Frankland Estate Smith Cullam Syrah 2018
- 94
- $120
- Drink by: 2020 - 2034
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What a pepper pot!
If this was in a wine show, judges would be fighting over the high degree of pepper in this wine. Does it dominate? Is it too much, eclipsing the rest of the wine’s ingredients? There will be some who will say, yes.
But what about the crunch, the brightness and lift that all of that pepperyness brings to the wine? It adds to the structure, too. It’s also a clear indication that this wine is sourced from a cool climate. The Rotundone flavour and aroma compound which gives us pepper in wine helps define terroir.
This is the Great Southern region well-defined. Winemaker, Hunter Smith, has added a smidge of viognier (5%) and mourvedre (1%) to his shiraz finessing the fruit profile, and he’s also matured the organically-grown fruit in a 3500litre foudre for 15 months, so there will be no noticeable oak but very noticeable texture and, as he says, “lightness of touch.”
Expect intensity and concentrated black fruits, persistence of fine tannins, length . . . and, yes, black pepper.
Jeni Port is one of Australia’s top wine communicators. Based in Melbourne, Jeni created the first wine column in the (then) Sun News-Pictorial before moving over to The Age and becoming that paper’s longest-serving wine writer. Over the years she has written for most Australian wine magazines and these days calls WinePilot home. She is also a Tasting Panel member on the Halliday Wine Companion. She was named Wine Communicator of the Year and Legend of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in 2014 and in 2018 Legend of the Vine. She is a founding board member of Australian Women In Wine and is the co-deputy chair of Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards and China’s Wine List of the Year Awards.
