d'Arenberg Footbolt Shiraz 1998

The Old Vine Shiraz palate is consistently well structured as a young wine, with terrific fruit and oak tannin providing great texture to support plum, blackcurrant and rolling blackberry flavours especially on the mid-palate. Often dark Chocolate characters are quite evident too. This is followed by a traditional, long, velvety, fine grained tannin finish.

The Old Vine Shiraz, like all of d'Arenberg's traditional red wines, gains considerable complexity with age. The colour moves through a red-brown into a brown-tawny spectrum. The aromas slowly incorporate more and more developed cedar, coffee and developed dark chocolate smells with leather, tobacco and earthy aromas complementing the rich developed fruit characters. More often than not distinctive peppery-spicy characters come to the fore after a little time in bottle.

On the tongue, the Old Vine Shiraz maintains a wonderfully textured palate with significant bottle age. Gentle, grainy black olive flavours balance the sweeter coffee, chocolate and mint characters. Malty, earthy and distinctly savoury characters on the rich middle palate dominate against a canvas of soft tannin and piquant acidity. The hallmarks of McLaren Vale, d'Arenberg, and The Old Vine Shiraz; a soft, rich middle palate, terrific texture and a long rolling finish, can reside with this wine for a number of years, even decades, as more than four decades of previous vintages have shown.