Winemaker Notes
Starbright pale lemon with green highlights, this dry Riesling Traditionale is fresh, crisp, and dry with bright lemon, lime and slate - all seamlessly wound around a spine of bright, mineral acidity providing length and drive.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Wonderfully fragrant nose of lemon blossom, then juicy and vibrant on the sleek and super-straight palate, this is a prototypical Clare Valley dry riesling with a lot of lime fruit and a very zesty finish.
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Decanter
Now in its 38th vintage, Traditionale is Australia's best-selling premium Riesling. While not as incredible as the 2021 vintage (squirrel some away if you can find it), this is still a great-value, ageworthy drop from a fine, cool year. Bone-dry with a perky grip of lime juice acidity, orange blossom lift and crisp flavours of lemon sherbet and wet river stones. A great aperitif for shellfish.
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Wine Enthusiast
A vibrant, transparent perfume of lime zest, white blossoms, orange essence and chalk leads. Racy acidity on the palate cuts through a slippery texture, leaving tangy citrus flavors lingering long on the finish. Highly refreshing and a bargain for the quality.
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.