A $24k STOLEN DRC?! 99-Point Rioja, Radikon, Loosen GG & The World's Best Rosé! 🍷

G'day, g'day, g'day. Tom and Wade here from Diff'rent Drop. Welcome back to another episode of Wine Unfiltered. A very exciting episode today, mate. Oh, mate, I'm fired up. International theme today. Yeah. Let's just open all the best booze that's come in from overseas. That's the theme. We're just gonna open all the best wines. Yes! Today's episode is sponsored by Anthony Albanese, so we're feeling very un-Australian. ------- Albo, come on, mate. By the way, we're taking our business to Singapore, so. Nah, all good. Mate, let's rip in. We've got a great lineup of wines today to get into. Shall we get started? Okey-dokey, mate. Starting off with a bit of Riz. Yes! Love a bit of Riz. If you're gonna drink Riesling, where else? But the Clare Valley, of course. No, no, we're off to Moselle. Mate, this is the 2024 Dr. Lucent Vellner Sonnenherr GG. Brand new release. The set of Grosses Gewächs wines from Ernie. And one of our favourite German producers, I think it goes without saying. Absolutely. And what a legendary bloke as well. Fantastic bloke. It was excellent to have him in here, what, a couple of months ago with the Lucent Barry stuff, yeah, so the guy's out of his mind, but does make phenomenal Riesling. Now we can drink the real stuff. Yeah. Ditch the Barry side. Sorry, boys. Those wines are sick. But this is basically his pride and joy. So when he was here, he was talking about making his best dry German Riesling, sort of the way his grandfather did. So these are all 100 plus year old vines of like Vellner Sonnenherr, one of the warmer sites in the Moselle, but it's blue slate. The wines are renowned for being incredibly cellar worthy. And they're usually quite backwards on release. Like they're quite like tight and inwardly focused. 2024 being a warmer vintage there. I think I just tasted it. It looks a little more open. It was a weird vintage. The headline around 2024 in around the Moselle was frost, like devastating frost. Where Ernie's vineyards are, it's a touch warmer on the water there and protected a little bit by some of that frost. And then a lot of rain, but then also warmth as well. So I think talking to him, it was like quite a weird vintage where he wasn't quite sure which way to go, but in the end he's like, oh yeah, that looks pretty good. Yeah. So one of the big keys of these wines is like extended leaves aging. Yeah. They're very precise wines, but I think they're actually probably a little bit more relaxed in bottle than some of the other like more nervier styles. And certainly when you compare it to like Australia's finest Rieslings, right? Totally. Your Jim Barry's, your Crossets, your Pike's Merle, et cetera, where they're very precise, very coiled, more reductive. These are wild ferment, aged in 3000 litre Foudras on their leaves for 12 months. It's a much more, I guess, hands-off style of winemaking. That's meant to- It's old school. Encourage oxygen and texture into the wines to go with that really bracing acidity. Well, the acidity is crazy. It almost feels like, you know those fruit tingles? Like the bath salty kind of like really sherbet-y, tingly acid. Yeah. But it's got beautiful flavour. And the thing that you probably always pick in this vineyard, I see it when I do like, if you do like horizontals of different GGs, is like the stoniness. And there's like a sort of smokiness, almost, to Vellner Sonnener. And I love these wines. Gorgeous. This is always my favourite. Crazy vineyard, steep like this, all blue slate, almost no topsoil, just straight into rock. 100 year old, ungrafted vines. Also in the set, we've got the new Erzsinger Wurzgarten and the Erzsinger Trepschen, the other GGs from Dr. Lewson. And they're in a little set. The other two, you can only get in the pack. This, we have a few extra bottles of. But the Vellner Sonnener is probably the one that's been our favourite over the years anyway. 100%. Plenty of flavour, plenty of acid. Just amazing wines. Ridiculous. Wish we could make this style in Australia. Por que nos dos? We can do this, right? Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. No, this is uniquely Moselle, uniquely Lewson, and that's just fine. We make great wines too here. It's a different style. It's just complete though. It's got everything, hey. Needs time though. It needs time. Like I wouldn't be cracking the top off this right now, to be honest. What do you mean? I'm going to drink this tonight. Well, we have cracked the top of it. It's a professional necessity. It's part of our job. If you're tucking it away in the cellar, I reckon it'll look even more relaxed over the next couple of years and just be glorious to drink. So, mate, what a start. All right, let's keep on rolling. Tremendous wine. All right, mate, we're sticking with the white wines, but we're heading west. We're heading to France. We're heading to Burgundy. We're heading to Chablis. And