Seppelt Drumborg Vineyard Riesling 2021
- 96
- $40
- Drink by: 2021 - 2036
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Former Wolf Blass winemaker, Clare Dry, took up senior winemaking reins at Seppelt in November last year.
Months later, with the start of harvest in the small Western Victorian town of Drumborg, she was granted a gift: a great vintage.
La Niña had been kind to the grapes producing a mild ripening season and, unusually, for one of the most southern, coldest dots on the Victorian wine map, the weather remained dry throughout with little wind. The result is a blinder of a wine.
A rush of florals opens the bouquet, all white flowers and citrus blossom. So welcoming, as is the lemony-grapefruit freshness, lime zest, musk and orange peel. It’s the scent of spring.
Drumborg riesling is traditionally low in alcohol – 11% here – which makes the wine’s textural pleasure all the more astounding. Or, maybe not. Clare Dry admits to introducing a few “different” winemaking techniques to this wine such as whole bunch pressing, and employing different levels of solids from the grape skins and pulp in the fermentation. It works beautifully on a number of levels, elevating what is usually an arms-and-legs kind of youthfulness – it was only bottled at the end of May – into something that arrives in the glass fully-formed and complex.
Ultimately, this is a riesling to excite. It is also a riesling that stays true to past Drumborg releases and the joy many feel about Henty riesling in general. You could write a book about the sheer juiciness of Henty’s cool climate, natural-born acidity. The mouth waters, literally.
The 2021 Drumborg riesling is all round long, intense, lip-smackingly good.
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.
