Category Archives: Rated A-

I’m on record as saying that sparkling wine is perhaps the most underused cocktail ingredient around (the other: Damiana Liqueur), so I was really pleased to get A.J. Rathbun’s book, Champagne Cocktails: 50 Cork-Popping Concoctions and Scintillating Sparklers.

It’s a slim, hardbound tome, with just 50 recipes included, spanning both classic and original cocktails, and not always centered around “Champagne” – the whole gamut of sparkling wines get their due in this collection (even sparkling Aussie Shiraz!).

And though just 50 drinks are covered – many with color photos, all with an introductory writeup of some kind – I’m hard pressed to come up with a sparkling wine-based cocktail that isn’t included here, except for the ones I’ve invented myself. More inspiration than reference, it’s a fine guide for the shelf or a good gift for the bubbly lover in your life.

A- / $11 / [BUY IT HERE]

I didn’t know the French hated Australian Wine. Not specifically, I mean. I thought they hated all wine that wasn’t French. And I thought that everyone hated Australian wine.

Aussie wine writer Campbell Mattinson does a good job at reminding us it wasn’t always this way. Australian wine came from a place of no repute whatsoever, supermarket wine made by eccentrics (many of whom are profiled and quoted in this book, and most of whom use a whole lot of profanity) and consumed mostly by locals – and they guys who made it – in vast quantities.

But in the late 1990s, Robert Parker came sniffing around. He tasted an inky Shiraz, just 50 cases of it had been made, and gave it a 99 point rating. Overnight – literally, overnight – the Aussie wine market changed, and that wine, plus other limited release wines, saw their prices double – or climb tenfold – with their next vintages.

As speculators and wine nerds flocked to these new cult wines, along came the new guard – and that’s where the trouble began. Wines like Jacob’s Creek and Yellow Tail flooded the market – millions of gallons of the stuff – destined to be sold at bargain basement prices. Aussie wine became supermarket plonk once again.

Well, to answer Mattinson’s question: Who wouldn’t hate Australian wine? The vast majority is just jug wine now, and while the cults are still being produced – Mattinson has a whole chapter on whether Grange is really all it’s cracked up to be – the sheen is starting to wear off.

All of this is pretty much outlined in the first 50 pages of Mattinson’s book, an easy read but a bit of an insular one, as he explores his own personal fascination with his own country’s wine – and expresses his own dissatisfaction with the way the industry has grown.

About half of the book has nothing to do with France but rather outlines in detail many of Australia’s better-known, higher-end producers. More characters are interviewed, lending a kind of wild west air to the way wine is produced here. It’s on the whole an interesting history lesson, but not one that you were probably altogether unfamiliar with.

A- / $18 / [BUY IT HERE]