Stats
- Grapes: 100% Grenache
- Vineyard: Little Branch Vineyard – Blewitt Springs
- Vine Age: 35-104-years-old
- Soil Type: Maslin sand flecked with ironstone over iron-riddled red clay
- Viticulture: Practicing organic – dry-farmed
- Fermentation: Inoculated – open-top stainless-steel (14% whole-cluster)
- Skin Contact: 10 days
- Aging: 16 months in a single neutral 18hL French foudre
- Alcohol: 14.1%
- pH: 1.49
- Total Acidity: 5.4 g/L
- Total SO2: 64 ppm
- Total Production: 200 cases
- UPC: 9340076000551
- SRP: $79.99
Tasting Notes
A wine of red earth and crushed raspberries, of dried rose petals carried on warm afternoon air, of spice that whispers rather than declaims. There is a kind of Australian sunlight here, certainly, yet it is filtered through wisdom and restraint. The wine seems to understand that true profundity needn’t arrive draped in solemnity; it can laugh, seduce, and nourish all at once. This is Grenache as conversation rather than monologue—transparent to its place, attentive to detail, and animated by that ineffable quality we too casually call drinkability, but which is, in truth, the rare gift of balancing that with a vision for long-term aging.
Press & Reviews
The Wine Advocate
97
"The 2023 Little Branch Grenache is floral and ultra fine—the tannins sit through the middle and the back of the fruit and drag out through the fine finish. The fruit leads with Boscobel rose, green tea, petrichor and wet asphalt (although they may in fact draw from the same thing, they feel necessary to outline individually). I tasted this 2023 alongside the 2022, and the two have clear identities and are different, yet they are cut from the same cloth. The 2022 is silkier and more supple, with great depth and complexity; the 2023 is lacier, more diaphanous and very perfumed, and both are very long. The vineyard DNA is clear, while the vintage conditions have extracted different characters. They are both excellent wines. They are collectible in the extreme, but magnificent to drink today."
- Erin Larkin
- Erin Larkin