Welcome to another instalment of ‘these are all the Burgundies I’ve tasted recently’, a collection of indulgent tasting highlights from my visit to the Grand Jours de Bourgogne 2026 (a week-long wine fair in this famed French wine region in early March). We’ve gone from endless Chablis through Vosne mega-wines, explored the value joys of Outer Burgundy, remembered why I love Volnay and Pommard, and much more.

For this penultimate series post, I’m going into the white wine deep end, with a look at some of the Chardonnay heroes from the village of Meursault, plus a sprinkle of goodness from Montrachet. A word of warning – prepare the Amex now; this is going to get expensive.

How do you make steely, just-bottled white Burgundy from a cool vintage look even more razor-sharp? Serve it in a Meursault shed just days after the end of winter.

So it was when I rocked up to day six of this Grand Jours de Bourgogne adventure, walking into another tonnellerie (the Tonnellerie Damy if you’re playing Google Maps spotto at home) with icy breath and jacket buttoned right up.

It didn’t hurt the wines, though. I don’t think anything can. Here, the occasionally angular (or perplexingly forward) mercurial brilliance of the 2024 Burgundian vintage was playing centre stage, jostling with the power and weight of the rather classic 2023 harvest (please, read vintage context here and here) for a pretty grand demonstration of Chardonnay magnificence.

The scene was set early. I tried the Bouchard wines below as a first taste, and it was like a bolt of pure electricity. I always second-guess these warmup wines because I just get excited (‘ooh, wine. How good is wine?’) but floated back five wineries later to confirm that I wasn’t delusional. The fire did not go out.

Actually, the only regret is that I didn’t give these wines enough time. It was crowded, the clock was ticking, and everywhere I looked, another brilliant Chardy was winking at me. Sorry if the tasting note truncation is at high levels.

The 2024 wines in this assortment really are worth the hype. Yes, it was a less-than-easy vintage, with wildly variable yields and occasionally quality. But in the top plots – g’day Genevrières and Perrières – and the top makers, the wines are so bloody compelling.

Not just Meursault either – you’ll also see a few bottles from the neighbouring village of Montrachet in this Meursault collection, too, tasted over the course of my week, included here because like-with-like.

Finally, the obligatory caveat about scoring – please don’t compare the numbers below with any but other Burgundian Chardonnay. Also, I have no pricing, and don’t really want to know, as I’ll probably just get scared. But I’d also say that some of the basic village-level Meursault wines here are probably the go for anyone who baulks at spending $AUD400 on a bottle of white wine. Let’s go:

10 of the best wines from this selection

• Domaine Bachey-Legros Chassagne-Montrachet Morgeot Les Petits Clos Vieilles Vignes 1er Cru 2023

• Domaine Bouchard Père et Fils Meursault Perrières 1er Cru 2023

• Domaine Bruno Colin Chassagne-Montrachet Morgeot 1er Cru 2009

• Domaine du Cerberon Meursault Clos des Cras 1er Cru 2023

• François Mikulski Meursault 2024

• Domaine Jacques Prieur Meursault Les Perrières 1er Cru 2023

• Domaine Latour-Giraud Meursault Genevrières 1er Cru 2024

• Domaine Marc Rougeot Meursault Montagne Saint-Christophe 2023

• Domaine Marc Morey Chassagne-Montrachet Morgeot 1er Cru 2024

• Domaine Rémi Jobard Meursault Genevrières 1er cru 2024

The post Enter the Meursault megastars appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

Endeavour Drinks, the Woolworths liquor and hospitality spin-off that controls Dan Murphy’s, Langtons and a smorgasbord of wine brands and facilities, is having a fire sale.

I’m not on the Endeavour/Pinnacle mailing list, so you’ll need to head over to WBM to read the full release and hot damn, is it a serious sell-off.

