2018 Rock of Wisdom Shiraz

Sourced from the Road Block located in the Koonunga sub region. When we started making the wines for Rock of Wisdom in 2013 we were trying to work out how to make our Barossa Shiraz stand out and show the softer more elegant side of life. As fate would have it, I was still working at Torbreck then and the day our Shiraz fruit came in was the day they had picked the fruit for The Descendant (their Shiraz Viognier co-ferment) and there was left over Viognier skins. I was able to get a few buckets (5% worth) and throw it in the mix. The mix of Viognier changes according to the season, so far we used 5%, 6% & 7% with 5% being the most common.

The 2018 vintage will go down as one of the best seasons the Barossa Valley. We added 5% Viognier skins to the Shiraz ferment to build fruit lift and soften the tannins, if we’d added any more it would dominate the wine and shift it into unbalanced wine territory and no one wants that. The Shiraz fruit was destemmed but not crushed so as to maintain whole berries during ferment. Temperatures were kept cool (lower temps help to maintain more delicate & vibrant characteristics in wines) and it got two pumpovers a day. The pumpovers were very short so as to keep tannin extraction under control.

The ferment was drained and pressed around 1 Baume via a basket press, we only use basket presses due to the gentle nature that minimises grape seed cracking (grape seeds crack and bitter compounds can come and ruin the party) and prevent over extraction. We then wait till the wine is sugar dry in tank before racking it off gross lees (think Grimace – purple bloke from Maccas after being put in a blender) then into barrel. Once the wine is in barrel malolactic fermentation does it thing naturally. We encourage natural malo in oak because softens the acid out and produces a more complex wine as well as not pushing the wine into direction it doesn’t want to go.

The oak we used for this wine was all old French oak with half the barrels being lightly shaved. Shaving the inside of the barrel is when the cooper shaves the first few millimetres off the inside of the barrel to expose the ‘raw’ oak again to allow it to impart more oak characteristics. Shaved oak is less full on when compared to new oak. With the styles of wine we produce, new oak would be over powering and unbalance the wine. This wine was matured in oak for around 15 months. The barrels were topped once every 2 months, this topping program gives us the best of both worlds during barrel maturation in that we can develop the secondary notes and characteristic but also keep the freshness and elegance of the wine.