Elderton Ashmead Family Reserve Shiraz 2024
- 97
- $90
- Drink by: 2025-2045
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This was one of the better vintages in the Barossa in recent years, and this excellent wine illustrates this perfectly. The vine age from this Nuriootpa vineyard owned by the Ashmead family is about 130 years, and it really does pump out some quite remarkable fruit. In this case, on the nose, you get fairly typical plums with a liberal dusting of spices and a slightly vanilla pod character, reflecting the American oak influence. The palate, though, reveals a slightly different context with red berries augmenting the natural plumminess, and a little creamy chocolate. The tannins are fine and quite chalky, and the oak, which is new American puncheons, sits very neatly within such a plush fruit environment. Outstanding wine.
Ray Jordan has been writing about wine for more than 40 years. His first articles were published in the early issues of national wine magazine Winestate in the late 1970s when he worked in Sydney as a newspaper correspondent. From 1989 Ray wrote more than 3000 columns as a regular newspaper wine columnist. He currently writes a regular column for the special business publication Business News and is one of the main contributors to national wine platform Wine Pilot. In 2017 Ray co-authored The Way it Was – A History of The Early Days of the Margaret River Wine Industry and previously wrote Wine in the Blood: Australia’s Family Wine Estates, published in Mandarin and English. In 2011 Ray was awarded WA Wine Press Club Jack Mann Memorial Medal for his contribution to the WA wine industry. His love of wine is as strong as his love of the blues and tasting the thousands of wines that cross his bench each year allows him to indulge in both.
