Forty Bottles of Ringboree

Thirsty Lizard 2001 Shiraz - 25 bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree.

Trying to remember to post right after tasting, rather than weeks later, but it's hard.

First, a note about the rating. There's this bizarre tendency in the wine industry to have ratings that don't mean anything at all. Or, rather, they are taken too seriously. Or something. If you have a 100 point scale, it's an insult to give anything a rating below 80. This means that you don't really have a 100 point scale, you have a 20 point scale, with 80 being the lower limit, and 100 being the upper limit. So why don't just call it a 20 point scale and be done with it? Because there's so much prestige tied up in the arbitrary numbers.

So a rating of 20 on my 40-point scale doesn't mean that I hated it, but that it was good, but not the very best. I am not shy of giving wines a score of 1 or 0 if they deserve it.

The Thirsty Lizard is a nice sippin' wine, nice with barbeque, and easy drinking. The thing I like so much about it is that you can actually taste the shiraz. They've left out the obligatory tree-and-a-half of oak, and left the fruit flavors in so that you can taste the yummy jammy flavors. This does, of course, leave out some of the smoky dusty flavors that you might be used to, but it produces a wine that you can sip by the fire while reading a good book.

Mmmm.