Description
Tasting Notes
Cellaring: 15 to 20 Years
Origin of name
Our first wine was already bottled before we discovered our great, great grandfather (Pietro D’Orsa) had planted vines nearby in the late 1800’s. We found six remnant vines and had them DNA tested to determine their origin. One vine remains a mystery so we planted a special vineyard from it. For this ancient survivor it will be a new spring, another youth, a sanguine rebirth. So that’s where our compulsion to make wine came from. It was in the blood all along.
To do justice to this heritage, we’ve kept aside some exceptional barrels of Shiraz to make this wine, an opulent, dark-crimson homage to our grand predecessor.
Vintage Overview
THE BEST VINTAGE EVER?
Great winter and early spring rain got the vines off to an amazing start. It dried off and got warm all at the ideal time in November making our first fully organic vintage easy to manage. It looked as if it was going to get really hot again but the first heat wave in late December only reached 38 degrees not the 42 forecast and that’s the hottest it got. It remained a coolish and dry summer setting a perfect and large crop. It seemed to take forever to harvest, 8 weeks in total, but the fruit was ripening slowly giving us plenty of time to get things right in the winery. A special vintage that definitely makes up for the previous year’s hardships.
Winemaking
All batches are destemmed and lightly crushed and then naturally fermented with wild indigenous yeasts in small open fermenters. At 6 to 8 days, a portion of the wine is transferred to new French oak barriques for barrel fermentation. The remaining wine is kept on skins for an average of 12 days. All wine is moved around the cellars by gravity to avoid pump shock. The best batches from each harvest are selected and matured in French Oak barriques (60% new) for 24 months and then left to rest in bottle before release.
100% Shiraz
Awards
- Silver Medal – Victorian Wine Show 2023
Recipes
Click on images to view recipes