The big news is that Chapel Hill is being shuttered in just a few weeks, with cellar door operations and the winery shuttering at the end of June. I’d heard rumours there was something happening at Chapel Hill this year (with minimal grapes processed in McLaren Vale), and now it’s confirmed. I feel extra sorry for Michael Fragos and the team, who are doing such good work (you only have to look at the latest releases to see the quality). The brand will apparently be retained and moved to Dorrien, leaving the old chapel and some wonderful vineyard assets for sale (the featured image above is of some of these vineyards). What a sad way to seal the Chapel Hill story…

Meanwhile, what is basically an exit from a large part of the Pinnacle winery holdings includes the jewel in the crown: Oakridge is up for sale (again). Apparently, this is a going concern, so less worry about losing one of Australia’s finest wineries, though it’s also hardly reassuring. There was so much trepidation when Oakridge was first sold that it would be mangled by Endeavour, though thankfully, they instead backed it (of sorts) as Dave Bicknell talked about here. It means that for anyone with some cash keen to get into wine, there is a prime opportunity for one of the most A-grade wineries in the land.

Then again, this sort of sale only serves to reinforce what I was discussing last week – we’re getting deeper into existential crisis mode for Australian wine.

Digging deeper into the press release, the other hard news is that Vinpac is closing its McLaren Vale site. This is a hugely important processing, bottling, and storage facility for the Vale, which will impact many small boutique wine operations, not just Endeavour.

More telling, there’s a line in the press release that really spells out the state of play in Australian wine right now, with Endevour’s move ‘resulting in approximately 99 per cent flexible sourcing of purchased bulk wine and grapes from the viticulture market’.

In other words, there is so much excess grapes and wine out there at the moment, even absolute top-tier McLaren Vale Shiraz, that there is no point in holding onto physical assets like a stupidly capital-intensive vineyard and winery. It’s a rough old time! Indeed, I had a conversation yesterday with a wine distributor about a renowned Langhorne Creek wine name that can’t pay its bottling bills, and if they can’t stump up some serious cash by the end of June, the business would be gone.

So, who’d like to buy a winery?

The post Fancy buying a winery? Oakridge is now for sale appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

Welcome to another instalment of ‘these are all the Burgundies I’ve tasted recently’, a collection of indulgent tasting highlights from my visit to the Grand Jours de Bourgogne 2026 (a week-long wine fair in this famed French wine region in early March). So far in this series, I’ve looked at how much Chablis I can taste in one session, been bedazzled by a smorgasbord of Vosne mega-wines, tasted many mercurial Mâconnais whites, worked through a challenging lineup from the Côte de Nuits, and topped it with some Volnay/Pommard seduction.

Today, I’m tackling something important – Burgundy that nudges closer to being affordable. Sort of. For this quest, I’m turning to some lesser-known producers and wines from what Jancis Robinson calls ‘Outer Burgundy’ (the appellations beyond the famous Côte d’Or), with a particular focus on the cradle of Burgundian bargains, the Côte Chalonnaise.

Driving (with our excellent guide Yuri) around the hillsides behind the villages of Rully and Mercurey during a break in tastings, something seemed amiss. How is it that this part of Burgundy (the Côte Chalonnais) has a second-class reputation?

Here, you’re as little as 2km from the edge of the most expensive white wine vineyards on the planet (Montrachet), passing plots on ideal mid slopes, with soils that go from limestone to clay (also locally revered). France’s Chardonnay and Pinot Noir holy land is an almost neighbouring slope. Yet, somehow, the rep here is underclass. Look only at average vineyard prices, which are €250k/ha vs three times that further north, producing wines that, and I quote here from Jasper Morris MW in the Oxford Companion to Wine, come with a caveat that ‘although cheerfully fruity while young, few wines from this region have enough body to age well’.

Oof.

This area certainly feels like wine country (complete with chateaux like the one in Rully, pictured above), and no less viticulturally charmed than the incredibly famous vineyards on the next range of hills. So why? Interestingly, there’s a tangled web of reasons why the Côte Challonaise lags behind its neighbours, starting with the fact that the best vineyard land was not mapped out by monks centuries ago. The lack of a contiguous slope also makes identifying the best dirt trickier. You can stir in a focus on sparkling wines to muddy the table wine angles as well. But all of that still didn’t equate, especially I drive past the Faiveleys’ picture-perfect La Framboisiere vineyard in Mercurey, which sure seems like a pretty grand place for Pinot Noir.