we're heading to the address, mate, of Domaine Moreau Nordet. Now, this is one of those kind of culty labels. Speaking of labels, maybe my least favourite labels in the world of wine. I mean, but anyway, it's so distinct and so obvious that this is the brand. So you have to love it for that. But anyway, there's a hand holding a grape. So, Moreau Nordet. Stéphane Moreau was the owner winemaker who sort of brought this estate to prominence in the last few decades. Stéphane passed away. His wife, Virginie Moreau now, continues all the amazing work. And one of those Chablis producers that has helped to... We talked about Samuel Biot a few weeks ago. One of the producers that's really helped to reinvent Chablis and that's in how they're making the wines largely. Yeah. So there is a little bit of oak. There's like a little bit of old oak in these wines. Like it's not noticeable oak, but they do use it during... Yeah, but I think that's kind of what made it like, you know, like the whole thing was all stainless steel. You know, this is wild ferment, you know, hand-picked, whole cluster, a long alabarge on fine lees, organic farming. You know, a combination of stainless steel with also larger format old wood. So, you know, it's a more alive textural style. It is, yeah. It is really interesting. When we first popped it, I had a look and I was like, oh ****, it's a really big, like golden sort of showy vintage of that wine. But actually, like with a couple of minutes in the glass, it's like tightening up. Yeah. Like you're getting some of that sort of mineral and some of that sort of chalkiness coming through. There's no doubt. It's pretty, pretty plush. It's a big, rich, luscious Chablis, yeah. This is the direction of Chablis' style. The wines are getting bigger. That's not a bad thing. We celebrate the big wines from just down South in Cote de Bonne, right? And then we go to Chablis, it's like, oh no, I want it to be like pebbly and linear and austere, because we love being able to categorise these different things. But I think that's delicious. Yeah, it's got so much weight and presence. Like this is AC, but it smokes a lot of Premier Cru Chablis. Well, it's got some pretty fancy fruit in this. Like in particular, there's a parcel from Les Parcs, which is sort of, just sort of next to Veyon and Montmartre on the sort of famous slopes there. And that goes into this wine. So you've got some Premier Cru quality fruit in here at the AC level. Mind you, the price is pretty punchy on these wines too, because they sell out. Yeah. And I think rightfully so. Yeah. Like got a real cult following, so they should. It's definitely a riper vintage of that wine than I've tried it in a few years, but it's still absolutely delicious. It's a showy, flashy Chablis. Totally. There's a lot of flavour. There's a lot of struck match. Yeah. There's a lot of texture. There's length. It's quite salivating. It's a full noise kind of Chablis. It is. But it ******* works. It does. It's delicious. Yeah. Yeah, cool. So great to revisit this wine, this producer. We've got this in stock, the Petit Chablis too. You know, we get one swing a year. We buy it, we can. They're very popular wines, and with good reason. And it's kind of Chablis that you're gonna impress people that love white burgundy, that love quality Australian Chardonnay. Sometimes you can put a Chablis on the table and it can go a bit missing. Yeah, yeah. You're gonna put this in front of people, they're gonna, whoa. Yeah, it's not a shy wine. It's not shy. It's a big, juicy, delicious. But it's so delicious. Yeah. Cool. Nice, mate. All right, what's next on the table? Gigi, Chablis. What do we do now? No, the Gigi's are from Germany. Yeah. Chablis from here. This just might be the wine I'm literally most excited about in this lineup. I know. And it's the Rosé, because it's probably, and I reckon you'll say the same, maybe my favourite Rosé on the planet. Yeah. It's really close. I mean, the Dominique Portet is great. We're gonna need a Portet's. No, but this thing is a beast of a wine. Yeah, it's a whole other level, isn't it? It's not even like recognisable as Rosé, as something that we drink here. Cause this is just absolute class. So this is close to Bonn. This is the 2023 tradition, which is their kind of a state wine. So this is basically 90% Tabourin and then 10% Grenache. So Tabourin is this really weird local variety that they have in- Super like ancient variety. Yeah, yeah, it's old. And it's apparently a massive pain in the ass to grow. So it's got like really thin skin, hence why it makes really great Rosé. But you've got to grow it like right on the coastline for it to have enough breeze to protect it from rot. Otherwise the bunch is, you get a lot of bot in these wines, I think. Yeah, it's where these vineyards are. It's just right by less than a kilometre from the water. You can see those photos and it's like, you know- Yeah, it's right there. But altitude still, like