Winemaker Notes
Vermentino on skins offering notes of peach and iced tea. A super refreshing wine.
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Pigato is a skin-contact wine, and the bitterness of that component makes me smile as I taste it. There are notes of dehydrated orange peel, lemon and grapefruit, squeezed lime and sea salt—it's throwing salty Margherita vibes—plus jalapeño, coriander and white pepper. Bottled unfined and unfiltered, with 50 parts per million of sulfur added. 10.1% alcohol, sealed under Diam.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Pigato, aka Vermentino, shows up in Clare Valley via one of Aus’s most boundary-pushing producers. A slightly hazy lemon hue, it smells of toasted pine nuts, lemon peel, almond oil and hay. It’s textural and pithy, with acidity gliding along for the ride rather than shrieking, banshee-like. It’s an outside-the-box bottling for adventurous drinkers, with just 10% alcohol.
-
Australian Wine Companion
Twenty days on skins has resulted in a straw-coloured vermentino with a high refreshment factor and a bit of wildness too. Lemon, barley and anise notes meet orange oil and grapefruit. It's tasty, but it's also free-flowing.
A fantastic, aromatic white grape that grows with great success in Sardinia, Tuscany and in lesser proportions on the island of Corsica. Somm Secret—Vermentino is thought to be genetically identical to Liguria’s Pigato grape and Peidmont’s Favorita. It comprises a large proportion of the whites in southern France where it is called Rolle.
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.