St. Hallett Old Block Shiraz 2022
- 96
- $165
- Drink by: 2025-2040
Share
This famous wine was first made in 1980 by Robert O’Callaghan and longtime St. Hallett winemaker Stuart Blackwell. This is a cracking wine from a season that was ideal for this style of wine. It’s produced ripe, intense, and concentrated fruit that’s been captured perfectly. The colour is brilliant and bright with slightly crimson hues and a deep intensity. On the nose, there’s quite a distinctive combination of spices, licorice, and deep blackberry and blackcurrant notes. It suggests power, and then the palate delivers. It’s generous and opulent with a plummy, slightly liqueur cherry character and some spicy clove-like combinations. It’s impeccably balanced with fine, though firmish, tannins providing the structure, and the oak is neatly integrated. The wine spent about 18 months in a combination of French hogsheads and puncheons, and it struck just the ideal balance, allowing the fruit to fully express its qualities. This is a wine that you could drink now, such is its balance, but obviously it has the pedigree to handle extended cellaring.
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.
