Thicker Than Water Obscura Shiraz 2023
- 95
- $200
- Drink by: 2026-2046
Share
The colour is immediately striking. It’s almost opaque with a reddy black hue. This is a wine that’s been built for extended cellaring. It’s sourced from McLaren Vale in a season that produced some very tidy Shiraz. After fermentation, it spent thirty months in a mixture of French and American oak hogsheads, of which about seventy percent was new. And yes, there is some oak there, but boy, there’s so much fruit weight and intensity. It’s hugely concentrated with dark plummy spicy fruits, dark chocolate, a little liqueur, and some sweet vanilla notes. It’s a bold statement of McLaren Vale Shiraz, and yet it possesses a degree of subtle humility that controls it as it extends through to its long finish. Certainly handles some 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.
