by Martin Field

Judging for the 2007 Queensland Wine awards took place at the Brisbane Sofitel on December 3 – with your kindly editor as one of the judges.

Three judging panels tasted some 340 wines from 55 Queensland wineries. A tiny number of contenders compared with, for instance, the Royal Melbourne Wine Show’s 4,000 plus entries. Not bad however, for a state that most southerners still see as an emerging wine region.

Obviously, I didn’t get to taste all the wines but of those I tried, I thought the verdelhos were very good, the merlots were also impressive.

In the taste off for the trophy awards, I rated the 2006 Hidden Creek Rooklyn Shiraz as outstanding.

Trophy winners
Best Fortified Wine: 1986 Ballandean Estate Wines Red Liqueur Muscat; Best Dessert Wine: 2006 Heritage Wines of Stanthorpe Botrytis Chardonnay; Best Red Wine: 2006 Hidden Creek Rooklyn Shiraz; Best White Wine: 2006 Kooroomba Vineyards Chardonnay; Best Sparkling Wine: 2006 Sirromet Wines Sparkling Petit Verdot.

Cringe factor?
Funnily enough, you don’t see many Queensland wines on Queensland restaurant wine lists. Reminds me of the Mornington Peninsula region 20 and more years ago. If you went into a Peninsula wine store or bottle shop and asked for a local wine the typical reply was, ‘Don’t get much call for that sort of stuff around here Sir.’

Prawns and Technicolour yawns
Travelling to and from Brisbane for the awards judging, I couldn’t help noticing that the coastal strip is a bit of a horror show for fine food lovers. Numerous fast food outlets whiz past the bus windows. Their garish shopfronts interspersed with a number of restaurants advertising that ghastly juxtaposition: ‘Surf and Turf’, or its inventive alternative, ‘Reef and Beef’.

‘It’s for the tourists.’ Locals explain lamely. Strange really. Tourists in France, for example, seem able to make do with superior food that doesn’t depend on meat and seafood piled on the one plate.