It’s not just Mercurey. All up and down the famous hillside of Burgundy, there are villages, producers and appellations that are less heralded and well worth your trouble. That’s what I’m covering in this collection, pulling wines tasted across the Grand Jours de Bourgogne events sourced from upstart proudcers in the Côte d’Or, plus a smorgasbord from the Côte Chalonnaise, Beaujolais (which is, bizarrely, considered part of Burgundy, but Bourgogne locals seem to pretend it doesn’t exist), the Mâconnais (also covered here), and the Haute-Côtes (aka the high hilltops also covered here).

Let’s dive in!

Before we do, the usual caveat about scoring applies here – don’t compare the numbers below with anything but other Burgundian Pinot/Chardonnay/Aligoté. As a rule, extra notes are in italics, and a further note that some of these wines were not labelled, so treat that as you may.

The post The quest for value in ‘Outer Burgundy’ appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

A web developer is not one of my skills.

I can change font colours, maybe even align an image. But rebuilding a website that breaks isn’t BAU. So when this website broke earlier in the week, I had to reach into the internet depths and learn a bunch of things to fix it.

Long story short, this website now has a new skin, and the back end has had an upgrade. It also means I need your help to check this over, note what doesn’t work anymore and/or looks bad.

Let me know?

(P.S. the cover photo is something unbroken).

The post Housekeeping: is this website broken for you? appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

In a world of waning wine publications, it seems like some brands have managed to stay relevant. Here in Australia, the Halliday name (without James, who is very unwell) continues to be a force (for good or bad, depenging on your viewpoint), and in Italy, Gambero Rosso’s influence still seems strong.

Indeed this week, the Gambero Rosso ‘Top Italian Wines Roadshow’ hit Australia, with 45 wineries pouring wines that landed top scores in the latest Gambero Rosso guide.

Here in far-flung Australia, we only get snippets of the best Italian wines, so if you’re like me and missed Vinitaly this year, then opportunities to dive into classic Italian vino are unmissable.

Like any roadshow, not everything among the 190-odd wines poured today was a winner, but I’ve pulled out three absolute highlights well worth tracking down.

The post Three highlights from Gambero Rosso’s 2026 Aussie Roadshow appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

Finally, this website can legally drink.

Happy birthday, Australian Wine and Drinks Review!

Somewhere between May 8th and May 12th 2008, I first started the original blog that became this website. I would never have imagined sitting here still powering on with it 18 years later.

I owe you the biggest thanks for making it happen. Ozwinereview has been a transformative part of my life, helping me get first published (that was 17 years ago! Sheesh), landing me several jobs, winning me a few awards, and taking me around the world. And ultimately, it’s been your support – via donations, comments, emails, angry DMs, etc.- that has kept me going on, especially when life gets in the way.

That last bit is important.

The post Happy 18th birthday Australian Wine and Drinks Review appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

I got deep in the negative hole on Tuesday, stuck in a doom loop about the future of Australian wine.

It’s easy to get negative about wine at the moment, especially as every day there seems to be another bad headline. But on a Friday afternoon, it’s more enjoyable to tune into something more positive – a lineup of Australian wines that have crossed the tasting bench recently that are worth talking about.

This collection features a bunch of wines that I not only like but admire (and often for very different reasons) with many selling for $50 or less.

Let’s crack on:

The post The Australian wines I admired in April (with plenty $50 or less) appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

It’s a rough time in the Australian wine industry right now.

Let’s start with the 2026 vintage. This might well be the smallest Australian harvest in decades, and not for good reasons. The three fs – frosts, fires and floods – are the first culprit here, punching holes in yields across the country, from Tumbarumba (multiple rounds of frosts), Central Victoria (where the Longwood fire basically wiped out the whole Strathbogie Ranges region), to the Murray-Darling (with floods in late March delivering plenty of berry split).

Quality-wise, this is hardly a shit vintage (and that sort of generalisation is dumb in gigantic Australia anyway), but lots of producers in premium wine regions are looking at yield drops.

