Daniel – Page 6 – Daniel Tillett

Langmeil Orphan Bank Shiraz 2009

The Barrosa had a reasonably good year in 2009 and one of the best wines I have from that vintage is the Langmeil Orphan Bank Shiraz 2009. I found it on the Dan Murphys “wall of death” (i.e. off the main floor and hidden away in a corner). I was intrigued by the story on the back of the bottle about them saving some of the original 19th C. shiraz vines from the ravages of the 80s vine pull. I thought I would buy a bottle even though it is a bit outside of my normal price range ($42). I am certainly glad I did as it is worth every cent. I have had $80 wines that are nowhere as good as this. Highly recommended.

Price $42.75
Value >$75

Taltarni Pyrenees Shiraz 2009

Another great pyrenees shiraz that only cost me $22 a bottle. My only complaint is Taltarni is still using corks with this wine! Come on Taltarni it is 2012 – a cork these days is about as desirable as a hypercolour t-shirt.

Taltarni

Price $22.00
Value +$35.00

Update Nov 2013. I saw some of this for sale a couple of weeks ago at my local DM – the only downside is it is now $30 a bottle.

Irvine Springhill Merlot 2009

I am not overly fond of straight merlot wines (Château Pétrus is a little outside my price range) as they tend towards being lolly water. One real exception to this is the Eden Valley 2009 Irvine Spinghill Merlot. This is simply a great wine – soft, smooth and full of flavour. It is easy to pair up with food and best of all it is a total bargain at under $17 a bottle. For the price I don’t think I have had a better wine all year. This is certainly a wine you can afford to stock up on.

Irvine Merlot

Price $16.90
Value >$25.00

Update Jan 2014. I have recently tried the 2012 vintage and it is great too – I would say even better than the 2009. Still the same great low price.

Mount Pleasant Rosehill Hunter Valley Shiraz 2009

A longer overdue post on some good wines. I have had a few (well more than a few) in the last couple of months, but life has intervened and I have just not had time to write about any of them. One that I should write about is the 2009 Mount Pleasant ‘Rosehill’ Hunter Valley Shiraz. I have a very soft spot for Hunter wines in general and for ‘Rosehill’ in particular. The 1991 Rosehill was one of the first ‘good’ wines I can remember drinking and I have drunk a lot of the great vintages of this wine over the years. The only problem is Rosehill is typical of all Hunter wines in being totally vintage dependent. To say the Hunter Valley does not have a reputation for consistency is a massive understatement. If it was not for its geographical location a couple of hours north of Sydney then I am sure that all the vineyards in the Hunter would have become coal mines long ago. Despite this when the conditions are right (unfortunately far too rarely) it can give birth to some of the best wines in Australia.

The upside to all this inconstancy is that no Hunter wine can command the prices that it should when a good vintage comes along. The 2009 vintage is a great vintage and is one of those years where there are many hunter bargains to be found. There is probably no greater bargain than the 2009 Rosehill. This is a traditional hunter shiraz at a price ($26) far below where it should be for the actual wine in the bottle. My advice is run (don’t walk) and buy as much of this wine as your wallet (or wife) will let you. Bargain of the year so far.

Rosehill

Cost: $26
Value: +$50

Clonakilla O’Riada Shiraz 2009

Tim Kirk from Clonakilla is one of the better Australian winemakers (just a slight understatement). Clonikilla flagship Shiraz is rightly considered one of the best Australian wines, but at $100 a bottle is a little outside my budget. Last year I saw a new wine from Clonikilla – the O’Riada Shiraz at $35. The second wines of great winemakers in good years are normally bargains and this wine was the perfect example of this theory. The 2009 vintage is everything you could wish for at this price and is better than most wines I have had that cost more than twice the price. I was only able to grab 3 bottles and Dan Murphys were not able to get any more in for me (unfortunately the 2010 is not anywhere near as good). I had my last bottle tonight with roast rib eye and it was perfect – smooth, powerful and in harmony with the meal. Now if only I could get more :(

O'Riada

Cost: $35
Value: >$70

New iPad

On a bit of a impulse I decided to try my luck getting a new iPad at BigW on Friday morning (I was driving past around the time they open). While there were quite a few apple desperadoes ahead of me in the queue (I was last in line), I thought it might be worth the wait. Luckily they still had the model I wanted (32G wifi black) by the time they got down to me so I bought it.

