Winemaker Notes
Aromas of fresh white peach, lime juice, and white florals with wet slate and minerally notes. A powerful Riesling with upfront lime leaf, followed by lime juice, white stone fruit and wet slate, all finishing with mouthwatering acidity. A wine built for the ages.
Blend: 100% Riesling
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
From a high-altitude site with similar, slate-based soils to Polish Hill River, but a cooler, more northerly location. This has super fine, white-peach and lemon aromas with a scintillatingly fresh and completely formed mouthful of fruit. Such attractive, fleshy drive. Powerful, long and dry. Drink or hold.
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Australian Wine Companion
A lime theme going on, with squirts of finger lime, kaffir leaves and blossom. Lithe and lively across the palate, juicy, yeasty with a dab of texture. Then the acidity kicks in to put everything back into its box.
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Wine Enthusiast
Classic Clare Valley, and a bargain to boot, this delicately aromatic Riesling opens with waxy lemon and lime leaf, jasmine and lavender flowers and talcum powder. The palate is dry and crunchy with a chalky texture, laser-focused acidity and floral, limy freshness that emerges with time in glass.
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Decanter
A very floral, lime and mint scented Riesling. Very dry on the palate with plenty of acidity and elegant lime fruit notes. Long and elegant with acidity leading 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.