Smidge Wines

Tasting Notes

The nose has plums and mulberries with chocolate and cedar with subtle underlying smoky vanilla characters. The palate has dense dark chocolate and plums with tight fine tannins balanced with fleshy length and spice and linear acidity from start to finish.

Cellaring

Smidge recommends drinking this wine within the next 6 to 8 years.

Viticulture

The fruit for this wine predominantly comes from a mature vineyard in the Ebenezer area of the Barossa Valley.

Vinification & Maturation

In one of the batches, a sprinkling of Viognier skins were added as an experiment to see if I could extract the talc like phenolics from the variety and create another dimension to the finished wine. A significant and positive difference was seen and subsequently the experimental batch was blended into the finished wine. Seeing that the 3% Viognier addition was minimal, a point was not made on the label. Average fermentation time lasted 7 days and was allowed to reach 28o c, with the total time on skins averaging 12 days before pressing to tank. The blended free run and pressings were then rough racked 24 hours later to oak, which consisted of 20% new French barriques and the balance 2-4 year old French barriques and hogs heads. Like all Smidge reds, malolactic fermentation occurred in barrel and over the 12 months the wine was cleanly racked twice and then went to bottle without filtration.

Technical Analysis

Harvested - March 2004
Bottled - April 2005
Alcohol - 14.3 %