Dan Murphy’s

Normally we buy wine direct from a group of selected wineries in various regions eg. Hunter Valley, across the country whose wine we know will be consistently of good quality and reasonable price. Sometimes I have been known to indulge in some of their upmarket products eg. Pikes “The Merle” Riesling from the Clare Valley for special occasions but that is another story.
For quaffing wines we usually rely on our supermarket wine shop as it’s easy to pick up half a dozen of their specials when we go grocery shopping. Sometimes they can have real bargains.
But with Covid-19 changing our shopping strategy from instore to ‘click and collect’, we have had to give the liquor purchases a miss as they are not included in the internet purchase system.
So recently I turned to the well known Dan Murphy’s.

While they have a chain of good wine shops Australia wide(two within an hour’s drive, one north and south of us), they also have a strong on line presence with a wide selection, good prices and very quick to the door courier delivery even for their rural customers.
Looking at their range I was taken by the variety of foreign wine they keep in stock.
We usually stick to Australian or New Zealand products but took the opportunity to broaden our wine horizons a little.
So with a strict $20/bottle limit, over the last few months we have bought wine grown in France, Italy, Austria, Spain, Germany, Argentina and Chile.

Some of the more outstanding ones have been wines from France’s Cotes du Rhone, which are usually a Grenache/Shiraz or Mourvèdre blend sometimes with a small percentage of other approved red grapes eg. Marselan.
Rioja Tempranillo from Spain has always been a favourite even at the crianza level and Dan had a really good one.

Surprisingly cheap Burgundys can be good and not so fruit driven as our lower end Pinot Noirs tend to be. When you can pay up to $1000 for a first growth Burgundy, you wonder how much better it can be than a $19 one. Certainly not 50 times better.
I was also happy with their range of Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc the home of Sancerre. They are not so in your face ‘varietal’ ie. tropical fruit/passion fruit /capsicum/asparagus character caused by more methoxypyrazine and thiol compounds as the NZ wines.

A huge surprise was a Carmenere from Chile. Wonderfully complex with fine tannins and a long finish. This red grape variety is of French origin from the Bordeaux region but is hardly grown there any more. The phylloxera plague of 1868 killed most of it off. Chile imported the vines in the 19th century thinking they were Merlot hence the variety has been preserved.
Chile has now adopted it as their signature grape.
So Dan the Man, as he is known here, is now firmly on our wine supplier list.