up the hill. So I mean, Provence is a massive area. It's not like you just go to Provence and drive 20 minutes around. Like it's huge having just spent a week down in Provence. And yeah, I didn't make it here cause it's too far away. So it's massive. So most of the provincial Rosé is actually not that close to the sea. But this is different. This is like right in the water, higher altitude. So, okay, the weird varieties, it doesn't stop there. So the way this is made, it's all hand-picked. It's all wild ferment. It's fermented in like a temperature controlled stainless steel ferment. And then it gets transferred in these 120 year old 5,000 litre foudrous. And it remains there un-topped. Yeah, so they're not topped. So then from there, you're kind of getting like a little layer of floor on top for like a full year. Not dissimilar to how you make like, you know, Vingeant or something like that. Yeah, a Finnish area. Yeah, and so that gives you this whole other dimension of like, so the wine itself, immense amounts of power in the fruit. Just crazy, crazy power straight off the bat. But delicacy and freshness as well. And then it's got these base notes of like all this sea spray and like saltiness that sort of sit in the background. And this really delicious sort of creamy golden kind of nutty top layer that you get from the little flory business. I don't even. It's an absolute meal of a wine and it's just so ******* good. I don't even know how to talk about this wine. I just love it so much. I love this wine so much. It is such an awesome drink. It is at once incredibly complex, but just so smashable at the same time. That to me is what makes the best wines. Where you just want a schooner glass of it, but while you're sculling that schooner glass, you're still analysing every sip and it's just making you think as you drink the schooner glass. As you scull that schooner glass. The thing is, is that like it's pretty wild in terms of rose, but I defy anyone to not find that absolutely ******* delicious. And the chalkiness, like the texture of it, like the grip and the drive and all those things, it sounds like there's just like too much ---- going on in the glass, but it's so complete and so balanced that it's just like, nah, mate, you can drink tonnes and tonnes of this. And we do. That nuttiness and spice and kind of chalkiness that you spoke of is just so perfectly pitched. Absolutely must have. Like this is a buy every year, without question, kind of wine for me. I'm so happy that looks so good. It's our first look at 23. Usually save a bottle or two for Christmas because it's just like such a ******* good Christmas wine. Does sell really well as well. Like it'll go five or 10 years if you want it to, but good luck. I'm not going to be able to, it's not going to last 10 minutes tonight. So savoury as well. So good. All right. All right, let's keep moving. Where should we go now? Where else in Europe can we go? I don't know, but this is awesome. All right, mate, the hits just keep on coming. We've moved South now to Italy, not too far South or up the North of Italy in Piedmont, of course, in Barbaresco. Yeah, baby. Yeah, you're happy. So Casino Della Rosa. This is a relatively new project to Australia brought in by the legendary Andrew Jamieson in the last couple of years and a great discovery from AJ. And we love the 2021 release. This is the brand new 2022s. I'm excited to rip in. So interesting producer, been around for 70 odd years. One of the first organic certified producers in Barbaresco. That's cool. Which is really cool. They've got vineyards in Rio Sordo and Tre Stele, which is, I think, just attached to the Rio Sordo crew. And they're one of only two or three producers with vineyards there. Third generation, two brothers now basically running the show. Riccardo and Davida. Nice. Is that racist? I don't know. But been doing absolutely epic things since they've taken over. The style of these wines is like traditional, but spotless. Like they're like really like harken back to an old school Barolo where it's like all old oak. Like you don't see any oak at all. It's like traditionally fairly long elevation, not as long in long time on skins, but not as long in 22. Cause you know, slightly warmer year. Wines are probably a little bit more upfront, a little bit more dewy. Typically 30, 35 days maceration. Probably like a couple of weeks. And then it's like basically two years in body in the big huge Slavonian body. