The Good Wine Guide 2013
Age and SMH Good Wine Guide 2013 cover.
Life is too short to drink bad wine! This simple saying exists - in many languages and in the many places where grapes are grown and crafted into wine - for good reason. And with so much wine around, the task of finding the very best is enormous.
But more than that, life is too short to even waste time reading about bad wine. So instead of having to sort through vast pages of average wineries and wines to find the good stuff, the 2013 Good Wine Guide brings you straight to the leading edge - the cream of the crop.
I also make a point with this book to cover the wines that are actually on your shelves and that's a major point of difference from most other Australian wine books. You'll read here about the fabulous 2012 rieslings from the Clare Valley and Eden Valley, you'll get the jump on the 2012 Marlborough sauvignon blanc wines and you'll even read about the amazing quality of some 2011 reds, seemingly against all odds!
There's also a new section: a sake chapter. This has been an eye-opening one to tackle and the decision to include it is based on the fact that we are now seeing a very good range of interesting sake available in Australia and that it's become a common section on many restaurant wine lists.
The 2013 Good Wine Guide is the biggest edition we've published, either under this or the previous Penguin Good Australian Wine Guide banner, with close to 1600 wines in the book this year.
The best examples of respective styles of wine are what you'll find in these pages and there's a strong emphasis on wines that carry a distinct sense of place.
Many thousands of submissions passed scrutiny over the office tasting bench again this year and I have trevelled far and wide to ensure that the most current vintages are rated here for you at the time they are available on the shelves.
I hope you enjoy the best of them as much as I did. Happy drinking.
Nick Stock
