Stats
- Grapes: 100% Shiraz
- Vineyard: Hoffmann (Dallwitz & Dimchurch Home Old) - Asbroek (Kalimna 'Old Vines')
- Vine Age: 50-70-years-old
- Soil Type: Ironstone, red clay, and sand
- Viticulture: Practicing organic
- Fermentation: Native – 100% whole-cluster in closed stainless-steel tank
- Skin Contact: 3-4 weeks
- Aging: 12 months in old barriques
- Alcohol: 13.5%
- Total SO2: 40 ppm
- Total Production: 203 cases
Tasting Notes
This is a fresh yet concentrated Barossa Shiraz, blending across three iconic sites. There is a savory element of black olive that travels, with plums, anise, and nutmeg, from the nose to the mouth. There, you’ll find ripe tannins and a menthol lift. Like a kaleidoscope, the flavors bounce and collide until they settle into something breathtaking.
Press & Reviews
The Wine Front
96
"Beautifully set, fresher feeling rendition of Barossa shiraz though there is no scrimping on the intensity and concentration here. Quite a bit of ripe and stewed plum, black olive tapenade, sweet earthiness, charred-sweet spice, anise, game meat, cocoa powder and crushed rock – what a ride! It’s a rich, rambunctious red of incredible flesh and yet sinew too. Tannins are stellar, if not a bit nebbiolo-like in their succulence and trim. It sloshes into the palate then finds a muscular flex, a cool yet somewhat game meaty finish, a load of dried herbs in there likewise. Cornucopia of things going on, all meshed so well. Whoa!"
- Mike Bennie
- Mike Bennie
Wine Advocate
95
"This is a combination of Ebenezer fruit (Hoffmann) and Kalimna (Asbroek) and the only blended wine in the 2022 suite of releases. 'Theel's Handfibel is an 1800s school chart I found digging through the Barossa Archives,' says winemaker Callum Powell, 'which is now the typeface used to communicate place names on the labels.' The 2022 Theel’s Handfibel Shiraz is black, black, black in all ways—black ants, tea, graphite, crushed rocks, sand, blackberry, mulberry, pepper, petrichor and star anise. Gritty tannins shape the fruit in the mouth, yet for all the heavy-handed descriptors that the wine invokes, it remains light and pure in the mouth. It is kind of startling, really."
- Erin Larkin
- Erin Larkin
Vinous
93
"The ethereal 2022 Shiraz Theel's Handfibel has an almost Pinot Noir-like quality, with perfumed raspberry, red licorice, mixed spices and a lick of sweet oak. Strong stocky tones and tannins dominate the young wine, which offers a wild ride with tar and cola complexity rising up on a long, strong finish that will flesh out with time in the bottle."
- Angus Hughson
- Angus Hughson