Wine and Spirit

I was at a wine auction last Friday.

Bought some really interesting wines but one of them seemed even more interesting than the others.

A grenache (garnacha) from Clare Valley (Australia) from 1995.

I'm a big fan of spanish style varieties (especially tempranillo), so I could hardly wait to taste this one.

For many years grenache has been seen as a nasty word, yet most of the winemakers would agree that along with the more famous shiraz, it has been a workhorse variety of Australia.

In this the fruit was picked ripe, at optimum flavour levels, and the wine was matured for a short time in a mixture of new, two and three year old American oak barrels.

Buying a 15 year-old wine is always some kind of lottery (you never know where it was stored during the years).

I was more than lucky this time.

This one has a ruby colour with orange pale.

Sweet raspberry and vanilla on the nose.

A very complex, full-bodied wine with low acid and high tannin, quite a long aftertaste.

Superb. A brilliant example from Clare Valley.