Luddite Shiraz 2009
Appearance: Dark red and garnet hues.
Nose: Spice driven red fruit with hints of liquorice, cinnamon and toasty wood.
Palate: Brooding dark fruit and spice. Rich, natural, sweet fruit core. Lingering finish of savoury spice and balanced tannin.
93+ pts Stephen Tanzer/Vinous June 2015
2009 Luddite Shiraz (15% alcohol; made from only estate fruit for the first time; includes 2% Mourvedre; vinified with natural yeasts and sulfured only for the bottling): Full medium-deep red. Deep, subtly complex aromas of ripe raspberry, woodsmoke and minerals. Wonderfully silky and sweet, with spicy red and darker berry and licorice flavors and an utterly seamless texture. Conveys an impression of small-berry concentration that buffers the wine’s high octane level. Finishes glyceral, ripely tannic and very long, with absolutely no edges. This mouth-saturating Shiraz is already approachable but it would be a shame not to wait a few years for more complexity. — Stephen Tanzer 93
90 pts Robert Parker Jr’s The Wine Advocate (NM)
The 2009 Shiraz is matured for 24 months in mainly French oak, just a little Hungarian oak (5%) in the blend. Despite a couple of years in bottle it remains backward and broody on the nose. The palate is full-bodied with boysenberry and licorice fruit, cassis and blackberry with plenty of spicy on the sinewy finish. Give this 3-4 years in bottle for this sinewy Shiraz to mellow.
The 2009 vintage was one of the most exciting in the sense that we used our own cellar for the first time and all the grapes were sourced from the Bot River Valley. Weather wise it was up and down promising to be a very cool vintage but ultimately ending quite hot. We picked over a full month which had never happened before. This produced a wine that was bold but had the resultant spice of a cooler vintage. It was also the first time we had a proper crop from our young block. We fermented all these different clones in small batch open fermenters. The old block was fermented in stainless steel tanks with regular pump-overs. Fermentation temperatures were higher than normal due to a non-existent cooling plant (28°C). No skin contact was given after ferment and the wines were pressed into tank to undergo malolactic fermentation.
After malolactic fermentation batches of wine showing promise were blended together and pumped into barrel. 30% new oak was used of which 95% of the barrels were French Oak and 5% Hungarian Oak. The rest being 2nd, 3rd and 4th fill.
The wine remained in barrels for 24 months after which we blended all the different batches together to create the best possible wine which was then bottled.