Dappled Syrah 'Fin de la Terre' 2022

Shaun Crinion of Dappled makes wines that are sweet, savoury and delicate at once. There’s an intricacy to them, a stitching. This syrah is another fine example: it puts reduction to positive effect, it serves twigs with its blueberries, it suggests at graphite as the red cherry flavours swing through, and its mace/pepper characters are perfectly aligned with its meaty, earthen, woodsy side. Everything here is fine, in grain and nuance, and firm, in form and intent. It’s an excellent, savoury, cool climate shiraz. Drink 2024-2032+. 95 Points. Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front.

Sourced from the Peirce Family vineyard in Steels Creek at the base of the Kinglake range. It’s a warm site with hungry mudstone and shale soils with a granitic bedrock base and some scattered quartz. The vines are own rooted and planted in 1990. Hand-picked and sorted, cooled overnight and gently placed into 1 tonne fermenters as 100% whole bunches. The fruit is locked up for two weeks to start a natural carbonique ferment for 2 weeks with no working at all… after which time the fruit is pigéaged (foot stomped) once a week for a further 5 weeks. The must is then pressed straight to a very old puncheon with all lees - and not touched until May the following year. It’s then that the wine gets racked straight to its bottling tank and is bottled by hand via gravity. Unfined and unfiltered. Dappled wines.