The Auswine Forum

We all love wine, why else would we be here for. But besides loving wine, I get fussy with provenance and vintage - I will ignore 2011 in Eastern Australia and will ask a waiter to put the red wine in an ice bucket because it is too hot.

But this fastidiousness spills over into other parts of my life, like I will only have coffee at well reputed cafes and will only buy beans freshly roasted. I only have leaf tea at home, and strongly brewed at that. The olive oil I cook with is only Australia's Cobram Estate, none of that Spanish or Italian muck. I only iron my shirts so the sleeve line is crisp and sharp - my wife rejoices over that!

Am I on my lonesome with this fastidiousness, or are there others out there that have similar general principles?

If no one responds I will fastidiously go and brew myself a strong tea.

You're not on your own, Hacker. I'm sure we all have interests other than wine - cooking, for example, and we might find that any fastidiousness about wine overflows into food. My partner cooks for a living, and, although I cook well, I defer to her in the kitchen, as she does to me regarding wine. We have a lot of common ground in both areas, however, and she has a good palate.

I'm also a musician (drums in a couple of bands) and the attention to detail pervades into that field as well.

Now go and fastidiously brew that cup of tea - nah, go pour a glass of wine

Cheers
Allan

I'm no great shakes as a cook, but I hate hot food on cold plates. When I do bacon and eggs for the wife and kids on these cold winter Sunday mornings I don't just heat the plates, I heat the cutlery as well.
Also, there's one best way to pack a dishwasher. Cutlery especially. Learn it!

I don't have many issues apart from steak. Cooking a medium rare steak inside with the outside seriously crusted requires the beef cut to be very thick. Hard to get a thick cut unless you get to it at the butchers before they cut them thin. But a thick scotch fillet (my fave) is far too big (say 500gm to 600gm) for one person. Finally resolved this by buying a super thick steak and cutting it in 2 after cooking for sharing.

Oh and I think less than razor sharp kitchen knives should be a criminal offence.

Chuck wrote:I don't have many issues apart from steak. Cooking a medium rare steak inside with the outside seriously crusted requires the beef cut to be very thick. Hard to get a thick cut unless you get to it at the butchers before they cut them thin. But a thick scotch fillet (my fave) is far too big (say 500gm to 600gm) for one person. Finally resolved this by buying a super thick steak and cutting it in 2 after cooking for sharing.

Oh and I think less than razor sharp kitchen knives should be a criminal offence.

Ah, a good steak. We have a butcher nearby called Handlers Meats and they do portion control eye fillets, each about 250g and 2 inches thick.I push them down with by hand to about 1 inch, generously season it with salt and ground pepper. Heat up a cast iron griddle extremely hot, and spread half a teaspoon of olive oil on each steak and sear for 3 minutes each side. This results in delicious crusting. Serve with Dijonnaise sauce or a quality Bearnaise.
Serve with a full bodied Barossa, perhaps a Standish wine. Now, if only I had a failsafe french fries ability.

Hacker wrote: Ah, a good steak. We have a butcher nearby called Handlers Meats and they do portion control eye fillets, each about 250g and 2 inches thick.I push them down with by hand to about 1 inch, generously season it with salt and ground pepper. Heat up a cast iron griddle extremely hot, and spread half a teaspoon of olive oil on each steak and sear for 3 minutes each side. This results in delicious crusting. Serve with Dijonnaise sauce or a quality Bearnaise.
Serve with a full bodied Barossa, perhaps a Standish wine. Now, if only I had a failsafe french fries ability.

Push them down to 1 inch? What's the thinking and benefit behind this?

Croquet King wrote: Push them down to 1 inch? What's the thinking and benefit behind this?

Believe it or not the steak surface gets too black/burnt and it is so much harder to get it medium rare. Plus the new surface size is almost doubled. Such a first world lockdown problem.

For me, I am an 80/20 guy ... Pareto optimality rather than perfection. Or, near enough is good enough. This applies to wine and elsewhere.

We only have a nice quaffer? Fine by me. We have a Grand Cru burgundy but only have tea cups to drink it? No problemo. (...but if I can solve this problem by just paying a little more, then I will)

Not to say I don't like nice things, but I also prefer to outsource anything finicky, as such I haven't ironed a shirt myself in years (to be clear I use a service, it is not that I force my partner to do it for me!)

Equally, I love to cook, but I like to cook approximately, hence I am not terribly good at baking which calls naturally for precision.

Some might say I am simply lazy...

For me, one of the things I am very fussy about is my golf clubs. I hate bag chatter on my forged irons, so I always use iron covers. Some of my mates always take the mickey out of me about how fussy I am with them.

