Winemaker Notes
Perfect for summer picnic in the park or with freshly shucked oysters.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This vintage of pét-nat offers refreshment so unlike the Aussie stereotype that it’s the perfect tipple to surprise and delight those new to Oz’s diverse modern wine offerings. The color of cloudy lemon juice, it also smells like a freshly squeezed lemon and its rind. Aromatic wild herbs, like fennel and thyme, are there, too, along with a flicker of stony minerality, but it’s really all about the citrus. Bone-dry and buoyed by energetic bubbles, it’s crunchy, stony, citrusy and prickly all at once. Weird, wild, alive and downright delicious. Editors’ Choice.
Representing the topmost expression of a Champagne house, a vintage Champagne is one made from the produce of a single, superior harvest year. Vintage Champagnes account for a mere 5% of total Champagne production and are produced about three times in a decade. Champagne is typically made as a blend of multiple years in order to preserve the house style; these will have non-vintage, or simply, NV on the label. The term, "vintage," as it applies to all wine, simply means a single harvest year.
Quite the powerhouse region thanks to its proximity to the Murray River (and thus irrigation potential), Riverland produces over half of South Australia’s total annual harvest. While its warm Mediterranean climate promotes large volume production, many smaller, premium producers abound. Australia’s usual suspects—Chardonnay, Shiraz and Cabernet—do great but a continuing local push for heat-loving Italian varieties like Vermentino and Nero d’Avola promises future diversity.