Winemaker Notes
Dark forest fruit aromas, combine with nuances of spiced dough. This is classic Clare Valley Shiraz. Blackberry compote and lightly spiced vanilla flavors. A deep and brooding core, with a moreish texture and flavor. A wine for the ages.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
This 2017 The McRae Wood Shiraz is savory and meaty—in accordance with its 2017 peers. The vintage has led to a tranche of wines that are far more savory than sweet, possessed of charred wood, tobacco, earth, salted licorice, deli meat and a multitude of other similarly woven fabrics. This is purely a style choice here—2019 is concentrated, 2018 is pure and red, and 2017 is spicy and savory. All are great, just armed with different attributes.
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Wine & Spirits
Integrated and fully mature, this wine’s sweet notes of plum pudding and Christmas spice meet lasting tannins, giving an evergreen scent of spruce and pine boughs. Drink up with lamb.
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.