Most of us don’t have cellars, or the means to lay down wines for years until they’re ready to drink. Lindemans used to run a mature releases program in the good old days. Sadly, these days Lindemans is just another brand of Treasury Estates, the wine business Fosters once owned but found a distraction form its beer business. More on that here: http://briard.typepad.com/get_the_picture/2011/09/how-fosters-and-southcorp-trashed-australias-greatest-wine-brands.html
I’m no admirer of large corporations, as you can glean from that piece, but I buy some of my non-fresh food from Woolworths and some of my wine from Dan Murphys Big W owns. DM’s has a Cellar Release program that includes a broad range of red and white wines they’ve cellared for around 4 - 5 years. Many are cheap wines like Annie’s Lane or Metala, which will be much improved with a few years of age, but there are Penfolds and Leo Burings and Wynns Coonawarra in higher price brackets.
The prices are more than fair as a rule, in fact they’re not much higher than the retail prices for the current vintage equivalents. For example, you can buy a Seppelt Chalambar Shiraz 2004 for $19, which is about the same cost as the 2009. The Mitchell’s 2005 Watervale Riesling is $24, about $4 more than the current 2011 vintage.
DM doesn’t make it easy to find these cellar releases online, and most of the stores only offer a subset of the full release.
This button on DM’s website will take you there, but it will only show up some of the time. Here’s a direct link which should take you there.
some older releases here, some still in stock
http://danmurphys.com.au/product-group/cellar-clear-out?resetnav=false
And here’s a catalogue of the top 20
http://danmurphys.com.au/guides/cellar-release-wines-buy-best-rated-wines-content
If all else fails, enter the names and year of some of the wines I’ve listed below into the search box on DM’s website, and then follow the breadcrumbs back to the next level up. There are lots of interesting wines here, and good on DM for doing this without getting greedy. A couple more examples:
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