Friday, 10 April 2009
2007 Tempranillo Garnacha
With a $12-million 8000-tonne winery that is a contract maker for a number of producers as well as processing some fruit from 1300 hectares of managed South Australian vineyards, the majority of them located in the Clare Valley and the Adelaide Hills, Kirrihill is an operation that appears to be well and truly on the way up.
And rightly so, if our visit to the Cellar Door on our way to lunch is any indication.
On our trip to Clare we visited every winery with more than four stars from Mr Halliday that was open to the public, so when ‘Er Indoors remarked that it was a winery where everything was very good it’s a judgement made in comparison to some pretty classy company
So in the wake of Black Saturday when an e-mail from Kirrihill advised that there was a one-day Black Friday fundraiser for the bushfire victims Hughesy would probably have rocked straight over to the website to download an order form even if they hadn’t been offering a 10% discount and freight free delivery.
A phone call to Jimbo resulted in a phone order for five cartons of wine, which was the least we could do to help out.
I had pretty clear memories of the Companions Tempranillo Garnacha from our visit to the winery, and I thought a dozen would make for interesting late summer/early autumn drinking with pasta and other Mediterranean-influenced evening meals.
Having been impressed at the Winery, Madam decided she’d invest in a mixed dozen from the higher-priced section of the list which remains basically unsampled at the time of writing.
There was a 2005 Companions Clare Valley Semillon cleanskin on the list as well, and at $60/case that Jimbo and I thought was also worth investigating. and has been investigated to the point that there is, at the time of writing, none of my case left.
The Companions range is largely made up of blends from Clare and the Adelaide Hills and in the case of the Tempranillo Garnacha it’s Adelaide Hills Serendipity for the first variety and Armagh in the north-west of the Clare Valley for the second.
Crushed, fermented and matured separately for six months the resulting 50/50 blend is a fresher vibrant style with spice and fruit aromas and light tannins on the palate and a soft well-rounded mouth feel, an ideal late summer drink now style that still packs a bit of a punch at 14.5% alc/vol.