On the other side of the vintage equation, there will be thousands of tonnes of grapes unpicked this year, or indeed from vineyards now ripped up, with the Riverina alone removing 5,000ha of vines. No doubt this is because grape pricing is so low that it costs more to pick grapes than growers will receive. Winemakers aren’t exactly ramping things up either, given that the industry has over 262 million litres of excess juice…

The post Welcome to the 2026 Australian wine existential crisis appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

It’s that time again. Time to inspire me to spend more money on drinks, even though the WineArk cabinet can’t be closed properly, and the Amex is looking scared.

So, what wine, beer, and other refreshing liquids have you been buying and drinking this month?

I’m determined to drink more from the cellar this year, so aside from a top-end top-up of sublime Ceretto Barbaresco Bernadot 2021 and some Domaine de la Grange des Pères 2022, there weren’t any significant additions this month.

But it’s been a big April of emptying bottles…

The post What have you been buying and drinking in April 2026? appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

Welcome to another instalment of ‘these are all the Burgundies I’ve tasted recently’, a collection of indulgent tasting highlights from the Grand Jours de Bourgogne 2026 (a week-long Burgundian wine fair in early March). So far in this series, I’ve looked at how much Chablis I can taste in one session, been bedazzled by a smorgasbord of Vosne mega-wines, tasted many mercurial Mâconnais whites, and worked through a challenging lineup from the Côte de Nuits.

Of all the sessions in this Burgundian adventure, there was one lineup that felt like Burgundy Pleasuretown. Or at least, that was the persistent vibe I got wandering around the Pommard & Volnay hall…

I’ve never flown first class. There is no turning left for wine scribes. But even if I had the dollars, I don’t think I could ever justify going all in. Business class? Yes yes. The full suite luxury experience? A colossal waste.

The same can be said for wine. So often, the Grand Cru wines, the unicorns and icons, are just not worth spending twice as much as their peers. And especially so in Burgundy, when mere metres between vineyards separate wines that cost $100 from those that cost $1,000.

I’m not saying don’t go long on the great stuff. Rare Rutherglen Muscat is probs worth more than double that of Classic. Also, don’t let me start another long-winded explanation about value systems. But I’d still rather comfort and deliciousness rather than luxury every day of the week.

In a tangential way, that brings us to today’s focus tasting – a lineup of red (and some white) wines from the Côte de Beaune (the hill at the southern end of the Burgundy’s fabled Côte d’Or escarpment), led by an extra delicious selection of 2023 Pommard & Volnay wines.

Obvious.ly classing these Burgundian red wines somehow more affordable is a misnomer – we’re still in fancy wine land, with the prices to match. Yet when compared to some of the even fancier wines from the northern end of the Côte d’Or (places like Vosne-Romanée, Gevrey-Chambertin or Nuits-Saint-Georges), we’re more often in business rather than first class for pricing.

Of course, super confusingly, the Côte de Beaune also has some of the most expensive white wines on the planet (from appellations centred on the villages of Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet), and we’ll cover those off in a separate post (eventually). For now, though, I want to talk about why I like the wines of Volnay (and to a marginally lesser extent, Pommard) first.

It’s all about fruit. The 2023 reds from these pretty neighbouring French wine villages are so often pretty wines that feel generous. My tasting notes are a mudbath of red fruit, with words like round and luscious like a well-worn cliche. Even Pommard, which has more clay- and ironstone-rich soils than Volnay’s steeper, limestone-dominant plots and typically produces more muscular wines, delivered plushness this vintage.

Beyond the Pommard/Volnay nexus, you’ll also see a selection below of wines from the broader Côte de Beaune that shifts from the welcome mat to a bit more of a journey in the backyard. You’ll find proper establishment wines in that selection, complemented by a few wines from the quite exciting, climate-buffering fringe of the Hautes-Côtes.

The post Enter the delicious 2023 Pommard & Volnay red wines (and more Côte de Beaune beauties) appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

How much is too much for great Australian Chardonnay?

Forgive my rhetoric, but please play along with me here. What’s your dollar boundary on Aussie Chardonnay? Is it different compared to something fancy and French?

Obviously, any answer is couched in personal value equations (if I were a billionaire, I’d buy a lot more Montrachet), but I want to know the answer anyway.