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like just, you know, that's what works for these wines. But a real focus on farming too. Yeah. And that's the big difference. You know, so much of that brightness and purity that happens in the vineyard, not just in the cellar. I absolutely love the 21s of these. This is the first time I tried them when AJ brought them in. I was like, dude, you're so on like a, you're on a winner here with this producer. He's like, yeah, *******, I know. He only brings in a tiny amount, but this is my first look at 22. We had a look at the Langhi with him the other day and that's absolutely magic and a really good buy. This has got a little more grunt than what I was expecting though. There's like some pretty serious tannin here for 22. Yeah. Tannins, there's 22 tannins, like thicker skins, warmer year. They're a bit more, it's a bit darker, a bit swish and svelte, the tannins. Yeah. Yeah. But the fruit is still, I think for me at least, very pure, very translucent, the fruit, but with depth. Like there's an energy to the fruit, which I love to see. Yeah. I don't know if it has the complexity of the 21s, like the 21s are such an amazing vintage. 21s are like 16s. It's like, you know, they come around probably once in a decade. The 21s are better. 16s are still pretty big. A 21 like had power, but elegance and complexity as well. So you've got both. This is like, if anything, more like maybe 17, which kind of the back of 16, which was warm, but like a little bit more approachable. So they're probably less wines for the cellar, but great options to drink now over the next few years. And yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to say, this is a Trastele Barbarosco. Yeah. Where we have like a massive, maybe 18 bottles or something, tiny. So we've just, we've just cracked wine. This is really dumb. I'll start filling this. Sorry to the accountants there. Anyway. The Langhi Nebbiola is great. You should drink that one. In fact, we have Focola. No, I'm going about the same. The Rio Soto, we've got three bottles. The thing is, absolutely class producer. Everything I've tasted from these guys has been absolutely rockstar. And I, you know, I probably end up drinking more Barolo than Barbarosco because I just think that there's more Barolo that makes it here. But when you taste these wines, just like the finesse of it, like there's like a real like seduction and softness about it as well, which is just like delicious, man. Yeah. The fruit's just a little bit more in that red fruited spectrum in Barbarosco than Barolo, which we always love. It's all black licorice and stuff though. It's still like, yeah. But the tannin, the tannin is like ******* great. And they're like prominent tannins in 22, if you love your tannin. Great wine, great Barbarosco. A producer to have on your watch list for sure. And absolutely worth a couple of bottles of these to take a look. So good. All right, mate, where are we going now? Now on our tour of Europe. I don't know, but this is- On our Contiki tour. This is so good, dude. What a Friday. Vamos, mate. Our Contiki tour continues. We've been, where have we been? We've been to Germany. We've been to Burgundy. We've been to Provence. We've been to Piedmont. We're heading now to Rioja in Spain. Por que no? I love my job. Mate, this is exciting. Now this is the 2023 Archuque La Condenada. We opened up a Archuque wine a couple months ago for one of our videos. That was just a little entry-level Rioja Tempranillo, which was the bargain of the week at the time. This is not a bargain. Or maybe it is, because this is the Grand Cru for Archuque. Holy ----. I'll keep talking, you drink. So- No, no, no, no, no. No, dude, taste it. So these, holy ----. All right, if you've watched this channel for a while, you know I absolutely ---- on Tempranillo constantly. And with good reason, I reckon. This is an amazing wine. So the whole story with these boys is that their dad sort of started this movement sort of like rejecting like the old school Rioja kind of. The ******* Crianza, Reserva, like Grand Reserva, like, you know, how long you leave things on oak, like how ripe and how big and how extracted they are and like, disgusting wines. Can't stand them. So kicking all that aside, moving towards like a more of a Burgundian model, looking for like great sites around their little pocket of Rioja, right? So they live in the, what's the sub-region? Banhos de Ebro. Yeah, so it's, yeah, a little bit of background. Roberto de Miguel was the boy's father. I think he started that movement away from the big commercial styles of Rioja. But it's now, it's the brothers. Yeah. The third generation, I think. So it's Ricardo and David de Miguel, who also founded the Rioja and Roll. That's really lame. Rioja and Roll movement. This one's really cool. That's really lame. Well, it's not lame what they're doing though, because as you say, they're throwing out that old convention and they're moving towards a much more Burgundian approach of thinking about Rioja and thinking about villages, sub-regions, vineyards, and classifying their wines that way. So they're based in a place called Banhos de Ebro, which is in the Rioja Alaveza sub-region. So there's three kind of main sub-regions within Rioja. Rioja Alaveza is the more northern, cooler, wetter, kind of more mountainous region compared to the other sub-regions, which tend to yield those bigger, richer wines. And they're not