There’s much more to golf than improving your swing and perfecting putting. Yes, there’s always that primal instinct of sport – the challenge and exhilaration of competition, whether you’re watching or playing. Then there are those who simply enjoy a hit, inhaling the fresh air, soaking up the scenery, exercising the body and brain – socialising, eating… drinking. In absoluteness, the ultimate day of golf goes beyond the greens to which this column observes the neurological receptors, the gustatory and olfactory senses of both amateur and professional golfers all over this planet. We take a cross section of the golfer’s stomach and we probe the visual, the tactile, the fine motor controls of pleasure, going where no golfing publication has been before, right to the dopamine receptors and intestines of – the Golfer’s Palate. Read More >

With Christmas only weeks away now, it’s that time where indecisions on present buying start turning into panic, particularly for friends and relatives abroad and you know you have to get that parcel off in the post pronto. Read More >

Domiciled for Christmas festivities, no sooner had the turkey digested The Wandering Palate was in peripatetic mode, Melbourne bound and yearning for a food fix.

Alas, we forgot about the great Australian shutdown with practically every decent restaurant in Melbourne closed for an extended holiday over Christmas and New Year. Read More >

Part 7 of the series

My time here in Burgundy has exposed me to many new ideas and debunked many of my initial beliefs about how wine should be done. Burgundy is indeed a land which does things contrary to most wineries I find in the new world.

Read More >

The Wandering Palate is gloating in his moment of stardom… being ‘guest DJ on the Two Paddocks ‘Team Top 10 Tunes’, following some tough acts from Willem Dafoe, Stephen Fry, Liam Neeson OBE, Toni Collette, Alan Rickman, Jancis Robinson MW, to mention a few… yes, I know not very modest of me but you have self-promote yourself these days as no one else will.

Read More >

November 17^th – recovery day and a slow recovery at that when you are a peg off a half century.

I had a most enjoyable birthday with the day entailing lunch at The Stomping Ground, Singapore newest wine bar, with two of the greatest pinot noir legends in America, Jim Clendenon from Au Bon Climat and David Graves from Saintsbury.

Read More >

Our Cambodian correspondent, Darren Gall, tells a fascinating story of an Australian maverick winemaker building water wells for the poor in Cambodia and Sichuan province in China.

Read More >

Day 17: 13/10/2011 – Another Cold Spell

There wasn’t much going on today due to the sudden return of the rainy weather. It was freezing cold. Temperature has dropped to seven degrees. In fact, weather was so bad, none of the pickers worked today so they were put on bottling duties.

Over at our end, we decided to take some time to check on the bottles of wine that we have re-corked. To our dismay, the sulphur levels were not at the level we wanted and so we had go through the trouble of taking all the corks out and re-doing everything again. This time, we did a more thorough cleaning of the bottled.

A few pressings were done but other than that, things were significantly quiet. The grapes brought in tasted more diluted but flavours were still acceptable.

In my earlier post, I talked about pressing juice and how it is usually separated from the free-run. The reason for that is that pressing juice is considered of lesser quality as compared to the free-run due to more exposure to oxidation and the flavours not being as pure as the free-run.

Apparently, the practice here at Salomon is to add a portion of the pressing with the free-run to be fermented together so as to impart more texture to the wine. Unlike other wineries that would ferment both separately and blend them later before the bottling process, Salomon has no qualms when it comes to mixing them up together as the belief is that both free-run and pressing are good enough to be put together at the initial stage.

We are looking at about 1/8 of the wine having pressings juice. Perhaps this explains the lack of overt fruity flavours of the wines compared to a new world wine that would shun pressing juice and use them only in the entry level stuff. Thus, this is one of the differences between new world and old world wine-making.

To me, this is a big shift in wine-making for someone who is more familiar with new-world wine-making and that makes me question the teaching that pressing juice is always inferior to free-run. To the old-world guys, it is less of a question of which is better but how both elements can be used to make a better wine.

At the end of the day, the blokes and I had some time off for the night so we went out for a few drinks just to unwind.

Day Ten: The Coming of Autumn 05/10/2011

Autumn has already arrived. You can tell be the falling of the leaves from the trees and the browning of them on the vines. It is starting to get cold too and harder to stay out of bed.

As part of the routine, I made my way to the winery and tasted each tank to check for any off-odours from the wines. I also took the usual alcohol and temperature readings. A few bins of Grüner Veltliner and Riesling came in today.

Read More >

Shalom has his first experience of re-corking old wines from the deepest part of the Salomon cellars, and 1969 Grüner Veltliner. This brings back memories of when Bert Salomon showed up at my place in Melbourne for my 40th birthday with a case of 1962 Grüner Veltliner!

Yes, a whole dozen, as he was not sure how many people were coming!! I will never forget Bert’s generosity and true friendship in this wonderful gesture. Oh, the wines was brilliant, very sound, complex, provocative, showing a lot of development although not falling over – like the birthday boy.

Read More >