Cheers
Ian

I like that 80/20 approach and is one reason I won't pursue the grandest of wine labels. There is a heck of a wide range of 'good' between those and plonk.

Back to the subject though: I love finding good food, more so in specialist food shops than fine dining. Italy is a dream for me, and I delight in preparing a list of such specialist shops in the months leading up to a holiday. They get added to lists of wine shops, events, quirky points of interest, bars and restaurants etc. All that helps me have a sense of familiarity when I arrive, plus easy 'on the fly' options.

Other things like coffee I'll indulge to minor hobbyist level, but rarely true geek.

Ian S wrote: Other things like coffee I'll indulge to minor hobbyist level, but rarely true geek.

I am a coffee person, just like tea, and after years of using mid range espresso machines - circa around $1000 - I believe the humble stovetop percolator extracts more efficiently than anything else.

I think the 80/20 approach works for me too.
I'm pretty geeky about a lot of things and I also tend not to want to follow the mainstream, but that geekiness has to be inside a budget, so I think that makes me search out the new and interesting, before popularity either changes something for the masses or pushes the price up. I'm pretty fussy about beer, coffee, tea, music, Literature, TV, cinema. I have cooked and baked professionally so I can definitely be a bit fussy about the quality of ingredients and I do judge people for not having decent knives, especially if they have a whole load of useless kitchen gadgets as many seem to do!

ticklenow1 wrote:For me, one of the things I am very fussy about is my golf clubs. I hate bag chatter on my forged irons, so I always use iron covers. Some of my mates always take the mickey out of me about how fussy I am with them.
Cheers
Ian

I am golf finicky as well, mind you it is a bridge too far for iron covers I think most golfers on single handicap (like Ian) tend to always be watching the pros swings, equipment, tips, slo-mo's etc. Instagram is perfect for that. And of course, the Open is on at present at Royal St Georges. Golfing nirvana!

Hacker wrote:

ticklenow1 wrote:For me, one of the things I am very fussy about is my golf clubs. I hate bag chatter on my forged irons, so I always use iron covers. Some of my mates always take the mickey out of me about how fussy I am with them.
Cheers
Ian

I am golf finicky as well, mind you it is a bridge too far for iron covers I think most golfers on single handicap (like Ian) tend to always be watching the pros swings, equipment, tips, slo-mo's etc. Instagram is perfect for that. And of course, the Open is on at present at Royal St Georges. Golfing nirvana!

I’m struggling with The Open at Royal St Georges. It’s a terrible course…. After playing it four or five times I vowed never to go back. There are so many better courses in the UK - they just weren’t built to handle all the spectators.

Mike Hawkins wrote: I’m struggling with The Open at Royal St Georges. It’s a terrible course…. After playing it four or five times I vowed never to go back. There are so many better courses in the UK - they just weren’t built to handle all the spectators.

I played St Georges in 1995 the week after Sandy Lyle won, and on many of the tees I genuinly couldn't see any fairway. I wouldn't bother. My fav UK Open courses in order:
St Andrew's
Portrush
Muirfield
Turnberry (Trump nearly made me not mention it)
Carnoustie
Troon
Birkdale
Lytham

This probably demonstrates my, and I'm sure many others, obsession with golf. I don't know why I didn't mention this in my first post. I hope Gavin doesn't mind this thread going off piste.... Oh, lets talk skiing.

Hacker wrote: The olive oil I cook with is only Australia's Cobram Estate, none of that Spanish or Italian muck.

Hey, there is plenty of "muck" from all around the world. I could argue that there is plenty of Australian wine muck exported to Canada but fortunately I don't judge things by tasting the "muck". Spanish olive oil can be excellent, as are the ones from other Mediterranean countries, including Italy. However, like Australian Little Penguin, there are olive oil equivalents from other countries.

Right now I am using an award winning Chilean single estate olive oil. It even has, if it's of any importance to you, a 97 point award on the bottle, from Italy no less.

Mahmoud.

Fully agree Mahmoud, and I'd like to believe that Hacker was just indulging in a little tongue in cheek nationalism.

For me, the very best olive oils have you thinking that it might be something you'd be happy to sip on without anything else to go with it. The brain says that's stupid, but the tastebuds are saying it isn't.

Freshness is a big factor in olive oil so a bit more of it is muck by the time it hits our shores. I can attest to the quality of Spanish and Portuguese Olive oil when in those countries but if it is going to be shipped out to Australia it is either going to be stored well and super expensive or poorly handled but affordable. Most of the supermarket grade stuff from Spain and Italy is not great by the time it gets on shelves here, is sometimes rancid (that sounds worse than it is but that is the correct term) and where the oil is labelled extra virgin, it often is significantly less than 100% extra virgin
So Hacker may have been a little tongue in cheek, but there are also some good reasons for that statement.
I guess I should add Olive oil to the list of things I am fussy about

Hacker wrote: The olive oil I cook with is only Australia's Cobram Estate, none of that Spanish or Italian muck.

