Genista Wines Taking The Mickie Shiraz 2018

I have yet to meet a 2018 shiraz from the Barossa Valley that wasn’t scrumptious and delightful as a youngster, and with great potential for ageing. Taking The Mickie 2018 is no exception. Deep, dark and dense, every component is well-measured. This is one of those wines where expensive oak greets you and it’s so good, so enticing, it just jells with the fruit. Ripe oak tannins aid the wine’s structure and are nicely are under control allowing plump, sweet black fruits, spice and smart vanilla-toasty oak their moment. The fruit is the star, love the blackcurrant pastille notes that inject a touch of sweet juiciness among the dark, light savouriness of the wine. Shows Barossa shiraz as ripe (14.5% alcohol), warm and rounded. It’s all in pursuit of a wine that is delicious and good to go now, but with the ability to age.

Jeni Port

Wine critic at Winepilot

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.

Wine writer and critic