Haselgrove The Lear McLaren Vale Shiraz 2020
- 95
- $90
- Drink by: 2022-2032
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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.
Ken was born and bred in Brisbane, Queensland. He had a non-trendy, perfectly happy childhood, in a family convinced alcohol meant instant condemnation to Hades. But a break fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, and some good wine, started a serious obsession that eventually took over. It did not stop Ken being chastised later for drinking Pol champagne, disgusted he’d drink anything made by a Cambodian dictator. Now, Ken mostly writes on wine, champagne and spirits for various newspapers, magazines and books, but is perhaps best known for his work in The Courier Mail. He also has a little sideline writing on cigars, fishing, travel and food. When not writing, fly-fishing for trout in NZ or bonefish on the flats of Cuba, travelling or smoking cigars, he is no doubt following a variety of sporting teams – the occasionally glorious Queensland Reds rugby, the dysfunctional Washington Redskins, the dodgy Arsenal and especially revels in the world restored to its proper axis with the return of the Ashes to their rightful home.
