Winemaker Notes
#4 Wine Enthusiast Top 100 Wines of 2019
There’s a hint of talc and Provencal lavender and some vibrant herb aromas with a tight, intense mid-palate that features pure lime juice flavors. Mouth-puckering with a hint of lemon pith and shaley minerality, it’s long, uber-dry and memorable. While plenty love the youthful tight structure and restraint of ‘Polish Hill’, others will prefer it after a few years in the cellar. It has the potential for significant aging.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a downright beautiful, textured and highly focused expression of Riesling. The nose is more open and fruit forward than the previous vintage, bursting with freshly sliced lime, guava, flowers and streaks of stony minerals. The palate is bone dry, slippery and fresh, with bright limey fruit and an endlessly long mouthwatering finish. Drink now–2039.
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Wine Spectator
Intense and crisp grapefruit and lime flavors show touches of lemongrass and fresh ginger, set on a light frame, with crunchy acidity and a hint of lanolin on the finish.
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.