On the case for good taste

There are more than 40 cases of wine stacked high in my too-small living room.

I love wine but this pile is not for my pleasure (at least not solely for my pleasure) but rather for me to taste, rate and write about.

Wine constitutes a large part of my life, and a living room-full got me thinking about my favourite things.

Change

No sooner have wine lovers become used to new wave New Zealand sauvignon blancs and great value Australian shiraz, than these wines have been eclipsed by Bulgarian sauvignon blanc, Chilean merlot, Argentinian malbec and, now, Spanish garnacha. All of which become so yesterday when you taste Spain's latest take on shiraz, southern France's newest chardonnays and New Zealand's freshest pinot gris - not all as cloying as they used to be.

The global wine industry is hot with change, which makes it exciting.

Big glasses

It's not that I need the challenge of trying to balance a big bowl on a skinny stem; I just like the difference that big glasses make to the taste of wine. It doesn't matter whether it is cheap or one of the great wines of the world; a small pour into a big glass is the most economic way of enhancing its taste.

Screwcaps

Never thought I'd say it but screwcaps are so easy to open that I sometimes forget they were revived to eliminate cork taint.

And while they are not perfect (reductive rubbery smells can be an issue in some wines and on one occasion a cap simply would not come off) screwcaps are brilliant for ease of use, chucking away the corkscrew (nearly) and keeping wine fresh.

Screwcaps have also removed some of the snobbery inherent in wine. But the biggest reason I love them is they have made the taste of white wines fresher and cleaner.

Oh, and in the four and a half years since one screwcap stuck like cement on a bottle, I have lost count of the broken corks, corked and oxidised wines I've had.

Champagne

Alas, simply not enough of it comes my way. But champagne remains firmly in the category of best sparkling wine in the world.

Krug winemaker Nicolas Audebert arrived in Auckland last month to show us his latest wares. The best was not the vintage bubbles or the delicious Krug rose. It was the Krug Grande Cuvee; hardly a snip at nearly $295 a bottle but one of the best bubbles I've tried.

And while there are fantastic sparkling wines made all over the world, the best still come from champagne makers Krug, Veuve Clicquot, Dom Perignon, Laurent Perrier, Louis Roederer and a few other top champagne houses.

My job

Often during the 12 years I have been writing about wine, I have arrived home to find packages waiting for me. The goodies inside easily make wine writing one of the best jobs in the world.