The Blue Bird is the latest blue wine to hit Australian shops

So. Blue wine is a thing now. Really. Pop down to your local Liquorland if you don’t believe me.

‘It looks like pool water.’

So. Blue wine is a thing now. Really. Pop down to your local Liquorland if you don’t believe me. There you’ll find a bottle of The Blue Bird, a new, sweet, low-ish alcohol Australian wine with bright blue colouring added to it. (“Take care,” warns the label, “contact with clothes or surfaces may cause staining.”) It looks like something they’d drink on Star Trek. Or the colour of the water in your toilet if you have one of those automatic cleaning tablets in the cistern.

Blue wine was a hit in Europe this past summer after a bunch of young Spanish entrepreneurs launched a product called Gik. “Forget everything you know about wine,” the Gik website urges us. “Break with the past and invent the future.”

Liquorland has jumped on to this bandwagon with The Blue Bird. It’s being promoted as Australia’s first blue wine. But it’s not. Oh no. That honour goes to a blue-tinged, blueberry-flavoured bubbly launched by Penfolds back in 1974.

According to the promotional material of the time, Chalet Blue Rhapsody was “the most revolutionary wine that the House of Penfold has ever presented ... The first wine to match scrubbed blue jeans or an azure Australian sky, or a lazy swimming pool ... The first wine to ‘get with it’, out of the traditional rut.”

Sound familiar? It didn’t last, of course. So much for “getting with it”. What’s that famous quote about people who can’t remember the past being condemned to repeat it?

Anyway, I know the target market for The Blue Bird is not snobby middle-aged wine writers. So I enlisted the help of my 21-year-old daughter to put the product to the test. She was excited by the idea of a blue wine when I told her about it. Not so much when I poured her a glass. “It looks like pool water,” she said, echoing the Penfolds advertising copywriter of four decades ago. And the taste?

“Nah.”

Enough said.

Top reds for $25 or less

What does 25 bucks get you these days? A couple of dollars change from a plate of smashed avocado and feta on toast, perhaps. Or a bottle of delicious red wine. I know which I’d choose.

Seriously. Have you noticed how many fabulous reds there are at the moment competing at the $25 price point (give or take a dollar or two)? So many.

And they just keep coming. Here are just a few highlights from recent tastings that you might want to track down.

The 2016 Shadowfax Mondeuse. A ripper of a red, made in Werribee of all places from a relatively rare grape variety: wild and lively flavours of hedgerow berries, juicy on the tongue, light-footed, but with an earthy, gamy tang on the finish. Drink with chunky terrine.

The 2016 Paxton NOW Shiraz. This is, as the name suggests, so very now. The initials stand for natural organic wine: it’s made from biodynamically grown McLaren Vale grapes, with no added preservatives. It’s dark, bold, slurpy and rather more-ish. Drink with garlicky, cumin-scented chargrilled lamb skewers.

The 2016 Other Wine Co Grenache. A side-project for the winemakers at Shaw and Smith in the Adelaide Hills, this is also made from McLaren Vale grapes, and it’s a lovely expression of grape and place: some bright spices sprinkled over round red plummy fruit. Bung a few more of those skewers on the grill.

The 2014 VineMind Shiraz Malbec from the Clare Valley
This shiraz, by contrast, is crying out for a big hunk of steak: dark and brooding purple in the glass, it’s dense with flavours of glossy black licorice and rich sweet humus. It’ll age well in the cellar if you can keep your hands off it.

All, as I say, are about $25 a bottle. And not one of them is in the slightest bit blue.