Award-winning Australian Shiraz revealed!

I don't often feature specific wines on this blog, but I'm making an exception for the wine that I chose for an International Judge trophy at the National Wine Show of Australia.

The results were revealed in Canberra on Thursday evening. Up until that point, all I knew about the wine was that it was a 2014 single vineyard Shiraz and it was utterly delicious. It turns out that the producer is ... drumroll please ... Dinny Goonan Wines.

Well, I'd certainly never heard of this winery, and it's a name you're not likely to forget. It turns out that Dinny Goonan is an actual bloke, and he established his winery in Geelong, southwest of Melbourne, back in 1988.

It's always pleasing to discover a new producer that you like, and this wine is absolutely up my stylistic strasse. I tend to like Geelong wine anyway, as it produces a fragrant, aromatic style with lighter body than the Australian norm. I reckon this Shiraz also had a proportion of whole bunch fermentation to further accentuate those aromatics. I exchanged a few emails with Dinny, and he says:

We had 20% whole bunches in the ferment. We find the whole bunches enhance the aromatics of the wine by contributing some of those cab mac characters that come from fermentation within the berry.  The stalks also contribute tannin structure to the wine as well as that herbal character you mentioned.

2014 was a slightly cooler year for us and we didn't pick until 1 May which you would appreciate is quite late for Australian Shiraz.  The wine was fermented in small 1,000L fermenters with 45% as wild yeast and 55% cultured yeast.  We like to leave a proportion of the ferment in the hands of wild yeasts as they tend to introduce more savoury elements to the wine than come from cultured yeasts. Final alcohol was 12.8% - also quite low by Australian standards.

I plan to release the wine in January 2016.  RRP is $30 a bottle.

I reckon that is an absolute bargain. The bad news? They don't export - in fact, they don't even seem to sell it much outside Victoria. Perhaps this award will generate a bit of interest for them, and might expand their distribution. From my perspective, that would be a fantastic result from awarding the trophy. 

I'll leave the last word to the redoubtable Dinny, as found on their Facebook page. Congratulations!

It just gets better. We have just won the INTERNATIONAL JUDGES AWARD at the National Wine Show for our 2014 Shiraz. Celebrations are in full swing!!!.

Posted by Dinny Goonan Wines on Friday, 20 November 2015