Carpe... that cheap wine

A couple of years ago I went on one of those chauffeur-driven wine tours around the Canberra wine region. Despite the lah-dee-dah way that sounds, what it actually meant was Mr Kettle and me cramped in the back of a Corolla driven by a balding middle-aged man named John who took us to Murrumbateman and somehow convinced us to buy half a dozen bottles of mead.

Awesome. Mead.

While I thought, immediately following the trip, that a happy life was one lived without such a trip, I'm delighted to find that finally, finally it's serving some kind of useful purpose.

You see, during the course of the day we did actually visit a rather nice vineyard, with real life wine makers and everything. At this vineyard I bought one of their signature wines, a shiraz viognier. For $75 a bottle I just bought one, and we opened it at the next auspicious occasion (i.e. when the balding middle-aged John finally dropped us back at the hotel).

And the wine? It was red. It tasted like wine. It was gone quickly and we slept well.

A couple of years, a different city and a tank of goldfish later, Dan Murphy's has opened one of their hyper-global-mega wine stores a couple of blocks from my house.

They sell plenty of bottles of wine. Some very expensive, some very inexpensive. Some, like Bowler's Run Cab Merlot 2009, for an embarrassing $2.89 a bottle.

When we saw this surprisingly inexpensive bottle during a recent visit we had a very large laugh then quickly picked up half a dozen of them. For just $17.34 we were the proud owners of six bottles of Bowler's Run's finest.

And the wine? It was red. It tasted like wine. And we had change from a twenty.

The point of all this is that I've decided it's more fun to blog like a $2.89 bottle of wine than to wait for $75 bottles to come your way. I can't tell the difference anyway.