Have you tried Joseph Olive Oil?

The First press EV is fantastic. It was part of last years xmas present to staff and some clients.
Gift boxed from Peter's with some balsamic - everyone loved it.

Utterly fastidious in the preparation of fine wine. So many simple things can make a huge difference in the wine’s performance. Storage, serving temperature, glassware cleanliness ( final rinse always in purified water ) and I could go on!

However, generally in life, I like to follow a professional dictum from over 30 years as a professional pilot : T-LAR ( that looks about right ). Rules of thumb with mathematical proof followed by guesstimates. Probably not evolving with the modern world but I just drown in useless technology or everyday bureaucracy.

Hacker wrote:

Mike Hawkins wrote: I’m struggling with The Open at Royal St Georges. It’s a terrible course…. After playing it four or five times I vowed never to go back. There are so many better courses in the UK - they just weren’t built to handle all the spectators.

I played St Georges in 1995 the week after Sandy Lyle won, and on many of the tees I genuinly couldn't see any fairway. I wouldn't bother. My fav UK Open courses in order:
St Andrew's
Portrush
Muirfield
Turnberry (Trump nearly made me not mention it)
Carnoustie
Troon
Birkdale
Lytham

This probably demonstrates my, and I'm sure many others, obsession with golf. I don't know why I didn't mention this in my first post. I hope Gavin doesn't mind this thread going off piste.... Oh, lets talk skiing.

I’ll continue the misdirection…

Turnberry (haven’t played the new version but I hear it’s awesome)
Birkdale
Old Course
Carnoustie (hardest course I’ve ever played)
Lytham
Troon
Liverpool
Portrush
St Georges

Haven’t played Muirfield, but would take Royal County Down and Dornoch over any of them.

Couple of my NWR interests about which I am fastidious

Cooking Thai food
bbq'ing steak (and serving with red wine of course, so only partially NWR )
Audio system and music listening

mjs wrote: Audio system and music listening

mjs I would love to hear your thoughts on Sonos speakers in terms of relative quality compared to other brands. I use four Sonos cube like speakers linked in with Spotify. I'm slightly deaf so top range speakers would be wasted on me.

Authenticity in 1950s Harley Davidsons, especially the K model and ironheads. Matching numbers, matching date codes, etc etc...

Hacker wrote:

mjs wrote: Audio system and music listening

mjs I would love to hear your thoughts on Sonos speakers in terms of relative quality compared to other brands. I use four Sonos cube like speakers linked in with Spotify. I'm slightly deaf so top range speakers would be wasted on me.

Just a quick comment then. Sonos are as good as any others in that space, so no problem from me. My son has a pair of One SLs, I have an Sonos Arc soundbar in front of a TV, but my sound system is a bit different from that, no wireless speakers.

ticklenow1 wrote:For me, one of the things I am very fussy about is my golf clubs. I hate bag chatter on my forged irons, so I always use iron covers. Some of my mates always take the mickey out of me about how fussy I am with them.

Cheers
Ian

Ooh I can relate! My Srixon 765s are a bag-chatter mess, but I'm gaming Ping i210s now so it isn't much of a problem

And yeh, I give hell to my iron cover using mates

Croquet King wrote:

Hacker wrote: The olive oil I cook with is only Australia's Cobram Estate, none of that Spanish or Italian muck.

Have you tried Joseph Olive Oil?

The First press EV is fantastic. It was part of last years xmas present to staff and some clients.
Gift boxed from Peter's with some balsamic - everyone loved it.

Joseph is really good including the pink label first press. I agree though, the Cobram is the one. Also try the Castagna olive oil.

Have a look at this

Cobram Estate oil tasting - $10.
I signed up - I'm at home need things to do

https://cobramestate.com.au/virtual-tasting

back to the OP.
as a Muso, Guitar tuning.
Nothing grinds my gears more than a pitchy instrument. I just can't deal with it.

Wizz wrote:

ticklenow1 wrote:For me, one of the things I am very fussy about is my golf clubs. I hate bag chatter on my forged irons, so I always use iron covers. Some of my mates always take the mickey out of me about how fussy I am with them.

Cheers
Ian

Ooh I can relate! My Srixon 765s are a bag-chatter mess, but I'm gaming Ping i210s now so it isn't much of a problem

And yeh, I give hell to my iron cover using mates

I've had the same set of Hogan Edge GS forged irons for 30 years now, with neoprene covers on the whole time, and they still look pretty tidy. As opposed to my game...!