Awards and Accolades

96 Points, Special Value Wine - James Halliday, Wine Companion
"The top-end wines of Wirra Wirra all boast an exemplary meld of tightly knit, grapey tannins; considered oak and easy flowing acidity, making them a pleasure to drink. Despite the muscle of blue to dark fruit tones and the driving vinosity of this shiraz, it is far from an assault. Violet wafts across an altogether savoury melody. Long and fine."

2014 Vintage: GOLD - Royal Melbourne Wine Awards 2016

2014 Vintage: 94 Points - Mike Bennie, Wine Business Magazine
“It’s a testimony to great fruit and judicous winemaking that a wine as bold and full of flavour as this finds such fine balance. Yes, it’s heady in dark fruit, nougat sweetness, cedary spice, and the palate floods the senses and offers flesh and texture, but it all stacks up so well. Bold and beautiful.”

From the Winery

Wirra Wirra sources fruit from a combination of owned vineyards and premium McLaren Vale growers. The blend of individual vineyard and sub-regional characteristics is the key to the resulting style. Blended from a diverse combination of old vine McLaren Vale sites - typically low in vigour, producing modest yields of intense fruit. Soils range from red clay and limestone to deep sands over ironstone base.

Each vineyard block was individually assessed for barrel selection and matured separately for 19 months in 100% French (predominantly Burgundian) oak prior to blending. New oak consisted of 30% of the blend. The balance was a combination of two to three year old oak.

Harvested at optimal tannin and flavour ripeness. The fruit parcels for these wines were picked in small batches reflecting the different vineyard characters and fermented separately in two-tonne open fermenters. Cold soaking was used on a number of the vineyard parcels for a three day period to extract maximum colour without the presence of alcohol.

Each ferment was tasted twice daily once fermentation commenced, to determine the level of hand plunging and maceration required during fermentation. At the required level of tannin and fruit extraction the ferment was basket pressed with winemakers making the ‘press cut’ at the first sign of tannin hardness. After pressing, the wine was transferred directly to oak before completing malolactic fermentation. Following MLF, and every four months thereafter, the wines are racked and returned. At the end of this program, the wines are barrel selected, blended and minimally filtered prior to going into bottle.