Winemaker Notes
This wine is pristine with aromas and flavors of lemon myrtle and tea tree blossom. With crushed quartz minerality, it is evocative, seamless and ageless. The wine shows great tautness and line as a young wine that will delight early drinkers as well as those who put it in the cellar.
Enjoy with kingfish sashimi and chillu lime dressing, or vegetable spring rolls with Vietnamese herbs.
Professional Ratings
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Australian Wine Companion
It has all the hallmarks of a great riesling. Balance of citrus, spices and a mineral sensation to the acidity. It has light raw silk texture and depth, yet is never showy. It's all class.
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Vinous
Bright straw. Vibrant, mineral- and floral-driven citrus fruit aromas show fine definition and pick up a deeper pear quality with air. Shows firm tension and energetic lift on the palate, offering nervy lemon zest, green apple and pear skin flavors that deepen and stretch out slowly through the back half. Smoothly blends depth and vivacity and finishes very long and minerally, with the citrus fruit note repeating.
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.
Higher in elevation and topographically more dramatic than the Barossa Valley floor, Eden Valley abuts it to its south and east. While it is a bit of an extension of Barossa, Eden Valley is topographically different than the pastoral Barossa Valley, and is composed of rocky hills and eucalyptus groves.
Recognizing Eden Valley’s potential with Riesling in the 1960s and 70s, producers started to move their Riesling production from Barossa to these better sites where schist soils on hilltops would produce more steely, tart and age-worthy examples. A most famous site, planted by Colin Gramp, called Steingarten, today produces one of the most outstanding Australian Rieslings. Youthful Eden Valley Rieslings express floral, grapefruit and mineral, while with time in the bottle, they become increasingly toasty and complex.
Riesling isn’t the only grape the region can grow; undeniably at lower altitudes Shiraz does very well. Mount Edelstone is a notable vineyard as well as the Hill of Grace, which boasts healthy Shiraz vines well over 100 years old. This is the only Australian region where Merlot has a made a name for itself and Chardonnay can be spectacular, particularly from the High Eden subregion in the southern valley.