02/09/2026
We are super excited to add this incredible wine to the shelves : Plunkett Dunwoodie 2018 Shiraz reserve. Those who attended the Wine X Sam Masterclass earlier this year rounded off the evening with this delicious drop.
This impressive full bodied red wine shows a deep ruby colour. It has aromas of dark berries, cocoa and spice. It will evolve in the glass. On the palate it feels rich and full bodied, but still with a freshness and enough of the grainy tannins suggesting it will continue to mature in a positive way for a decade or more.
The ambition for this wine was to make a top quality long lived red that represents the diverse vineyards we enjoy working with, from our home state of Victoria. There are more than 10 vineyards represented in this wine, with four significant contributors.
One a dry grown vineyard in the Pyrenees region of Western Victoria giving the wine structure and the compact tannin helping ageability. Our home vineyard in the cool Strathbogie Ranges adds bright acidity which assists longevity as well as boosting aromatics. Tait Hamilton’s vineyard in the Heathcote wine region is unusual in that it grows ripe fruit with remarkably low pH, so an uncommon combination of plush tannin and brightness of flavour. The Gentle Annie vineyard at Dookie is not quite dry grown but is always desperately short of water and gifts us tiny berries with thick skins and the resulting concentration of flavour and tannin which is a boon to high quality and long life.
The components were fermented separately in a range of vessels, including open fermenters, more common static fermenters and also an Italian made fermenter with paddles inside to homogenise the fermenting juice and skins. We ran hotter slightly warmer ferments than normal to help extract the short chain compact tannins I believe contribute to the structure of ageworthy red wine. We left some of the parcels on skins for extended maceration post ferment.
All the wine was matured in oak with the parcels being assembled in early 2020 and prepared for bottling on 4th February 2020. The wine was then laid down for a little over 5 years bottle maturation prior to release.
