, zingy acidity, and a lengthy finish here's a reminder that you don't need to go to New Zealand for high quality cool climate Sauvignon Blanc. One to look for on restaurant wine lists since it doesn't turn up in the local bottle shops (I looked).

Turkey Flat 2011 Barossa Valley Rose (5* $18) Grenache, shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, dolcetto blend that's salmon pink in the glass (looked great from the time the bottle arrived) fragrant aromas through the nose, watermelon and berry fruits on the palate and a well-defined balanced finish summer drinking doesn't get much better than this. Consistently at the very top of Australian roses says Mr Halliday, and there won't be any dissent from this quarter..

Pfeiffer 2011 Carlyle Chardonnay Marsanne

It's interesting how rapidly some experiments become part of the mainstream. Take, for instance, Jen Pfeiffer's decision to blend a bit of Marsanne into a batch of unwooded Chardonnay that seemed to be missing something on the way to a clean, fresh, fruit driven wine.

That was in 2008, and there's been a repeat of the blend in each of the subsequent years, because (as I remarked at the time) it works rather well. Clean pale colour, aromatic nose (and you can definitely pick the Marsanne) and a refreshing wine that's easy drinking.

On that basis I'd reordered the '08 and while the '09 was quite acceptable, I thought it didn't work quite as well, and I suspected  that while the '08 was an attempt to tackle a problem, the successor was a case of matching the formula that worked last time rather than approaching a particular issue with a particular batch from a particular vintage. It was still a reasonably attractive unoaked white but it didn't make me sit up and take notice the same way the '08 did.

It seems the 2010 sneaked past through the mid-year C3 pack that I opted not to sign up for (it doesn't seem to have been included in the C2 selections that landed here, and there's nothing in the fairly extensive electronic documentation hereabouts to suggest it was,)so I'd guess that it walked out the door fairly rapidly (otherwise I'd have guessed it would have turned up in the October 2010 box).

And the 2011 suggests that may well have been the case, because both bottles of this crisp, fresh, unwooded style disappeared with extreme rapidity.

Pfeiffer 2011 Carlyle Chardonnay Marsanne (4* $16.50) The Marsanne comes pushing its way through the nose with definite elements of honeysuckle alongside melons and peaches. Pleasantly aromatic, and that impression follows through across the palate with citrusy young Chardonnay characters to produce a refreshing style for summer drinking. Summer in these parts tends to be the time for Rose and Riesling, but there may well be three or four of these lining up in the box with Mr Gamay.