TN: NV Yellow Tail Sweet Red Roo (Australia, South Eastern)

WINE TALK
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  • NV Yellow Tail Sweet Red Roo - Australia, South Eastern (5/14/2019)
    We gave the staff an on premises luncheon for “Administrative Assistants’ Day” and gave them the opportunity to buy wine for the lunch. They chose this. Not the best choice because I do have a completely full small wine fridge in my office, but what do I know. They did not finish the bottle, so I poured some for a TN. It was actually interesting and not monolithic. There were two completely separate and unintegrated flavor profiles. One was just bad red wine with sugar added and the other was definitely Welches Grape Juice. It had a distinct Welches Grape Juice or Grape Jelly flavor to it. Unprocessed grapes not suitable for use as wine. My rating system requires that anything that you would hide behind the potted plant at a wedding gets 70 points or less, and I would certainly do that to this. However, there was nothing really hideous that made me spit it out, like the famous Berserkerfest Blueberry Bliss or the Two Buck Chuck Cabernet, which was much worse. Thus, it did not deserve a rating of 55-59 (voluntarily spit it out), or 50-54 (involuntarily spit out). (68 pts.)

Posted from CellarTracker

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Sounds like you got an off bottle or mishandled it. Was it travel shocked? Improperly stored? Did you not have time to decant it? Maybe not paired with the proper foods? What kind of stemware? Root day? Was it served blind, or did you allow label bias to affect your score?

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This brings new meaning to the old Premier Cru e-mail announcement, “New Container Arrives!”

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Maybe Ray Walker is consulting down under now.

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No, it sounds like Jay’s bottle actually arrived.

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My bad.

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At first I somewhat thought this was an April Fool’s Joke thread I had missed until I Googled up the product and it does indeed exist. I found it’s a 4 on the Canadian wine sugar level scale which means it’s got around 40 g/L of RS assuming that’s an accurate measurement. Whereas I once might scoff at the idea of a sweet red table wine that isn’t Port or Recioto and is actually meant to be drunk as a table wine, I did post recently of my discovery of traditional Georgian semi-sweet red table wines. So the idea is not as far-fetched as it seems and is in fact historically entrenched in European culture. Not to mention that we already know that sweeter reds like Belle Glos and Cupcake continue to do very well with the public. So the existence of this product isn’t necessarily a far out idea. You don’t have to like it but also don’t necessarily have to scoff at it as I almost did.

Quality, however, is another matter. See my take on the Georgian wine (a style I am still exploring a little) at TN -- MILDIANI 2014 KINDZMARAULI SEMI-SWEET RED;MY FIRST EVER GEORGIAN WINE - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers and see what Jay has written above on the Yellow Tail. I gave the Georgian naturally semi-sweet red quite a bit more credit than Jay did the Roo but I would be interested in his take on it and my take on the Roo some time in the future. For me, it’s the difference between producers who actually have a historical precedent and those who are simply trying to fill a product/marketing niche.