Oliver’s Taranga Small Batch Tempranillo 2022
- 92
- $35
- Drink by: 2023-2026
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Tempranillo and McLaren Vale’s Mediterranean climate go together so very well. Lively purple hues introduce a red wine bursting in fruit: blueberries, dark cherries, plum with lots of spice, particularly the grape’s signature red licorice intensity. A light dusting of dried herbs plays among the fruit on the palate. Chewy, easy-going tannins remain a background presence. It’s pure fruitiness all the way with little obvious oak apparent. Is there oak? I doubt the question comes into any drinker’s thinking once they get a taste. This is a very “now” wine – you just want to drink it, not debate it.
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.
