My name is Dave Worthington and I’ve been running Tinto y Blanco for a couple of years now. I live in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve had an interest in wine since being dragged around wineries as a kid, but a trip to Spain in 2001 opened my eyes to Spanish wine, something just clicked and I haven’t been able to stop drinking it since.

There are plenty of reviews of Spanish wine around from the US or UK, but I have struggled to find information and reviews on Spanish wines that are actually available in Australia over the years. So, after wading through a lot wine and drinking a lot of good stuff, and some bad, I started Tinto y Blanco to share my experiences. Hopefully you’ll find something here that helps to sort out the good from, well, not so good.

Where possible I try to post 5 times a week, this of course depends on what the importers have available, when new containers come in and how much time I have. I cover as many regions as I can, as well as wines made from Spanish varieties around the world. My focus is on wines that anyone could buy in Melbourne or around Australia, so I buy just about anything I can get my hands on. I also buy older wines at auction and a have a select few in my small cellar, so there will be a mix of the old and the new.

I’m not really into the news and gossip of the wine world or the bloging movement, so you won’t find a lot of that here. Just wine tasting and wine information. Maybe the odd travel tip or a bit of a chat about food for good measure. The site is fully funded by myself and I chose not to place advertising on the site from day 1. While I pay for many of the wines that I post about, I also get a lot of support from the importers by the way of invitations to trade tastings and samples.

How I taste

Where possible, I taste a wine like anyone else at home: open a bottle, decant it if it needs it, then pour myself a glass. I’ll generally have at least one glass of a wine, usually two. With food too if its going. The idea here is that I want to closely follow how ‘real’ people drink wine, not just a quick swirl, sniff and spit. I’ve not been keen on using points to score wine in the past, but it is probably the easiest way to tell if I like the wine or not. I’ve gone with the 100 point system as most people are familiar with it and it is widely used. If I think a wine has the potental go up in points with with bottle age I add a + to the score.