Octopus 2020 Shiraz Heathcote

Woah! What’s a Shiraz doing in the midst of all these Italian beauties? Well… we are not really sure either but somehow it snuck in and here we are! Lucky for all your Shiraz lovers out there who are looking for a delicious Shiraz that is rich and ripe and perfect with red meat, red sauces and red hot dates! Heathcote is one of our favourite regions in Australia for Shiraz as it’s not too hot and it’s not cold either and so this makes the wine beautiful and rich without getting those baked characters that punch you in the face and make you sweat. It’s chocolatey, dense and ripe with medium to full weight with a bit of vanilla and spice. This is a wine to take to a picnic, to a bbq or camping after a day of running around in the sun having fun!

The thing about making Shiraz is that you need enough ripeness to make it go yeah, but not too much so that it’s overripe or not too little so that it’s acidic and mean. So when we picked it, we crunched on the seeds and they were yummy and ripe, not green, and the berries were still plump and juicy and not shrivelled. We hand sorted the grapes, tipped them into an open vat fermenter and let the grapes ferment naturally until they were dry with some gentle plunging and pumping over every day. Post ferment, we left the grapes on skins for around 10 tens until they had picked up the right amount of flavour and structure and then we pressed out the grapes and put the wine into a mix of old and new French oak barriques for 10 months before bottling with only a rough mesh filtration to retain all the flavours.