I didn’t get much chance to play with it yesterday (work), but I have had a bit of a chance today. I already have the version 1 iPad. I can say the only important difference between the two is the screen. While this might not seem that important the new screen is immaculate – so much that it makes the old iPad seem like something out of the 80s. I can’t stress enough how much better the new screen is than the old. If like me you use your iPad mostly to read then the new iPad is not just an incremental upgrade, it is revolutionary. It is a shame that Steve didn’t live to see it released as I am sure this is what he always had in mind what the iPad should be – maybe Apple’s stock will reach $700 yet.

MySQL Problem: Column count of mysql.proc is wrong. Expected 20, found 16. The table is probably corrupted;

I was dumping and importing MySQL databases between my production server which had MySQL 5.0.95 and my test server which had MySQL 5.1.61 and was getting the error “Column count of mysql.proc is wrong. Expected 20, found 16. The table is probably corrupted;” on the test server with the copied over database.

To make a long story short apparently there is some bug in MySQL that causes this rather cryptic error when moving a database created by 5.0 to 5.1. To fix this problem you need to run the following command as root (or use sudo) on the server you have migrated the database.

mysql_upgrade --force -uroot -p [your mysql root password]

You have to use the –force option or else the upgrade won’t fix the problem. I hope this saves someone a little time.

Pio Cesare Grignolino del Monferrato Casalese 2009

I am a bit of a sucker for new things (at the supermarket if it say “new” I will buy it). On this basis I bought a bottle of Pio Cesare Grignolino del Monferrato Casalese 2009. I of course had never heard of Grignolino before (who has), but what the heck I thought why not try this wine. Price is usually a very good indication of quality (unfortunately) and at $30 I thought it should be drinkable. I am glad I took the risk as the wine is very,very drinkable. It is rather difficult to describe (Grignolino is apparently a rather rare, but distinctive Italian wine according to my google research), but I guess the closest would be to say it can fill the role of a pinot while being different. If you are looking for a medium bodied, yet robust, wine that can pair up well with food then this is something to try. If I had to sum it up in one word then that word would be yum. I will certainly be buying more.

Price $30

Value $45

Edit. Dan Murphys has dropped the price on this down to $19.90 so it is even better value than before.

The Hut by Dalwhinnie Shiraz 2010

This is a great food wine. Too many wines are made to drink on their own and not enough are made to have with food. A good food wine should have flavour and depth without overpowering the great meal you are eating. The Hut by Dalwhinnie 2010 Shiraz is one of those wines that manages to be meet both requirements. This is not a wine that needs to be cellared for 20 years before drinking – it is one of those wine to open and enjoy now.

One thing I rather like about this wine is the label. It manages to be different without trying too hard. Pick some up from Dan Murphys before it all sells out.

Cost. $23

Value. $30

Installing Windows 7 on Mac Mini without a MacOS X Lion Partition

The Apple Mac Mini make a rather nice silent and quite powerful Windows box (there just isn’t any other hardware out there as good). The first problem is if you install Windows 7 you have to keep a Mac OS partition if you use BootCamp which is a waste of drive space. The second problem is the new mac minis don’t have a DVD drive anymore so it is not possible to install from a Window 7 DVD. The final problem is you need all the drivers that Apple supplies, so even if you manage to install from an image it would not work.

It occurred to me that it might not be necessary to keep the MAC OS X partition if I installed from the BootCamp created USB installer. This would allow me to remove the Mac OS X partition in the Windows install process. I gave it a go and it worked. The basic procedure is as follows:

Boot into Mac OS X Lion and use BootCamp to create the USB installer with the Apple drivers. You will need a Windows 7 .iso image and a USB drive. I am not sure of the capacity you need for the drive, but the drive I used was 16 GB. Make sure you don’t have anything you want on the USB drive as it will be deleted in the process of creating the installer.
Restart the Mac Mini holding down the option key and select to boot from USB drive.
Windows 7 should start up and take you through the installation process. Select Custom Installation and when it shows the hard drive delete all the Mac partitions and create a new partition for Windows. Continue with the installation as per normal.
Once you are in Windows 7 go to the USB drive and install the Apple drivers.
Now you have the drivers installed you can download and install all the Windows updates – so much fun :)