More importantly, I’m asking because wines like the Oakridge The Apex Twin Chardonnay 2023 pose these questions, and I’ve already had an interesting response. If you follow my Instagram post (here), you can see that Luke Steele provocatively commented how he thought that it was ‘farcical that during a cost of living and wine industry existential crisis, that the Endeavour group think that releasing a wine at such a price point is a great idea’.

But what about you? Do you think $300 is indeed farcical pricing? If so, how much would be more reasonable?

Maybe I’ve been conditioned by tasting too much 2023 Burgundy (where Corton Charlemagne starts at $300 a bottle and some), but I don’t have a problem with this new Oakridge super wine landing at $300 at all. Further, Corton is a great example because I tasted a shedload of Corton (in situ at Aloxe-Corton for authenticity) a few weeks back that didn’t come close in absolute quality to this brilliant Oakridge Chardonnay…

Further, compared to peers like Giaconda (the 2022 is a $500+ proposition in retail or auction land) or a $180 Leeuwin Art Series Chardonnay, it’s not exactly exorbitant dollars. Certainly a more attractive option than half a bottle of Levantine Hill Optume at $600 for that matter (and let’s not talk about Cloudburst).

The post Whether I’d buy the brilliant and slightly controversial Oakridge $300 mega Chardonnay appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.

The Mâconnais may as well be on a different planet.

Here in Australia, we consistently lose our shit over the best Chardonnay from Burgundy’s hotspots of Chablis and the Côte d’Or, with oceans of love for Meursault, Montrachet, etc. But wine from the Mâconnais, aka the hills that mark the southern end of the region? For many, it’s just not Burgundy. Instead, the Chardonnay (and the odd Gamay or Pinot Noir) from these hills are treated more as a source of value – an insider’s choice for Burgundian bargains, but hardly top quality, despite the storied history of appellations like Pouilly-Fuissé and the impressive-looking, limestone soil terroirs.

You could argue that it’s a point-of-difference thing. We do sunny, ripe Chardonnay in this brown land, which renders the more typically rounded expressions of the Mâconnais a bit redundant. You could also argue that not enough of the really great wines reach Australian shores (although that’s not accurate given that makers like La Soufrandière land locally). I’ll also accept that this end of Burgundy is known for simple wines rather than profundity, which counts against anyone taking it seriously.

Whatever the justification, the Mâconnais is still Burgundy frontier land, which only makes the haul of impressive wines tasted at this year’s Grand Jours de Bourgogne another reminder of the gold out there.

Not that anyone should be surprised. There’s a dynamism in the Mâconnais you don’t necessarily see in other parts of Burgundy. I feel like the lack of really defined regional characters gives a bit more freedom with style. There are more natural wines here, more winemaking variation, less adherence to a theme, and more young/emerging producers.

The biggest showpiece? 2024 Pouilly-Fuissé. As I mentioned in my Chablis report, 2024 was a pretty challenging harvest in the northern end of Burgundy, but in this warmer southern end, 200km further south, the impacts weren’t quite as harsh. The extra tightness and acid shape, instead, delivered some fantastic wines, especially from Pouilly-Fuissé.

Of course, this story isn’t all smiles and high fives. For every brilliant Mâcon-Villages, there’s a lumpy Saint-Véran (which happened all too often – why?) or yet another wine that either tastes like overripe peach/pineapple juice or some of the terrible unwooded Chardonnay wines of Australia circa 2001, with a giant chasm between the great wines and the rest.

The Mâconnais’ reputation for sunny Burgundy is a bit of a poisoned chalice like that, with winemakers leaning on flavour generosity at the cost of shape and vitality. That’s a broad generalisation, sure, yet some of these whites would definitely be better with half a baume less ripeness (and better-quality oak).

Anyway, I’m rambling. Should we take a look at a few wines?

As with all the reviews in this series, I need to put a scoring disclaimer in before we start. You can only really compare my scores with equivalent Burgundies. That’s it. I apologise for the lack of context around these wines.

Meanwhile, you can read the whole series via the Grand Jours link here.

Wines I really liked:

The post All the Mâconnais hits (and misses) from the Grand Jours de Bourgogne 2026 appeared first on Australian Wine and Drinks Review.