HEATHCOTE SHIRAZ 2003
Gold Medal! - 2006 Royal Melbourne Wine Show
Halliday's 2007 Wine Companion - 95 Points - "Glorious colour; big. rich, condensed fruit and ample tannins; floods the mouth with flavour.
Heathcote Wine Region, in Central Victoria, has a rapidly growing reputation as a great place to grow Shiraz. The region features a deep strip of rare, ancient, red Cambrian soil with excellent moisture retention characteristic virtually eliminating the need for irrigation. It is this red soil that gives Heathcote Shiraz its distinctive character.
The combination of low rainfall, hot summers and the red Cambrian soil creates a challenging environment in which the Shiraz vines thrive, albeit producing low yields and small berries with intense flavours.
The 2003 Heathcote Shiraz is made predominantly with grapes from our ‘Athols Paddock’ vineyard. Several other Heathcote vineyards contributed small parcels of Shiraz to the final blend. We believe the 2003 vintage continues the high standards of preceding vintages which have collected two Trophies and forty eight Gold Medals.
2003 was the peak of the drought and yields were well down throughout the Heathcote region. The resulting wine is powerful and intense with concentrated fruit character and abundant tannin.
This is the fourth vintage to make use of new, ‘steam-bent’, medium toast, American oak barriques that engender a smoother, subtler oak character in the wine, and with less vanillan influences. The wine was matured in this oak for eighteen months.
Our Heathcote fruit is always picked on flavour, and in this aspect of the wine we are aiming for consistency. The new oak is subtler, smoother and more integrated, the fruit characters are more prominent.
TASTING NOTES
It is a rich, elegant wine, beautifully balanced and with great cellaring potential. The colour is deep, intense purple/mulberry and the nose exhibits elegant, plum/berry aromas with a gentle oak presence and some mintiness.
On the palate it has a silky texture, complexity, delicious intense plum and berry flavours with an excellent balance between the fruit, oak and tannin.
CELLARING POTENTIAL
Try not to uncork this wine for at least five years. Ten to fifteen years would be even better.
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