Winemaker Notes
Explosive florals, fresh lime, and citrus combine with a hint of rockmelon and wet limestone on the nose. The entry is driven by the nose, with a heap of fruit weight. Chalky in texture with white floral, citrus flavours, and a juicy finish.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Watervale Riesling is supple and spicy and very fine, with an aspirin-like acid line that underpins the fleshy citrus fruit. The wine is utterly pristine in its construction and populated by fruit that is crystal clear and perfectly eloquent of its Clare Valley roots.
Rating: 93+ -
Wine Enthusiast
Delicate but highly crowd-pleasing aromas of orange and lime sorbet, nectarine and florals waft from the glass. It’s a light, dry, crisp wine that offers a punchy freshness and fruity appeal but could gain honeyed complexity with a few more years in the bottle.
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.