Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is fascinating with dark chocolate and spice character. Violet pepper. Full body, with velvety tannins and a juicy finish. Northern Rhone-ish with Aussie panache. Drink now or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Very deep garnet-purple colored, the 2009 Oracle Shiraz gives complex notes of creme de cassis, coffee, grilled duck skin and soy over mace, licorice and tree bark. Full bodied and packed with flavor, it offers a solid backbone of crisp acid and firm, rounded tannins in the mouth, going long and spicy in the finish. Though approachable now, it should drink best 2013 to 2020+.
Rating: 93+ -
Wine Spectator
Fresh and vibrant, this is juicy with dark berry and black pepper flavors that sail over refined tannins and linger on the open-textured finish. This has intensity, but wields it gently. Drink now through 2019.
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.