going for that. Dude, this is absolutely ridiculous. So this is called La Condenada, right? Which means the condemned, because this is sick name, sick story. So a vineyard planted in like 1920. So it's like over a hundred years old now. Old bloke was running it, got too old. Couldn't look after it. Just was kind of like, **** it. We'll probably just rip it out. They find this vineyard and buy it in 2012. Takes them years to restore it. It's like on a cliff like this, all like just broken up sandstone, really rocky site, like impossible. You can't use machines up there. Crazy. So you've got these old gnarly, like crazy vines. It's a field blend, basically. So you've got like, this is probably something like 80% temp. Then there's Graciano, Grenache, and like a little bit of Palomino in there. I don't see any white wine in there. This is just like an absolutely glorious, elegant, svelte, perfectly put together, like gorgeous red wine, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, this sits like on the top of the Archuco thing as one of their Grand Cru sites, alongside I think it's El Escaladero. I might've got that wrong, but. And yeah, look, it's made as you'd expect. It's hand-picked. It's sorted berry by berry, just meticulously. Natural ferment, all into old wood. And it's just incredibly deep and expressive and complex. Yeah, but the brightness of the fruit, the freshness in it, like for, like I've never tasted Tempranillo like this, where it's like, like you can see like blue, like really beautiful, like blue fruit and violet. And there's this lovely like sage lift and like all these wicked like garden herb things going on. But it's soft, but the length of it, like the palate, like the depth of flavor in like what is quite like a medium-bodied frame. Yeah. It's like *******, that's a crazy wine, man. I would never pick that as a Spanish. Tempranillo, there's no chance. To me, it's delicious, it's yummy. The tannin, it's just stretched out like stringy cheese. Like it just stretches all on the palate. It's just perfect. And it's just rolls down the back of your throat. It's just smooth and rich and long, but never feels heavy or overworked, over-oaked. As you say, there's a levity and a freshness to it. It's one of the best red wines we've had in the year in a long time. There's a reason Tim Atkin gave this 99 points. He named Achuca his Spanish winery of the year. Hey, that is like, I've never tasted anything like that. Like- Not from Temp. No. No. Like that's easily the best Tempranillo. It still looks like Temp. When you smell it, it still looks like Tempranillo. There's that little hint of cola. Little cherry cola thing, kind of. But that's Temp. The reason we bag that, the reason we bag that is because that usually is a sign of what's to come with overripe, over-oaked style. Without that, it's like this lovely little varietal accent where you go, oh yeah, there's a Spanish Temp. But then everything about the body, it looks more like, you know, Premier Cru, Grand Cru, Red Burgundy. Definitely. In terms of like the tannin detail, for sure. Like, it's got real, like, real definition and sort of verve and energy and freshness to it. And, mate, I want to drink that all day. And I have literally never said that about a Tempranillo in my life. First time for everything, mate. Phenomenal wine. Absolutely phenomenal. How good, how good. All right, guys. Look, this is 300 bucks a bottle and we've got like two bottles left. So, you know, this isn't a one, this isn't a commercial exercise for us, but really happy to open that and let you know what that's like because this is a sign of what's happening in Rioja. It's a sign of what this producer's doing. You should check out their other wines, which are really in a great spot price-wise and seriously impressive producer and wines. Unbelievable bottle of wine, though. Wine of the day so far. What about the Rose? No. No, that's ******* in my mind. All right, we've got one more treat. Let's do it. All right, mate. Our last trip on the tour of Europe. We're to Georgia, obviously. No. No, we're back to Northern Italy, mate. We're heading to Friuli. And look, you know how this bottle is. This is one of the most recognisable bottles on the planet of wine. It is Radicon, of course. We've just landed in teeny tiny amounts of the new 2020s from Radicon. We've got Robola, we've got the Oslava, we've got the Jacot, as well as a few other little bits and pieces there in the shed as well. And we thought, **** it, let's waste one of them and open it and drink it and see how these wines are looking. So, if you don't know Radicon, one of the absolute godfathers of skin contact wine on the planet. Stanko Radicon is a legend. Yes. Awesome, I'm happy. A legend of the wine world, of Italian wine, of natural wine, based in Friuli. In the 70s, he's like, **** making all these clean cut, nice, easy wines from Pina Grigio and stuff. Let's make wines like his grandfather made them