Sami-Odi 2018 Syrah ‘Hoffmann Dallwitz’ (Barossa Valley)
Sami-Odi 2018 Syrah ‘Hoffmann Dallwitz’ (Barossa Valley)
“The 2018 season, Mother Nature-wise, was by far and away the best season in my Sami-Odi winemaking career”, states Sami-Odi’s Fraser McKinley, “no crop thinning, very good ferments, everything felt really at peace through the life in barrel”. The grapes of 2018 seem to have contributed to an increasing calm and quiet confidence for McKinley. “Whether there is actual fact that they [the grapes] are better from 2018 is individual, but the wine looked so ready, and so really good for me, I just felt very good about it and comfortable with what was going on”.
The wine was drunk in small sips in and around the Little Wine #9, and as a counter point it is interesting as always to discuss the methodology once more. “I never wanted variety, vintage [Roman numerals works in lieu], or region on the labels of the ‘vintage wine’. The vineyard from which the wine is from is paramount – the one common theme, shiraz of course the lens, whatever the wines are called, they’re the same from the same place, so it sort of its a moot point doing anything more in naming and the like”.
I asked, for interest, why I have records of ‘syrah’ and ‘shiraz’ in my notes on these wines as nomenclature, “I come from New Zealand so syrah is what I call it by practice, and so in the mail out I just write it there to remind people, rather on the bottle, but I guess now you mention it, when I talk in the Barossa I say the word ‘shiraz’ a lot more. If I went to the Hoffmans and said ‘syrah this or syrah that’, I am pretty sure they would think I was speaking a weird language, so I sit in a place of two camps, perhaps”. Intrigue in semiotics.
The 2018 harvest has resulted in the most old vine material making its way into the vintage wine where often that material is kept for Little Wine in larger quantity. There were three pickings for this wine, across the various age component sites from the vineyard (old, middle, ‘young’ vines), all of which made it into this wine and becomes a kind of matrix per se (three picks across several plots, per se). The detail! Jeepers.
Rich scents of sweet berries, violets, faint vanilla, clove-cedar wood, but gentle, some flighty green herb and undergrowth aromas in the mix. Lots going on. It’s perfumed, to summarise. Silky, satiny-textured, such a beautiful feel with the inky concentration a sub-plot in the wine story. Yep, it’s dense, but the catering for that intensity of oil pool-dark plummy fruit is licks of spice, herb and cooling acidity – lift and finesse in the power. Heft, grace, shapely gummy-puckering tannin, deliciousness and moreish impulse wrapped in. Multi-dimensional. Epic wine. Epic."
96+ Points - Mike Bennie, The Wine Front, January 2020, Drink: 2020 - 2032+
Wine Specifications
Wine Specifications
Variety: Shiraz
Size: 750mL
Region: Barossa Valley
ABV: 14.4%
Vintage: 2018
Winery & Vintage Info
A composition of our most pertinent casks from the very amiable 2018 growing season.
Derived from the two oldest sections within the Hoffmann families ‘Dallwitz’ vineyard, planted on their own roots in 1927 (0.435 Hectare) & the oldest vines between 1888 & 1912 (0.775 Hectare).
These 23 Burgundian Pièces were carefully assembled and bottled amidst the spring of 2019 after enduring their 78 week elevage. Bottles were filled without filtration, fining or sparging (the removal of naturally occurring oxygen & C02) and all transfer’s were completed via gravity prior to bottling.
Yields ranged between 29 & 38 hectolitres per hectare.
6341 bottles were filled.
Label: Self Portrait with my first pinhole camera, WBHS 1996. Rear – Andy’s Jelly Print, printed 2017.
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