This weekend I have been to a Wedding, and what a good one it was! I haven't njoyed a wedding so much in years.

From a wine perspective it was interesting. The meal at the reception was either prawn cocktail or melon, followed by beef, turkey or a vegetarian option. The choice of wine was a Semillion Sauvignon blend or a Shiraz Grenache blend, both form a very large Australian producer.

The white was clean and fresh with some good grassy and white fruit flavours, the red was fruit driven, with a loads of berries and plums, with a fairly hefty dash of vanilla and rather obvious acidity. The wines were OK, but they demonstrate why I want to work with small domains. While the white was drinkable, it just lacked a bit of character, it was a bit one dimensional, but difficult to criticise in any other way. The red really showed the "tool kit" that the winemaker used to make the wine. There was some obvious added acid to give the wine a bit of balance, the tannins and the vanilla were obviously from oak, which I am fairly sure was added to the wine in the form of chips, rather than the wine being aged in oak barrels. Both wines also had a really good mouthfeel, which came from a certain amount of sugar left when the fermentation was stopped by the winemaker, either by filtration or more likely by the addition of sulphur dioxide.

I don't mind people using these techniques, I suppose they justify it by needing to have consistencey across the million or three bottles they make of each wine, but they do tend to make wines that are a bit simple, and a bit unbalanced, and in the case of the red lacking integration.

At a retail list price of about £7.00 I don't think they offer good value. They don't make me want to drink more than a glass or buy some more for future drinking.

I suppose that it does reassure me that working with small producers who want to produce wines that reflect their terroir. I also know that all of my wines are balanced and made with only the minimum amount of intervention necessary. None of my producers would even think about adding acidity, or using oak chips instead of barrels to give oaky characteristics to the wine.

All I need to do is to convince enough people that my wines are worth trying, I am convinced that if anyone drinks my wines they will easily spot the diference! So please spread the word, let's try to get people to try wines made by people whose priorities are more about the quality of their wine as a natural product, and  are passionate about wine and the place they live first, with profit a necessary evil that must eventually be thought of - let's face it even vignerons need to eat!

More on the weekend later ...