Winter food and wine events increase in Victorias regions

The outstanding food and wine on offer in Victoria’s regions will be showcased at festivals throughout the cooler months including events at Port Fairy on the Great Ocean Road, to the cosmopolitan regional city of Bendigo and the Dinner Plain/Mt Hotham and Rutherglen areas in the Alpine High Country.

Port Fairy, located on the Great Ocean Road’s Shipwreck Coast 20 minutes’ drive from Warrnambool, will present ‘A Celebration of Food and Wine’ (4-6 July).A Celebration of Food and Wine’ is set dazzle visitors and locals alike with a gastronomic array of exhibitions, markets, celebrity chefs, cooking classes and sumptuous winemaker dinners.

Bendigo and its surrounds will be abuzz with heart-warming food and wine experiences taking place from July through to October. Highlights include: the ninth annual Deep Winter Wine Dinner (Saturday 19 July) at Emeu Inn Restaurant in Heathcote, an area famous for its premium Shiraz: and Rare Reds Unearthed (Saturday 30 August) which brings together wineries in the Bendigo region that don’t currently have a cellar door outlet. Then in October, the region hosts two of its biggest food and wine events: the Heathcote Wine and Food Festival (4-5 October) followed by Bendigo Heritage Uncorked (11-12 October), an annual festival that showcases Bendigo’s wine, quality restaurants and grand gold rush architecture.

Wine sales benefit history

ELIZABETH - More than 175 years ago a handful of fearless women were critical in the successful defense of a tiny fort against the formidable warrior Black Hawk. Three of these women were named Elizabeth, and sales of a wine that bears their name are benefitting a group that supports that same fort.

Massbach Ridge Winery and the Apple River Fort Historic Foundation last spring introduced the “Elizabeth” white wine, and a portion of the proceeds of wine sales have been donated to the Foundation for educational programming at the restored Apple River Fort. Foundation board members Vince Toepfer and Helen Kilgore noted that “the donations of Massbach Ridge Winery benefited the living history programming for kids and adults last year at the Apple River Fort.” They acknowledged a recent check from Massbach Ridge Winery, which will be used for educational programming once the Apple River Fort reopens. In January, a new label for the Elizabeth wine was introduced honoring the pioneering women who forged a new frontier in Jo Daviess County. The artist who won the wine label design contest is Beth Bird of Galena, Illinois.

Massbach Ridge Winery, located in rural Elizabeth, was established in 2003 by the Harmston family of Elizabeth. With more than 18 acres of grapevines, the winery produces award winning wines primarily from grapes grown in Jo Daviess County.

The Apple River Fort State Historic Site is a reconstruction of the 1830s civilian fort that was the site of a battle between Black Hawk’s Sauk warriors and Apple River settlers during the Black Hawk War. It is located along U.S. Route 20 in Elizabeth, Illinois.

Cheers to that!

Sipping on that glass of wine at the local pub or at a friend's wedding banquet, not many are likely to ask where it came from and how it was made. In fact, to the uninitiated, the Shiraz and Merlot would probably taste the same. But that's set to change with the increasing number of wine appreciation classes that are sprouting up in community clubs. PIONEER delves into the sophisticated world of wines and checks out one such class offered by SAFRA Town Club for its members.

The wine industry has the movies and media to thank for jumpstarting its engines. Often portrayed as a 'high-class'' activity, the intoxicating allure was hard to resist - anybody who hoped to be somebody yearned for that glass of red or white.

In Singapore, businessmen were one of the first to pick it up. Wine was an effective lubricant for smoothing over business deals and added that extra touch of class. The wine-drinking trend has gone into full gear since then, with the discovery of health benefits and Westernisation of our culture. Now, even housewives and students are discovering the pleasures of wine-drinking.


Taking to the bottle

According to wine expert Mr Mark Foo, Director of Foo's Group, which produces Majestic wines, any fruits or vegetables can be made into wine.

"But when we are talking about red and white wine, we are of course referring to grapes," said Mr Foo, who has organised many wine appreciation courses to help educate the public about wine-drinking.

There are a huge variety of grapes that can be used. Some renowned grapes for making red wine include Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Grenache and Mourvedre.

For white wine, we are looking at Chardonnay, Riesling, Semillion and Sauvignon Blanc. Different grapes have different characteristics, so there is a totally different process for maturing them.

"But generally, in wine-making, Cabernet Sauvignon will fall into the top few categories, because basically, it is a grape of complexity. There are different varieties depending on how you actually cultivate the crops - some wine-makers even blend their wines. The Cabernet Merlot, for example, is made using Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with Merlot grapes," said Mark.

"Of the lot, the Merlot comes in the junior category, as it is not such a dominant grape."

New bottle cap thwarts wine counterfeiters

When the Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote " in vino veritas " – in wine, there is truth – he must not have been drinking from a counterfeit bottle. Researchers Roger Johnston and Jon Warner of the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have created a device to ensure that modern wine connoisseurs can have faith that they are drinking what they pay for.

In the past few decades, bottles of rare premium vintages have begun to command tens of thousands of dollars apiece at auction, and thousands of other wines retail for hundreds to thousands of dollars a bottle. Although there may be no match for quality of the product inside, the ease and accuracy with which fraudsters can pass off bottles of "two-buck Chuck" with ritzy labels have allowed wine counterfeiting to grow into a booming criminal enterprise.

"One of the biggest problems buyers of very expensive wines have at auctions is that they have no way of being absolutely sure if the bottle contains the wine it purports to without actually opening the bottle and taking a swig," said Johnston.

To combat this problem, Johnston and his colleagues in Argonne 's Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) have created a cap that winemakers can fit over the bottle's cork. The cap contains a small circuit that completes when it is removed, triggering an electric pulse that creates electronic evidence someone has tampered with the bottle. "There's no alarm that screams at you if the wine's been opened," Johnston said, "but there's no way of getting rid of the evidence of tampering because basically, when tampering occurs, information is erased—a kind of anti-alarm."

By connecting the cap to a laptop through a USB cable, the auctioneer or the consumer can check whether or not the wine has already been opened or altered. Each cap has a unique bottle number that is registered to the winemaker, preventing wine counterfeiters from putting the Argonne caps on their fake Bordeaux and Burgundies.

In addition to the outright counterfeiting of fine wine, buyers face another potential problem when assessing the purity of a bottle. To preserve the life of some of their wines, some winemakers will remove the cork from the bottle and blend in a small quantity of wine from a newer vintage in a process known as "reconditioning."