The Man from Mosel River

Screen shot of the search result: critter wines

What are critter wines, you may ask?

Well, especially in Australia vintners and wine-makers seems to love to put pictures of cute little animals on to their labels. They select mostly marsupials but also other little animals which call Australia their home are to be found.

So on any super market shelf in Australia you will find bottles of wine with penguins, turtles, owls, emus, brolgas (a crane), and of course koalas, wallabies and kangaroos on their labels.

These are “critter wines”.

I found various entries on “critter wines” in the blogoshere with interesting essays and ruminations about this kind of wine labels, the quality associated with the products and the marketing of these wines. One of the main question is “do they all suck”? Of course not. But some do.

Many of these critter wines show a high level of quality. One of the most famous labels is yellow tail, owned by Casella Wines, one of the biggest family-owned enterprise in the Australian wine industry.

But because of the strong Australian dollar even a successful enterprise like Casella Wines struggels especially when they are exposed significantly to the US wine market.

Let us hope that Casella Wines can manage to stay in business. Then we can continue to enjoy their critter wines. The wine blog epicurious lists the ‘2007 Reserve Pinot Grigio’ (South Eastern Australia) by yellow tail($15) as one of the top five critter wines.

I guess this vintage is gone by now. I should try their Pinot Grigio although this is not my favourite grape variety.

http://www.epicurious

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013 at 8:57 pm and is filed under wine, wine regions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.