Awards and Accolades

96 Points - Campbell Mattinson, Wine Front
"A wine to be admired and applauded. This is neat as a pin, long as a song, flavoured not laboured. It’s medium weight, taut, and sensationally persistent. It’s the kind of wine that makes you wonder why you’d ever spend more than $50 on a bottle of wine. It’s curranty and earthen and fleshed with tobacco, but picking out the flavour isn’t of consequence here. It’s the soar, the flow, the finish."

96 Points - Tony Keys, The Key Report
"A 100 per cent cabernet from the Great Southern region of Western Australia. It’s slinky and very sexy, drawing itself across the palate in a lazy manner but giving pleasure all the way. It’s drinking very well now but clearly will cellar for some time 96 points and worth $46: To compare with the 2014 the Burch family sent a bottle of the 2001 vintage, it has that dusty slightly dry character that older wine exhibits and I think takes time to understand, I took the two bottles to supper the others all raved over the 2014 but were not so keen on the 2001, yet it accompanied food much better."

2013 Vintage: 94 Points - James Halliday, Australian Wine Companion
"Vines planted in ?67. 40% new French oak. It's an example of effortless quality. It tastes of blackcurrant, bay leaves, smoky/creamy oak and gravel, but the way the flavour swooshes through the mouth and then slings out through the finish determines its quality."

From the Winery

The Great Southern sub regions began the growing season with just adequate soil moisture and scant catchment fill. Predictably unpredictable spring weather in November did impact flowering, set and early spring growth on exposed sites. Summer was hot but uniformly so with some late onshore drizzle which brought the vintage to a rapid close in early April. With yields below average, the wines produced from the 2014 vintage are full of concentrated fruit flavours, good acidity and fine ripe tannins.

The wine is sourced from our Abercrombie vineyard in Mount Barker. This vineyard was planted with ‘Houghton’ clone rootlings in 1967 and is extraordinarily low yielding.

Small parcels are hand-picked and all batches are sorted to remove matter other than grapes before fermentation.
Vinification occurred in closed stainless steel fermenters with diligent cap management to extract fine fruit tannin and strong varietal flavour. Selected parcels remained on skins post the fermentation to further enhance the tannin profile while others were pressed at dryness to capture fruit vibrancy. After pressing, each batch is matured separately in order to build a wine history over time. Barrel maturation for 18 months in 40% new and 60% older French oak barriques ensures the thorough integration of oak and grape tannins. The wine was egg white fined and lightly filtered before bottling.