Geoff Merrill Reserve Shiraz 2016
- 96
- $65
- Drink by: 2024-2036
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Here is Merrill at his best. This was a small vintage after a dry winter, but the resulting fruit concentration has contributed to wines of deep intensity. Love this wine with its bag of riches on display first with bright plummy mulberry fruits on the nose and then on the rich and textured palate with its dark chocolate, toasted coffee and savoury meatiness. It has had some oak. Plenty. In fact, 29 months in new and seasoned French and American hogsheads and puncheons. But over oaked – no way. Merrill is a master of using oak over long periods and this is a masterful 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.
