Winemaker Notes
The nose explodes with finger lime juice and pink grapefruit, along with wet slate and orange blossom aromas. Sweet grapefruit flesh drives the palate with mandarin juice, freshly cut lime, and aromatic quince to follow. A slate and mineral backbone and a load of citrus to finish.
Professional Ratings
-
Australian Wine Companion
The vineyard has 480m elevation, which is the key to the fine-boned structure of this classic. A mix of crisp acid and lime juice progressively gains intensity on the back palate, finish and aftertaste.
-
James Suckling
Super-bright and youthful with tons of lime and garden-herb freshness, this is a sleek but very polished Clare Valley dry riesling that needs a bit of time to open up. Steely long finish with pronounced minerality.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Lodge Hill Riesling is lean and tight and more austere than the fleshy/talc-y Watervale tasted beside it. The structure here says it will age exceptionally well—long into the future.
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.