If you’d asked me what my favourite red was back in the 1990s, when I first started writing about wine, it would probably have been an Australian shiraz. I just couldn’t get over how voluptuous these wines were – how ripe, how velvety, how silkily smooth. Tastes change, though, and as time went on I fell out of love with them – they seemed to become sweeter and jammier, or maybe I was just less tolerant of sweetness, plus they didn’t really fit in with much of the lighter, more plant-based food that I wanted to eat.
But the other week I found myself at a wine tasting, trying a run of mid-priced bottles, all around the £10 mark, and thinking what good quality and how reasonably priced the shirazes were. Not only that, but, quality-wise, they outstripped most malbecs at the same price point.
