Holidays leave little time for blogging and, interestingly, for drinking too. However, a few items have been consumed along the way so far, brief impressions of which follow.

Continuing on my supermarket wine odyssey for a moment, I had a bottle of ASDA’s 2009 Montagne Saint-Emilion (£6) last night. there are precious few details on the bottle as to it provenance, but the wine itself turned out to be very drinkable, slightly simple and confected red fruit flavours forming an appropriately light layer atop a well balanced platform of acid and tannin. A really nice bistro-style wine that I could happily throw back by the carafe-full at lunch.

Rather more spectacular was a bottle of Morris Grant Liqueur Tokay NV ($A35). Morris’s house style is typically fuller and sweeter than other Rutherglen producers, and this wine was a powerhouse of coffee, tea-leaf and toffee flavours. Incredible length and drive, exciting intensity, complex flavours. Not the most elegant Tokay I’ve ever had but oh-so satisfying.&

I wasn’t, and am still not, sure what to make of a bottle of 2005 Glaetzer Godolphin (£30), more from a stylistic perspective than a quality one. There’s no doubt in my mind this is the wine it sets out to be, with gobs of dense fruit and oak on both nose and palate. The fruit’s character is typically Barossan too, with the kind of warm juiciness fans of this region will value highly. If it’s not my cup of tea, being a little garrulous and brutish as a style, then perhaps that’s simply my loss.