Winemaker Notes
A hand crafted wine made in very limited quantities, the Mort's Reserve is a unique blend of the best Riesling parcels from the Mort's Block and Khileyre vineyards. Cellaring potential at least twenty five years.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
From two vineyards in Watervale, including 40-year old vines planted by winemaker Kevin Mitchell’s father, this is a precisely made, powerfully flavored and completely dry Riesling. There’s an earthy tension underlying the lime and green apple flavors, with concentrated intensity hinting a citrus marmalade, a character the wine will develop with age. Cellar it, or decant a bottle now for seafood chowder.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2007 Riesling "Mort’s Reserve" is medium straw-colored with a bouquet of mineral, spring flowers, honeysuckle, and citrus. Made in a racy style, this crisp, intense Riesling will evolve for 6-8 years but can be enjoyed now. It is a perfect match for oysters on the half-shell.
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.