Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
This wine comes from a vineyard in Watervale, planted at an elevation of 1,500 feet in red loam over limestone. Jeffrey Grosset finds the site is less stressful for riesling’s drought-sensitive roots than his vineyard at Polish Hill. This wine’s fierce, linear structure seems to speak of limestone while its flavors have a Clare Valley accent of lime blossoms and orange peel—delicate and filigreed, lean and rocky. With a day of air, the texture develops creamy richness and the dense flavors show their depths more fully. If you want to get the most out of this wine, cellar it for a decade, and store away enough bottles to enjoy through its second decade.
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.