The Winery Josef Orbach of Clare Valley of Australie du Sud

Tina Gellie, Content Manager and Regional Editor (Australia, South Africa, New Zealand & Canada) It was a big year of Decanter travel for me, heading to Napa and New York in June, South Africa in October and most recently a week each in Margaret River and South Australia. These trips have formed the basis of my festive selections. Christmas lunch on North Stradbroke Island (reunited with my family after four years, no thanks to Covid) always starts with oysters, followed by a bucket of prawn ...

I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...

Early reports have suggested a significant frost impact in the Mendoza region, although producers were still assessing their vines. ‘We [are] talking about 10,000 hectares of vineyards affected,’ Mendoza’s sub-secretary of state Sergio Moralejo told reporters on Thursday, 4 November. The Mendoza regional government has declared an agriculture state of emergency after temperatures plunged to as a low as -4 degrees Celsius on Sunday (30 October) and Monday (31 October). The Valle de Uc ...