Top sipping tips

Subject

Content

Strawberries In Your Fizz

Don't do it! They overpower the flavours of the fizz and they will flatten the wine a lot quicker

Dinner Parties

If you know what your hosts are cooking for you, take a wine that will match the food

Coffee & Chocolate

Make sure you don't consume either of these two before you have a glass, as they coat your palate and mask the flavours of the wine

Chilli

The spicier the dish, the trickier it is to match wine to. Fire calls for beer but Riesling with some sweetness works very well

Syrah/Shiraz

Two names, same grape. Wines labelled Syrah are generally less fruit forward and more floral in style than Shiraz and generally from a cool climate.

Pinot Grigio/Pinot Gris

Same grape! Grigio means grey in Italian and Gris means grey in French. Gris is generally richer (can be off-dry) and Grigio lighter and crisper.

Wild Fermentation/Indigenous Yeasts

Instead of a commercial yeast, some winemakers prefer to let the natural yeasts on the surface of the grapes do the work, giving the wine more complexity.

Consumption Temperature

Here in Australia, too many of us drink our whites (and Rosé) too cold and our reds too warm. See our optimum serving temperature charthere. With whites and Rose especially, too low a temperature and you will miss out on many layers of flavour. Just like when you take a quality tomato straight out of a very cold fridge and eat it straight away - you just get tomato texture but next to no tomato flavour!

Mixed Cases & Common Pitfalls

We believe in all the wines we sell. All too often we've heard people make negative comments about their wine subscriptions with the big online companies.

Unfortunately some of them will include the following in their mixed cases…

• Poorly produced wines from a poor vintage
• wine varietals from regions that aren’t renowned for that specific varietal
• Wines that wineries or distributors are struggling to sell

Glassware

There are thousands of glasses available on the market but we choose to partner up with Zalto from Austria. We like the fact that they don’t over-complicate things with a massive range. They literally have 5 different shaped wine glasses that cover all wines. The Zalto Universal glass is a fantastic all-rounder and is a staple for many of us on the Baume team. Discover the elegant and refined world of Zaltohere.

The C Word

Chardonnay, choosing one if you are new to the variety or cautiously returning to it can be a minefield! In the 80’s and 90’s it was big, oaky and buttery and then a little after the mid 2000’s there was a bit of a knee jerk reaction and we saw plenty of incredibly lean (fine-boned and acidic etc) Chardonnay. Fortunately many Chardonnays these days are more balanced but there are still a fair few examples of the two extremes out there. Best thing to do? Tell us how you want your Chardonnay to taste and we will point you in the right direction.

Pet Nats

Short for Petillant Naturel or Method Ancestrale so low intervention wine making resulting in mostly cloudy wines.  It can be produced from white and red grapes. Before the primary (and only) fermentation process is finished it’s bottled and this premature bottling results in the buildup of carbon dioxide which turns into bubbles. The catch with this process is that the excitable wine in the bottle can be over-excited on it’s release so we always open them over the sink! There are some fantastic examples out there but some can be downright funky, faulty and unpleasant (we don’t sell the latter). 

Decanting

Decanting helps most wines, even whites believe it or not but generally the richer more full-bodied varieties such as Chardonnay, Viognier and a rich Chenin Blanc. Powerful young reds are decanted to open them up and to make them more approachable. Very old reds are decanted to filter out the sediment and to give the wine a good breath. Be careful with the length of time you decant the old reds for, they are generally pretty fragile and can deteriorate very quickly so once decanted, get sipping.