December’s OnWine revealed that Rosemount Estate is to create a new US$100 red wine for the American market. The company’s challenge will be to make this wine even better than its two existing flagship reds of Balmoral Syrah and Mountain Blue Shiraz Cabernet, a task which suddenly become very much more difficult with the release of the 1998 vintages of these wines. Throughout the mid-1980s the major market for Rosemount’s Diamond Label Shiraz was the US. Rosemount’s American distributors told Philip Shaw that if he could create an ultra-premium show reserve wine, they could easily sell it. Created and named for the Francophilic US market, the McLaren Vale Show Syrah 1989 was the result. Later, to the chagrin of their US agents, Rosemount decided to make the wine available in the UK and Australia as well. Just as well, if you ask me. Balmoral Syrah has been a favourite wine of mine since the 1989 McLaren Vale Show Syrah, when it sported a label that might have been printed by a newspaper press. Perhaps it’s because Rosemount’s spiritual home is elsewhere that the company has never felt obliged to follow the mandatory McLaren Vale pattern. The Show Syrah, which in 1992 became the Balmoral, has typically been fashioned by the team of master winemaker Philip Shaw and Charles Whish into a fine, silky wine which relies on things other than porty ripeness and muscular extract for its power and structure. Balmoral is a multi-vineyard blend sourced from several low-yielding vineyards aged between 50-100 years in and around Blewitt Springs, Seaview and McLaren Flat, whose soil types are sandy loams, red soils over limestone and darker loams respectively. After fermentation in both tanks and vinomatics, a portion finishes fermentation in oak, before the entire blend spends two years in 100% new seasoned American oak. As you’d expect, the 1998 release ($70 retail, approx.) is something special. Its heady perfume of violets and piercing aromas freshly crushed blackberries is little short of opulent; its background of sweet smoky vanilla oak providing a carefully orchestrated underswell of depth and complexity. Its palate is similarly arranged around layers of explosively intense dark berry and plum fruit, nutmeg and cloves, matched carefully with chocolate oak and tight-knit velvet tannins. Despite its obvious density and richness it retains poise and elegance, leaving a lingering and delicious impression of fine plain chocolate and cassis. Marking hard, I rate it at 19.3, with a suggested drinking window between 2010-2018. Provided you can wait, of course. I’ll watch the development of the 1998 Balmoral with great interest. Just what Philip Shaw and Charles Whish can do to make a wine that is substantially better rather eludes me at this time. Good luck to them.
