mid-palate fruit sweetness and delivered delicious generosity of red and dark aromas and flavours, with superb purity a key to the best examples. They were real crowd pleasers, with broad market appeal and beautiful drinkability. For a variety and wine style that is sometimes criticised for high levels of alcohol and jammy fruits, overall there were very few wines in the entire tasting where alcohol was out of balance or showed significant confected fruit characters. The 2021 Hayes Family Wines Estate Grenache Block 2 2021 was a standout, as was the Kurtz Family Vineyards Charlie’s Grenache 2019, John Duval Wines Annexus Grenache 2020, and Laughing Jack Wines Old Vine Moppa Grenache 2019 – all exceptional wines with strong varietal typicity and concentration, with excellent depth of fruit and balance. The immediate drinkability and sheer power of these wines also makes them an ideal starting point for anyone new to the variety. But the best wines can also age well, as evidenced by the Cirillo Estate Wines 1850 Grenache 2015 and the Maya Grenache 2010, both of which will continue to drink well for another decade at least. One of our favourite wines from the tasting was in a completely different style: the Schwarz Wine Co Meta Grenache 2021. It was clearly designed to appeal to a growing number of consumers looking for lighter and brighter red wines, with a high component of whole-bunch fruit providing delicious lift and savoury, spicy complexity. While not particularly ageworthy, we scored this highly thanks to outstanding drinkability, and believe that this is a very valid style for Barossan grenache producers to pursue as an early-drinking proposition and a stepping stone into some of the region’s best wines, which have a very bright future ahead of them.
58
T he V intage J ournal – Regional Focus
Powered by FlippingBook