Winemaker Notes
This single vineyard wine, produced from low yielding fruit from forty year old Riesling vines from the Mort's Block Vineyard, is pale straw in color with brilliant clarity and youthful greens tints.
Intensely varietal, exhibiting ripe citrus, limes and floral notes
A long and full flavored palate balanced beautifully by crisp natural acidity.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Kevin Mitchell at Kilikanoon captures Clare in this traditional, limey riesling. Its citrus flavors extend with air, as they will with time in the bottle. While relatively light in body, it's compelling, the lime pith and lemongrass notes persisting along with lovely florals.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
White values $20 and under. Tasted and recommended,
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Wine Spectator
Dry and crisp, with tightly packed, tobacco-scented green apple, pineapple and gooseberry flavors, lingering effortlessly.
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.