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This wine will be relatively closed and backward in style if not allowed some opportunity to develop in the bottle. After time in bottle, ‘The Dead Arm’ gains a biscuity, cinnamon, chocolate, earthy, eucalyptus- based bouquet on top of rich blackberry pie smells.
Tobacco, mushroom, malt and earth aromas play a part on the long, fleshy, chocolate mint and spice flavours. This wine will develop with a great balance of tannins, acidity and fruit. Classic McLaren Vale...
Wine Description
The Story
The Story Behind The Name / Dead Arm is a vine disease caused by the fungus Eutypa Lata that randomly affects vineyards all over the world. Often vines affected are severely pruned or replanted. One half, or an ‘arm’ of the vine slowly becomes reduced to dead wood. That side may be lifeless and brittle, but the grapes on the other side, while low yielding, display amazing intensity.
The Characteristics
A classic Dead Arm in every sense of the word. The nose is brooding and alluring, earthy notes combined with dark fruits, fennel and baking spice. The longer this wine sits in the glass, the further it unfurls opening into notes of sweeter berry fruit laced with more of those soily, forest floor notes.
The palate is dense and concentrated with a plethora of fruit characters, plum, blackberry, mulberry, earth, iodine and black olive. Despite the richness and intensity of the attack and mid palate the experience surprisingly crescendos with a lick of spicy pepper, coupled with lovely, fined grained, textural tannins that seem to persist in the mouth forever. Complex, savoury and moreish!
100% McLaren Vale Shiraz
Wine Information
After excellent winter rains and then a warm wet spring the vineyards were set for a good start to vintage. Flowering was consistent, for the first time crop sizes looked more normal than previous years. We experienced the coldest January for 12 years followed by a warm to hot February and mild March which carried on into April to eventually become a very long Indian summer.
As vintage proceeded the vineyards with rich, dense soils ripened with good acidity and weight. Berries were turgid, and expressed excellent fruit characters and rich, ripe tannins. While some early picked parcels of red varietals were exciting, free of mould, good sugar acid ripeness it was the vineyards picked in the mid to latter stages of harvest produced substantially bigger and beautifully balanced parcels of fruit with outstanding colour, levels of flavour richness and tannin structures.
