Haselgrove The Lear McLaren Vale Shiraz 2020

I’ll confess – I got a bit excited here. A wine named after, what is for me, the greatest work in all literature. In another life, studying in London, I had the chance to see Sir Anthony Hopkins play Lear. He was so mesmerising that I went back a few days later (student discounts were very helpful). So what a brilliant idea. Well, it might be but the Bard had nothing to do with the naming of this wine (perhaps another winery will name a line of wines after Shakespeare’s great characters, but I digress). The more prosaic reasoning behind the name is that in Celtic mythology, Lear is the personification of the sea and McLaren Vale is close to the ocean. Still, a cracking wine.

Selected from various blocks around the region, the grapes are destemmed but not crushed to open fermenters, cold soaked for three days and then fermented with thrice daily pumpovers. On skins for eight days and then to new and one-year-old French oak hogsheads for 18 months. An opaque maroon, there are powerful aromas here but everything remains in balance. Intensity is key here. There are notes of dark chocolate, blackberries and coffee beans, with truffles and woodsmoke. The wine is seamless and focused, with serious length and silky tannins. Good balance and early complexity emerging, this is a wine with six to ten years ahead of it.