Winemaker Notes
#42 of Wine Enthusiast's Top 100 of 2016
Complex and enticing bouquet of dark berry fruit along with juicy black plum, spice, cedar and hints of chocolate and roasted coffee. Rich and complex with layers of dark berry fruits layered with lashings of coffee, chocolate and spice from high quality oak. The palate builds further with well-balanced, elegant tannins delivering a very generous and complete wine with textural complexity and long, persistent flavors.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The Taylor family selected Clare Valley for its Cabernet affinity, but this Shiraz is a knockout. Yes, it's oaky—full of menthol, vanilla and toasted coconut—but there's just enough black cherry and plum fruit to support the wood. It's a plush, full-bodied wine with immense appeal, for drinking now–2025.
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Wine Spectator
Offers intoxicating aromatics, with toasty cigar box, clove and sandalwood notes, pepper highlights and fresh earth—accented flavors of black cherry. A spicy detail extends through the long finish, with polished tannins. Drink now through 2028.
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.