Thistledown This Charming Man Grenache 2023
This wine displays muscular yet elegant silky black fruits couple with deep, rich, warming spices, hints of violet, mineral and black cherry.
GRENACHE OF THE YEAR, 98 Points – Halliday Wine Companion
“The 2023 The Charming Man Single Vineyard Grenache is altogether moodier and darker than the Sands of Time tasted alongside it, but that is not making a comment on “weight” or “density” but rather on character. Here, we have blackberry and mulberry, raspberry pip and star anise, layers of coal dust, dirt and graphite, clove and even nutmeg/cinnamon. The tannins are über fine, chalky, grippy and gently chewy. It is a wonderful thing to experience the “feel” of the wine as much as the taste. Interacting with red wine in this way—and white as well—makes for thrilling drinking. It curls and winds its way through the long finish. It’s super. A pleasure.”
96 Points – The Wine Advocate
“It is inescapable, the need to compare the iconic grenache cuvees from this producer. Each superlative, vying for top position with the other each year, the seeding oscillating with vintage vagaries and mood. This is a richer geological mold, more ferrous of make up, resulting in a more ferruginous wine. Still, it’s mid-weighted of feel, due to the inherent freshness and bulletproof tannin profile, rocky and sublime. Thyme, dried lavender, kirsch, cardamon, tamarind and rose water. Exotic and resinous. Not the balletic pirouette of fragrance-meets-freshness of its sibling, necessarily. Yet, there’s more grunt, a little more extract, longer-limbed tannins and so much to believe in. Put this away for six-years and see what happens. I hedge towards magic, once the force-field of tannins settles. Drinkable now, but best from 2027.”
96 Points – James Suckling
96 Points – The Real Review
“From one of the region’s prized old vine Grenache plots, and named after the man who lovingly tended the vines until his 2023 death, this is a vibrant, complex and, yes, charming, wine with spice-and-herb flecked red berry fruit, a combo that draws cherry bitters comparisons. Lightweight with juicy red fruit flavors, there’s freshening acidity and more of that distinctive spice, rimmed in well-structured, cat’s tongue tannins, and ending on a pithy pomegranate rind note. “
95 Points – Wine Enthusiast
94 Points – The Wine Front
This remarkable site has vines that are 100+ years old. The entire site, high in the picturesque Clarendon sub-region of McLaren Vale, is planted entirely with dry grown bush vines and has been farmed by the same family for 3 generations. This wine is sourced from one particular block where the canopy is raised slightly higher above the ground, allowing for better air circulation and increased radiated sunlight. Hand-picked fruit was transported to the winery where 20% was retained as whole bunches to be placed on the base of a 2ton open fermenter. The fruit underwent a wild ferment and was gently hand plunged twice a day during that time. After that, the wine was pressed off, into 30 liter hogsheds, of which 20% were new French oak. year later, the wine was racked from there to bottle – unfiltered and unfined.
A Sense of Place is something that many winemakers talk about but it’s a tricky concept to get across to anyone who has not visited the region or who knows the people involved. In many ways, the “new world” Sense of Place echoes the old world notion of terroir where the effects of soil, site, aspect, climate and tradition all come to bear on the eventual character and quality of the wine – lending it a unique personality. On a beautiful hillside in the Clarendon sub-region of McLaren Vale, three generations of the Smart family have devoted their lives to Grenache. Decades have passed where precious few valued their crop and yet they endured. That this remarkable vineyard has survived, is all due to Bernard Smart, and this wine pays homage to this charming man.
