Tasting Notes

Inky crimson purple colour. Dark spice and brooding intensity with mulberry, Chinese five spice, and squid ink. Medium to full-bodied with saturated blueberry, satsuma plum, and black pepper. Incredibly youthful and expressive with layers of flavour and texture underpinned by a fleshy mouthcoating tannin structure carrying the fruit and spice into an enduring finish.

Vineyard Notes

Dry-grown, vertically trellised Syrah with small parcels of fruit hand-picked from specific sites on our Swinney Wilson’s Pool & Powderbark vineyards. The incorporation of mature Massale Selection Syrah blocks and newer 470 and Waldron clonal material, with their different growth habits and bunch structures, along with the use of shadecloth on the afternoon sun side of the vines, helps build layers and structural complexity in the fruit.

Production Notes

The fruit was hand-picked, berry sorted, and emptied to small wooden and stainless steel fermenters via gravity. We incorporated 28% whole bunches and wild fermentation to build structure and texture and provide the framework on which to express the opulence and spice of Syrah. The wine spent 12 days on skins prior to pressing directly to fine grained, large format, French oak (7% new), followed by ageing for 11 months prior to bottling. The wine was made with minimum effective Sulphites, is unfined and minimally filtered.

96 points - "This is part of a triumvirate of wines that showcases the vineyard and winemaking that have crafted these super wines. This is not your fruit bomb Aussie shiraz. This is syrah and there is more than a little Old World style here. The fruit shows an almost luminosity that bursts from the glass. The palate picks up the vineyard characters with its ironstone gravelly rusty characters complementing the bright red fruits. You sense vineyard here with a deft touch of the winemaker simply coaxing a little more out of it." - Ray Jordan (Wine Pilot)

95 points - "The 2022 Syrah brings together a beautiful confluence of a lovely vineyard and a great season. Aromatically, we see sweet balsamic, blackberry, licorlce, forest fruits, tea, steel, iodine and alplne herbs. This is a super wine, and I haven't even tasted it yet. On the palate, the wine is fresh and powerful. The tannins are pronounced but chewy and enlivening, with blood orange, saffron, a hint of sandalwood and blackberry. This is a really wonderful wine here, with the classic Frankland River splay of ferruginous tannin, rust and blood. It's super. Decant it; it will only get better, more svelte. 13. 9% alcohol, sealed under screw cap." - Erin Larkin (The Wine Advocate)

94 points - "It’s a medium weight wine, smoky, meaty, sweet with roasted nut characters, peppery through the tannin as much as through the fruit, juiced with plum and red cherry but, as mentioned, bloody with it, ferrous, rusty, distinctive. It’s a dry wine, almost drying, but yet lengthy, and complex in shape as much as in flavour. In truth I disliked this wine, and then loved it. I’m not sure how that’s possible for the one same wine, but over the course of a day it was. As a result I’m recommending this wine, I think it’s excellent, but I’m also suggesting that it be given a decent-length decant." - Campbell Mattinson (The Wine Front)

94 points - "A fine, mid-weighted syrah, reeling off scents of charcuterie, peony, lilac, clove and blue-fruit allusions, set in relief against a noble structural edifice. The tannins, often the masterstroke at this address, placate and suppress any stray fruit sweetness. Lovely strident tannins, doused in mace. Another wine to bury in the cellar for eight years or more, although drinkable now with a brisk decant." - Ned Goodwin MW (JamesSuckling.com)