The following article is brought to you by the good folk at By The Bottle. “This is not unique to the new wave movement by any means, but what we do have on our side though is the freedom to be agile and experimental.” — Ben Leen, Alpine Wine Co. Click image to listen to the Not Serious Ben Leen podcast. Orange and not even in a glass with a stem — Halcyon Days You’ve probably clocked a change in the wines we see in bars, restaurants and wine shops. Introducing themselves with artful, esoteric labels, these wines may appear somewhat ambiguous. The information offered on the label is oft ..read more

Look, we’re big fans of a great beverage here at Not Serious. While wine is a focus, we sure do love a mezcal margarita too. As we start a new year and see the annual influx of endless articles about “how to survive Dry January” or Instagram posts on personal resolutions to drink less, we wondered, if celebrating the silly season makes us all feel like we should slow down or even stop completely, why do we even drink at all? Excessive alcohol consumption has long term consequences. It fucks with your mind, body and spirit. If you’re overly imbibing on the daily then it’s highly likely it adds ..read more

You might think I’ve taken a departure from the wine chats by not talking to a winemaker for today’s chat. Quite the contrary.  For most of us, the restaurant setting is where we get our best exposure to wines we may not have heard of or tried before.  The beverage selection is an important income earner for any hospitality joint and the restaurant is an important customer for our beverage producing pals.  With such genuine simpatico it seems only right that we include those hard-grafting hospo heroes in the chats to get their not serious take on wine too.  If you live unde ..read more

One Tuesday morning in Tāmaki Makaurau mid August, Pete, John and I had the chance to sit down at the table at Coco’s Sound Lounge and chew the fat with Rosie Finn of Neudorf Vineyards — and she can chat. Rosie almost broke Matt Dicey’s record of such adept conversational flow that next to no editing was required. Dreamy! Matt still holds the record but Rosie was hot on his heels with only two short excerpts ending up on the cutting room floor. It was a total treat to chat to this fine wahine who is truly flying the flag for successful succession — quite a thing for the NZ wine industry — all ..read more

Pete at By The Bottle has written the perfect little 5-minute read on decanting. It also provides an opportunity to share one of the best ‘wine moments’ from Succession that will leave you unable to ever decant without wondering if you should employ the NutriBullet. Your 5 minute Guide to Decanting Wine. You might think it’s something reserved for expensive, old bottles served in top notch restaurants, but decanting is a handy little trick that can help get the best out of a bottle of wine at home, regardless of its price. Why decant? The first reason is to pour aged red wines off the sediment ..read more

On a Sunday afternoon on Auckland’s aromatic Karangahape Road, we welcomed winemaker, Nick Mills from Rippon to the newly christened Coco’s Sound Lounge. In town, for the annual Negociants New Zealand Fine Wine Tour, we were grateful that Nick could squeeze us in for a little not serious chat and a laugh or two. This one is for the winos but it’s also for the ski hounds and the musos. I don’t use the term Original Gangster that often but in the case of Nick Mills and his family they are nothing short of Central Otago’s OGs.  This family’s contribution to their local village goes back four ..read more

This is my dog. She’s called Scratch. She can smell anywhere from 1000 to 10,000 times better than me. That’s some powerful whiff by the woofer. It’s been recorded that, under perfect conditions, a dog can smell its owner from up to around 20kms away. While we don’t have that sort of olfactory super power, when it comes to tasting wine we use our schnoz much more than you might imagine. Many of you will recall being a little kid and hating something your Mum or Dad put on your dinner plate. The only way to scoff the sordid business down was to hold your nose. We learn pretty early on in life t ..read more

One of the magical things about wine is a lot of the hard graft is done by Mother Nature. Essentially, that means the recipe for a wine is never really the same. As the seasons are always different, what is the one true constant that helps guide those little berries into juice and the subsequent elixir that we’ve come to know and love? The answer: humans. Most wine folk out there advise that they practice what is called a ‘minimal intervention’ approach to their winemaking. It’s considered mandatory for small batch, quality producers. Perhaps an overused term these days but it is relevant so w ..read more

Warning: this chat contains sulphur. Listen, we’re almost done talking about natural wine. It’s been the most debated movement in the modern wine world since screw caps filled the gap where a cork should go. It’s contentious partly because it doesn’t adhere to a specific set of rules for certification and there are such different definitions of what ‘natural’ actually means. It’s possibly also a tad divisive because it made a lot of established wineries feel like they were out of touch and not down with the kids. The old guard poo-pooed it as being a ‘fly-by-night’ experimental winemaking flin ..read more

It was the best of wines. It was the worst of wines. What even is a wine review? It’s reported that literary legend Charles Dickens, responsible for the opening line we’ve just butchered to death down a back ally, was quite the wine connoisseur. Seldom does a Dickens novel not include a cask or keg within its pages at some point but it’s clear the man was a personal fan of fine wine. His ledger book is said to have outlined expenditure of close to £15,000 ($28,656.98NZD) per year just on grape juice (a figure that hasn’t been converted to today’s inflation rate) Dickens preference was Italian ..read more