Our Wines
2008 Reserve Merlot
$35/bt
Description
The
2008 Reserve Merlot is a deep
dark red coloured wine with a
classic lifted nose of plums and berries with a hint of red capsicum and spice,
in a framework of delicious subtle oak. The palate is rich and deep with
amazing pure intensity of both fruit flavours and smooth interwoven French oak.
The tannins are polished, fine and strong giving a window to view this wines
great potential. A wine that has the ability to age 5-15 years, but by
drinking it now you can be assured of a perfect glass of red.
If drunk with food (which is one
of life's greater pleasures), we certainly recommend the classic combination of
roast beef with all the trimmings with this wine. Other combinations that
should delight include any game bird (use truffle oil for basting), ox-tail in a
reduced stock, and even classic Hungarian goulash.
Sealed
under screwcap to ensure the wine made by us arrives to you as we intended it
to.
Reviews
Campbell Mattinson
and Gary Walsh, The Big Red Wine Book 2010/11, Hardie Grant Books
“Fresh and well weighted with good balance and length. This has all
the bases of a fine wine covered. It has lovely oak treatment
too – its flavours already meshing with the grape-derived notes of
blackberry, plum, menthol and fragrant pipe tobacco. It’s
medium bodied with supple fine grained tannins and a kind of
drawing-room charm. It doesn’t quite fill all the corners of
the mouth, but given time to mature, we reckon it will. Lovely.”
Rated : 94 Points
Tasted : Feb10
Alcohol : 14%
Price : $35
Closure : Screwcap
Drink : 2012 - 2020
Technical Details
This is our second Reserve wine made at Blue Poles and as such
represents the best wine that we can produce from our site in the heart of
Margaret River. The 2008 vintage was classical for Margaret River red wine
with initially quite wet spring conditions, leading into a dry but still early
summer ensuring good flowering conditions. The conditions in summer were
warm and dry, and that means the grapes were perfectly ripe with concentrated
flavours due to the longer season. All of the vines had little to no
disease pressure and were not damaged by birds that miraculously left the vines
alone due to the proliferation of blossom from the surrounding Marri trees.
A year that almost guarantees the quality of the wine!
The
fruit was severely thinned prior to harvest, and handpicked
early one morning, any grapes that were considered not "good
enough to eat" were dropped on the ground. The technical data on these
grapes are as below:
Merlot:
Picked: 29 March 2008
Total weight: 7,942 kg
Brix: 24.8
pH: 3.43
TA:
4.90
Sharna Kowalczuk,
in her last vintage for Vasse River Wines, made this wine and she
completed an exemplarily job with our grapes from ferment to barrel along with the
new and talented winemaker Dave Johnson completing the process through to
bottling.
The wine was fermented in a closed vat and continuously “pumped over” to extract colour and tannins softly, with ferment being completed after 10 days. The wine
was pressed and placed in French oak barrels and stored for 19 months.
This wine was
made by tasting and re-tasting every barrel of wine that we had produced from the
2008 vintage until we came across a combination of 6 barrels that was simply
exemplary. The structure of the wine, the poise and the tautness of all the
wines elements were critical in the selection process – and when combined prior
to bottling we realised that we have managed to continue this fine vein of wines
under this label. Nearly 100% Merlot (there is a touch of
Cabernet Franc); this wine mimics the wines of Pomerol in Bordeaux much to our
delight.