back in the 1920s and 30s, right? Which means organic and biodynamic farming. It means zero additions in the vineyard, zero chemicals anywhere in the process, no sulphur, no additions whatsoever. And then age in these wines for a long time on their skins. So, they get months on their skins, then they get years in barrel in the huge, big Savonian foudres. And then they get another 18 months or so in the bottle to calm down after this. So, this is a brand new release and this is a 2020 vintage. Mate, their accountant must hate them. He was like the least cashflow on the business. As is, Sasha Radicon has accountants. So, Stanko's son, Sasha, runs it these days. Mate, he doesn't have accountants. People don't pay him, they sleep with the fishes, right? These wines are sensational. I've had quite an interesting journey with Radicon over the years. Like a couple of the earlier bottles that I opened or that I probably tasted at Rootstock back in the day, I was like, what the **** is this? And kind of a first real like crazy world-class orange wine that I'd tasted. And I sort of didn't really quite know what to make of it. But I've had some unbelievable bottles of these over the years. Because while there are some other like cult natural wine heroes that I've tasted them and I'm like, this is bullshit. There's like, the emperor has no clothes here, you know? Like the wines are really faulty and they're really fucked up. These Radicon wines are class, man. Like how good is that? That's great. Yeah. Like, so you get a little bit of that rusticity on the nose, right? And don't be put off by that. That's just part of the style. These have been made with a lot of oxygen through the process. So you're going to get that slightly more open oxidative note on the nose. That's part of the style. But the palate is tight and balanced and pure. So it's kind of like, think like Mandarin and like orange zest and these kinds of characters. But then there's like a real kind of curry leafy sort of thing going on as well. And like, it does have a little tinge of like, there is a slightly aldehydic volatile lift on it. But it really just lifts the whole wine. Like, I don't mind a little touch of VA if it's going, like, if it's really in balance. Yeah. And it absolutely works for this wine because it elevates it. It's an interesting point you make about VA, volatile acidity, right? It's a fault, right? Yeah. But it is. But some people- It's a spectrum, right? Sometimes you can have wines with so much VA, you go, I can't get anywhere near that. I can't drink it. Other times, it just gives the wine like this little lift, this little, not spritz, but this little just poof, you know? And just helps freshen it all up. For instance, it's like, you know, they don't talk about it, but in a lot of Barossa Shiraz, one of the things they prize is a little bit of VA because the wine is so dense and heavy, a little bit of VA will actually lift it. Yeah. And so get it out of the glass for you. Yeah. And this wine, one thing you have to look at these wines is like, almost in the context of a red wine, right? Like, they're all about sort of tannin and structure and acidity. And that's ******* really, really dialed in, isn't it? Isn't it? It's definitely like quite a coiled. Yeah. I mean, this is six years old. It's still so fresh. Mate, that's going to live for like 30 years. I think, look, I don't know my details about the 2020 Friuli Vintage, but to me, this looks a really tip-top release, these wines. The acidity looks really on point. There's no blousiness to that. There's no looseness. It looks really neat and tight. All the classic kind of flavours that you mentioned, mandarin and a bit of waxiness, honey, all that's there, but it's just really neatly in place and zippy. The tannin is perfect. Yeah. Like, it's the time that they take to make this wine where like you get, you end up getting- It takes six years, but you get like beautiful tannin polymerization as well. So like, it feels like a very finely etched wine, you know? It's like really detailed and- Detail's the word. Just a beautiful, beautiful thing. Yeah, cool. Great drink, guys. Almost like sweet **** all bottles of ale. Like, I mean, like a six pack, maybe 12 of each, that's it. But unicorn wine's for a reason because like you'll put this on the table with someone and if neither of you have ever tried it, it'll blow your mind and it'll actually be good as opposed to just like scary. Yeah. All right, mate, you ready for some booze news? Let's do it. Welcome to the booze news. Back again with another week of news headlines, my friend. Mate, the Hunter Valley Legends Awards were the other night, or even last night, I think. Yeah? Yeah, the legends. We talked about the legends and we even mentioned one of the legends, Mr. Stu Horton, winemaker of the year. Did he get a- Yeah, cool. Got on your stew. The Broken World wines are sick. Yeah. I feel like he's got a tux on most nights. Does