Category: Adelaide Hills, Clare Valley, Great Southern, Musings, Red Wine, Riesling, White Wine
Tags: Red Wine, Riesling, Shiraz, Viognier, White Wine
This month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday is all about Single Vineyard wines – wines from a named individual vineyard. These wines are often made to showcase a vineyard’s terroir. Here in Australia, we are spoilt for choice for Single Vineyard wines & they are usually easy enough to identify as they will often have the vineyard name on the front label. For small batch boutique producers, this may be the only wine of that varietal they produce & it naturally falls into a single vineyard category even if not mentioned on the label.
I particularly enjoy tasting wines of the same varietal that are made by the same winemaker but from individual vineyards as it gives you a deeper insight into to the region, the vineyard & the winemaker themselves. Of course, you can’t beat being at the winery where you can see each of the vineyards while you are tasting. However, we are blessed with an abundance of knowledge at our finger tips these days with the internet so it is much easier to pull down tasting notes & hopefully images to help impart that sense of place.
Vineyard soil samples. Taken at cellar door. Bottles are not those tasted.
Single Vineyard is something that Frankland Estate in the Great Southern region of Western Australia does very well. It has three single vineyard Rieslings and they are some of Australia’s finest. I chose these because Riesling is all about fruit purity & therefore are very expressive of terroir differences. The priority for the winemaker is to get the fruit into the press & then the tank to keep that freshness. It is almost like distilling the grape’s essential character into a still snapshot capturing that one moment. Each of these wines shine with their own personalities although I have a preference for the lovely Poison Hill & the intensity of the Isolation Ridge- well everyone has to have a favourite or two.
Frankland Estate Isolation Ridge Riesling 11 (higher gravel content) has intense smoky lime, blossom with some grapefruit characters with a silkiness that is seductive {$32}. Frankland Estate Poison Hill Riesling 11 (sits on white clay) is unmistakenly the ‘pretty one’ with floral fragrance and an almost mandarin citrus nose{$30}. It seems more delicate, a little crisper but still has that hallmark length & line of a fine Riesling. The Frankland Estate Netley Road Riesling 11 (more loamy soil) is much more self contained in comparison with a tighter mineral line to its tangy lime ripeness {$30}.
There are plenty of icon wines from different brands that have a blend instead of a single definitive vineyard. The Taylor family have taken the single vineyard approach with their icon wines coming from the St Andrews vineyard. Taylors St Andrews Shiraz shows what Clare Valley shiraz is all about. The 2009 vintage is generous rich & smooth with peppery blackberry. The fruit is sweetly ripe, juicy & fresh without being overwhelmed by masses of oak ($60).
What I have open now is a wine from The Lane in Adelaide Hills. The 2010 Block 5 Shiraz Viognier has just that lift of pepper & supple tannins that you want from a dash of Viognier with no clumsy apricots to be seen. Elegant & lushly ripe from the vineyard with the co-ordinates 35° 0’57.94″S 138°50’6.12″E. Just so you can be assured of the provenance …..
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