Barossa 13.5% Cork $29.95
Yalumba’s “Hand Picked” series are wines I admire. Given that certain overseas wine writers seem hell bent on concentrating on the depiction of the Australian wine landscape as industrial and careless with its fruit, it does no harm to highlight that certain producers are doing things in an entirely different way.
This one was made by Kevin Glastonbury and is a blend of 60% Mourvèdre, 22% Grenache and 18% Shiraz matured for ten months in 2 and 3 year old French oak hogsheads. The winery’s website lists it as the current vintage and it’s drinking very nicely at the moment. It’s probably got another 3-4 years in it but I’m not so sure there is any real need to wait.
Raspberry compote and softer red fruits, liquorice, aged meat, ironstone, musty earth and dark plum. It smells and tastes really vinous and finishes dry with a scattering of herbs, chocolate cake and a little rock salt. Impressive depth at this price point and the structure is still very much intact; some snug acidity and lovely, long strands of tannin.The Mourvèdre seems responsible for a lot of the good work but the other grapes chip in nicely.
Well worth hunting around for, especially as this will be the last release of this particular wine. By the end of the bottle I was comfortably lost in the haze of alcohol’s soft middle age.
Winery website- http://www.yalumba.com/
Last of the line? Bugger..
Yep, a bit of a shame. I liked the 05 and I thought this 06 was even better. Mind you, Yalumba seem like they are always working on something new…
2007 is here in blighty
That’s interesting Geoff. The good folk at Yalumba informed me a the time of this review that the Hand Picked MGS had been discontinued and that, as a result, there would be no 2007 vintage. Having said that I seem to remember reading a review of it somewhere. I’ve never spotted a bottle here in Australia, so perhaps it is export only.