Wines - Sandscrub

Details

Variety
Shiraz
Current Release
2003
First Vintage
2001
Price
$380.00 per bottle
 
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Hand picked, hand pruned old vines. Open fermented, basket pressed and matured on lees in new French oak. Four years in barrel. Four years in bottle. Eight years in the making.

Additional Information:

This wine comes in an individual and elegant handmade presentation box, and includes an information booklet on the vineyard, grapes and soil type that combine to make this wine so special.

Tasting Notes

> 2003 Tasting Notes

This May sees the release of the 03 Sandscrub. I’m slowly working my way through a bottle right now. (Hey, it’s raining and we just packed the basket press away for the last time this year.) It started out pretty dark and brooding at first but as the day has worn on the full spectrum of spice and richness is slowly evolving. This is an olfactory steam-train, the nose is ethereal. The palate is long and silky smooth with super fine tannins. It’s a big nod to the smaller winemakers in the tough vintages.....that ability to dodge a bullet when everything in the season is against making quality wine. 2003 was one of those tough vintages. Heavy rain in February caused dramatic losses in yield and most people panicked and harvested way too early. You had to have the guts to leave the fruit hang and dry out again to get any sort of decent complexity in the Shiraz. Being in control of our own vineyard we had the ability to take that risk and this wine is the reward. To make a wine like this in a bloody tricky vintage is as satisfying as it gets.

> 2002 Tasting Notes

The 02 Sandscrub is as close to perfection as I reckon we can get. A wine of this pedigree, from a great vintage, really fortifies the fact that from Vine Vale fruit, a completely individual style of Shiraz unlike anything else in the world, can, and has been born. Slow, even ripening conditions provided one of the best vintages ever seen in the Barossa Valley. Deep in colour and incredibly concentrated this Shiraz is huge, and will drink well for twenty or thirty years plus. The acid balance is amazing considering how ripe the grapes were picked. 2002 was a super vintage, more elegant than other years however I think the balance between elegance and power is impeccable.

> 2001 Tasting Notes

The new addition to the stable! Rusden started in 1996 and by 2001 I had worked out that our best patch of Shiraz was the Top Block, where our oldest Shiraz vines are grown. After working several vintages at Rockford, Torbreck and in Mexico, using the best French oak available, I was finally able to get access to these special barrels which I have used to store and mature the best of our Shiraz. The Sandscrub has been aged in these barrels for 4 years before being bottled unfined and unfiltered, then bottle- aged for a further 4 years before release. Because of its rarity (only 40 dozen bottled), we’ve put it in its own individual package, complete with a history on the district, the soil, the vines and the method.