he? Winning an award for something, doesn't he? Like, I don't know, they're a good operation. One of the best. Absolutely. So good. Mate, best viddies of the year, a double act, Jerome Scarborough and Liz Riley. Nice. So yeah, hard to argue. How good? Beautiful people. Great producer, Scarborough. Love us some scarbs. Yeah. I mean, Yellow Label's best bang for your buck chardonnay in the country. Probably. Has been for 30 years, probably. And mate, the young achiever, we had him in here a couple of days ago. Who was here a couple of days ago? Oli Morgan. Oh, Oli. Good job, Oli. Looking sharp with the little bow tie. Mate, Oli is a star. Yeah. Him and his dad are doing absolutely smashing things at Morgan. Yeah. I had a look at the whole lineup of his new stuff, which I got really fired up about. So I think we're going to get a bit of an interaction. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do our Morgan. Oli Morgan, young talent, incredibly switched on guy, very driven, very great family legacy there with his vignette, very exciting. Mate, the Coonawarra story for you, and it's not a doom and gloom story for us. Oh, good. Okay. The old Rouge Homme label, so one of the old traditional labels of Coonawarra owned by the Redmond family and since bought by like Treasury and Accolade and whoever else, has been bought back by the Redmond family. So they've bought it back and they're going to reinvigorate it and Coonawarra is going to come back. So is it a second label? I don't understand. What is it? It's like an old label. It was an old family brand. That was owned by the corporates and has now been bought back by the family. That's good. It is good. Yeah. I would like to see, do you think that's what Coonawarra needs? Maybe it's like bring back what was great. Yeah. Bring back family owned estates, mate. That's what drives the quality. I'm not saying you can't make good wines from big corporate producers, but like the individuality and the personality of regions and the quality comes from family vineyards where there's drive and passion, you know? Totally. Yeah. The Redmonds are awesome. Dan Redmond, who's like heading up the Coonawarra Wine Association, he hosted that event I went to last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Passionate fellow about the region. And look, Coonawarra has a journey ahead of it to get back to where it was. Yep. Maybe it never does, but it can get somewhere from where it is now. And I think it needs like great family owned producers to lead the way. So that's, I think, a kind of heartwarming story. That's good. I made the last one. This is a funny one. A $24,000 bottle of 2020 Domaine Della Romani Conti was stolen in a heist with like a guy with like a wig and like a fake trench coat and a fake identity. They call it like a full Scooby-Doo like thing. Yes! Yeah. Is that all he took? He just went, one bottle of DRC? Yeah, and then it was anonymously returned. Well, he just wanted to prove that he could nick it. I don't know. Did he drink it? I don't think so. I think it was just returned. What are you doing, mate? A few weeks later. Absolutely insane. Maybe they knew he was onto them. Why would you go through all that? It's the closest you're ever going to get to a bottle of DRC and you give it back. But ironically- He's lost all my respect. Ironically, I think it's lost all its value anyway now. Cause it's- Oh, cause the provenance cycle's broken. Oh! It's a $24,000 no more. He should have just... Maybe we should buy it. He should have just drunk it. I wonder what we could buy it for. Oh, it's probably worth a hundred grand now. We're going to put a little link in the thing where you can donate to help Different Drop buy this bottle of shoplifted DRC. I'm sure we'll get it for like 15 grand or something. So if you can just chuck in maybe a couple of hundred bucks, that'd be good. That'd be sweet. Thank you. Cool, mate. That's the booze news for today. Nice. Okay. Welcome back to Getting Blind. Thomas Hollings. I just like to start the prefaces by saying I'm recovering from a cold. Okay. So, you know. Excuses, excuses, mate. You've got one minute to identify this wine. Your time starts now. All right. It's a white wine. Lovely. Really nice. Nice. Delicate. Subtle. **** you. All right. Lovely, lovely kind of texture. I'm into Chardonnay zone. It could even be Old World. It could be like a little cheeky little white bourbon. I don't think you'd open something so fancy. Little bit of that kind of like tiny bit of struck match. Little bit flinty, little bit stony. Man, that looks great. Fresh, acid, Aligotte. That's where I'm heading. I'm heading Aligotte. It's got breadth. It's got some richness. It's got some texture. But that seashell. Four. Aligotte. Three. And I'm going. One. I'm going to go King Valley, Aligotte. So, Australia. And I'm going to say. You just totally flipped. I thought you were Old World. Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry. I didn't talk you through everything I was thinking. It's not just the elegance of it, I thought. But Aligotte, King Valley, 2024. Four. $38 a bottle. Yeah. Mate, you're completely wrong. ****. I was really confident about that one. Yeah. It looks like that. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's *******. What a good bite. What is it? It's a thistle and weed, Chenin Blanc. Really? Yeah. So, this is a South African Swatland Chenin Blanc. Wow. You've stitched me up there. It's under 40 bucks. So, I'll give you the price. And you got the vintage right, which is 24. No, it's 23. So, you get the price. Yeah. Look, I don't mind missing that. Cause that actually doesn't look anything like a South African Chenin Blanc. Well. To me. It looks a little honeyed. And it's got like a real nice, green apple sort of thing going on with it. So, I think it is pretty class. Yeah, but the fruit spectrum isn't as like tropical or. No, but it's really slatey and shaley and kind of minerally. What a good wine. Epic wine for the price. Like that's an absolute screamer. Wow. Well, I love these wines. Like they've got a really sick Palomino blend that I've been all about. Oh yeah, that's dialed in. Yeah. Perfect ripeness. They've picked that perfectly well-made wine. Yeah, yum. Tough one, but I thought after our Chenin showdown. Yeah, yeah. You keep it international, yes? Yeah, exactly. All right, I've got a blind ranking for you. You ready to get into that? All right, so the theme today has been very much international wines. We're bringing it back home for our blind ranking. I'm going to give you six wines and you're going to rank them in terms of which one wine you would take to like an international wine conference to represent Australia. To rep Oz. Okay. You can choose whatever vintage or age of these wines you like. Oh. Oh, okay. So I'm just going to give you the cuvee. The cuvee. And I'll tell you what year I want to take it. If you want, you don't have to. But I mean, if that influences your decision, you can take an older one, you can take a younger one, whatever. Okay. All right. Oh ----. And then I have to put them in order. Yeah, that's the ******* idea, mate. Like it's a blind ranking. I got it, I got it, I got it, I got it. All right. The first wine. Yep. Tyrrell's Vat One Semillon. ****. 2013, take it now, number one. Whoa, you're going straight to number one. It's easy. Straight to number one on a Semillon, on a white wine. Yep. Done. Wow. Maybe 05. I'll take 05. Wow. I'll take 05 and yeah, number one. Done. Wow. Okay. Okota Barrels Fugazi Grenache. You're telling the story of Australian wine. Yeah. So I'll probably take 2020, like Tara's Last Vintage. I'd take, and I'd take that low. Probably three. Three. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Nice. And 2020 is looking good now. I've got a Magnum still at home. Yeah. All right. Toll Puddle Chardonnay. Ugh. Okay. Take 24, because it's awesome. Actually, maybe take 17. Maybe take 17. Yeah. First Vintage. No, 24 is a belter. I'll take 24 Vintage. Yeah, they've gotten better over the years. Yeah. And I'll put it, I'll put it, what did I put, Okota? Three. I'll put it four. Okay. Seppeltschild 100-Year Tawny. Oh, no. Dude. That's terrible. All right. I'll take my birth year. So I'll take the 19, What is it? 88. Yeah. So I'll take my birth year when it's 100 years old. Yeah. And I'll say, So that's the 1888 is what you're taking. Yeah. I'll take the 1888. Yeah. Or are you saying you'll take, because if you take the 1988 now, it's only 38 years old. No, no, no, no. You got to have it at 100 years old. Yeah. All right. So at the moment, so it's like the 1926, it's out or it's about to be out. We haven't had the 26. Yeah, yeah, yeah. **** it. It's a unicorn. I'll put it at two. Two. Yeah. Okay. Standish Lamella. Oh. Charades. Well, the best spot that I've got left is five, I think. So I'll put it at five. But for my money, like one of the best, most exciting Australian charades is you could show people internationally. Yeah. And the one that I always try and buy from Dan each year. Ooh, Standish release next month. Let's go. Last wine. House of Aris, E.J. Carr, Late Disgorged. Yeah. So what, we're talking the 98, the 100 pointer? Yeah, whatever you want. I guess we can talk the 98, the 100 pointer. I'll put it at wine six. Still an excellent, excellent Australian wine, obviously, and something you'd be happy to take to the world stage. But I think I'm pretty happy with my rankings. Yeah, you've done pretty well overall, I reckon. And- Oh, five Tyrells. Look, all of those, you know, represent Australian wine amazingly. So well. Hagrid's Aussie wine and also Hagrid's European wine. Yes. But great tasting today. Yeah. One of the all timers. Thank you as always for watching. We love your support. Jump in the comments. Love to hear your thoughts on any of these wines. And as always, we'll see you again very, very soon. Thanks guys. Gracias. Today was sick.