Winemaker Notes
Food pairings: Beef Wellington with glazed winter vegetables
Cellaring: Enjoy now or cellar for 5 to 7 years.
"This is an outstanding value."
-International Wine Cellar
"...this bargain-priced beauty is more about displaying the Clare Valley terroir than simple fruit or oak, unusual in this price range..."
-Wine Enthusiast
"For smoky, grilled meats, pizzas and veggies, I love the spicy richness of the Annie's Lane McLaren Vale Shiraz from Australia—it's perfect for a barbecue crowd."
-Decanter
"What I like best about it is that it's not overripe, so it maintains enough acidity to make it a good food wine in a category where many similar wines are not."
-San Francisco Chronicle
Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
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.