Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Australian Wine Companion
From a single site. It feels quite glossy and concentrated, a little slick of fruit sweetness but that's tempered by saline minerality and tightening citrus fruit characters. About all that, the wine speaks volumes in florals, talc, green apple, gingery elements and a kind of lemon meringue note, too. Ultra attractive, a little extra bandwidth and character here; complexity is notable. All that flavour and detail is super impressive and makes for an outstanding wine.
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James Suckling
Laser-focused aromas of grapefruit, flint, lemon peel, lime leaves and sea spray. The palate is light-bodied with a high-tension mouthfeel and energetic acidity. Delicate and refined, showing lingering notes of green apples, talc and slate. Excellent.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2024 Polish Hill River Smith Riesling is taut, tense and savory, remarkably so, given the comparison between this and the 2024 Polish Hill River Riesling tasted alongside. The structural integrity here is impressive, as is the concentration of acidity and flavor. This is a spearing wine of impact and length. It is very good.
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Vinous
The 2024 Riesling Smith is a big step up, offering a broad mix of powerful preserved lemon and pear scents with a whisper of apricot aromas. There is serious texture and grip to this, which impressively holds generous flavors and acidity through to a finish of exceptional length.
Riesling possesses a remarkable ability to reflect the character of wherever it is grown while still maintaining its identity. A regal variety of incredible purity and precision, this versatile grape can be just as enjoyable dry or sweet, young or old, still or sparkling and can age longer than nearly any other white variety. Somm Secret—Given how difficult it is to discern the level of sweetness in a Riesling from the label, here are some clues to find the dry ones. First, look for the world “trocken.” (“Halbtrocken” or “feinherb” mean off-dry.) Also a higher abv usually indicates a drier Riesling.
The Clare Valley is actually a series of narrow north to south valleys, each with a different soil type and slightly different weather patterns along their stretch. In the southern heartland between Watervale and Auburn, there is mainly a crumbled, red clay loam soil called terra rossa and cool breezes come in from Gulf St. Vincent. A few miles north, in Polish Hill, is soft, red loam over clay; westerlies blowing in from the Spencer Gulf influece this area's climate.
The differences in soil, elevation, degree of slope and weather enable the region to produce some of Australia’s finest, aromatic, spicy and lime-pithy Rieslings, as well as excellent Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec with ripe plummy fruit, good acid and big structure.
Clare Valley is an isolated farming country with a continental climate known for its warm and sunny days, followed by cool nights—perfect for wine grapes’ development of sugar and phenolic ripeness in conjunction with notable acidity levels.