Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wine & Spirits
This grows in a warm spot in a high-elevation vineyard otherwise planted to riesling. It's clean, fragrant and relatively light in weight; the purple plum fruit has a tart, almost malic acidity, creating a peppery crush of flavor. Serve it slightly chilled next summer.
Best Buy -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Medium to deep garnet-purple colored, the 2012 The Lodge Hill Shiraz is scented of crushed mulberries, black cherries and plums, with nuances of cloves and lavender. Medium to full-bodied with plenty of juicy black fruit flavors supported by a medium level of rounded tannins and balancing acid, it finishes with good length.
-
Wine Spectator
Lithe and lissome, this sleek style offers dark berry, tea leaf and spice flavors on a polished frame, lingering easily against nubby tannins.
Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
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.