Wine Dogs of Australia

There is a popular book which you find at many wineries throughout Australia entitled “Wine Dogs of Australia”. It is a fun book and in its latest revision is over 300 pages. One of the stars of this tome turns out to be Peter and Di’s dog Jack. There he is on page 257 listed as having an obsession for kangaroos and his favourite pastime is identifying spoilt wine, an important job in an estate that specializes in aged wines.

Actually this brings in the inevitable discussion about screw tops versus cork. There is now no doubt that by far the majority of Australian wines will have screw tops soon, even the most prestigious of estates are gradually moving to them. Apart from the problem of obtaining high quality cork as one estate manager put it to me, “With all the competition around I can not afford to chance a buyer of my wine getting bad wine, and besides the majority of wine is drunk within hours of leaving the retail outlet and we know for sure that wine tops do not make any difference over such a short time”.

I guess that when the bottle top has completely taken over then Jack will be out of a job, but for the time being he has more than enough gainful employment as a partner in the Waverley Estate set up. You can see his pictures in his own album on www.picasweb.google.co.uk. .