Winemaker Notes
The wine first has restrained floral aromas of orange blossom and rose petal and then later strong regional and varietal aromas of lime zest appear.
On release, the wine has a fresh lemon-lime flavoured palate with a crisp acid backbone. The finish has a subtle, pleasing minerally character.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Focused on citrus-pitch flavors of lime and pink grapefruit, this opens into a blast of minerality with air. It's a muscular riesling, the fruit held in check by potent acidity, a huge wine that needs bottle age to mature toward mellow toastiness and marmalade.
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Wine Spectator
Aromatic and aristocratic, this is dry, steely and mouthwatering in its structure, overflowing with pear, grapefruit, slate and floral flavors that persist on the extensive finish. Drink now through 2018. 448 cases imported.
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.